Paris, fashionable people carry little images of their special friends and in case of their illness mutter prayers or charms over the part affected. Indeed, those who protest most strongly their freedom from such degrading weakness thereby show themselves the more believing--he who resolutely walks under every ladder he passes as a mute protest is but acknowledging the faith he seeks to outrage. All these modern forms of civilised superstition are, of course, survivals from a former age. Some of them, as, for instance, that of spilling salt or sitting thirteen at table, can be traced back to religious or other sources. Others, again, have endured from the earliest days of the human race. Many directly emanate from the art of witchcraft. A full-fledged witch must have her regular recipes and prescriptions--the first witch as much as the last. With the genius that made her a witch, she must seize and formulate the shadowy conceptions that form so large a share of her _clientèle's_ beliefs; with her power of organisation, she must elaborate and adapt them to individual needs; in answer to the primitive appeal, she must return the full-fledged spell or charm. As we have seen, her magical powers were exercised in various directions; her methods were consequently as variant. In her capacity as healer, and conversely as disease-inflicter, her various spells must cover all the ills that flesh is heir to. She must be able to cure the disease she inflicts; more, those who combat her must have their own ammunition of the like kind. To the Greek Abracadabra the Church must oppose the sign of the Cross or the mention of the Trinity. Thus in time arose an enormous store of such early methods of faith cure--a store which has since accumulated to such vast proportions as make it hopeless to do more than enumerate a few gleaned from various ages and countries as examples of the rest. A great number of these charms are given by Wierus, who is severely reprobated by Bodin for propagating such iniquities. Toothache being a common and distracting complaint, there were various recipes for its cure. To repeat the following was found to be very efficacious:-- Galbes, Galbat, Galdes, Galdat. Or it was equally good to write the following on a piece of paper, and then to hang it round your neck:-- Strigiles, falcesque, dentatae. Dentium, dolorem persanate.