The jerking movement was meant to shew that he thereby took all the life out of the teeth. Had he failed to do so, the boy would, in the opinion of the natives, have been liable to an ulcerated and wry mouth, impediment in speech, and ultimately a distorted face.​[638] This ceremony is interesting as a rare instance of an attempt to break the sympathetic link between a man and a severed part of himself by rendering the part insensitive. [Sidenote: Contagious magic of teeth in Africa, Europe, America, etc. Teeth of mice and rats.] The Basutos are careful to conceal their extracted teeth, lest these should fall into the hands of certain mythical beings called _baloi_, who haunt graves, and could harm the owner of the tooth by working magic on it.​[639] In Sussex some forty years ago a maid-servant remonstrated strongly against the throwing away of children’s cast teeth, affirming that should they be found and gnawed by any animal, the child’s new tooth would be, for all the world, like the teeth of the animal that had bitten the old one. In proof of this she named old Master Simmons, who had a {p178} very large pig’s tooth in his upper jaw, a personal defect that he always averred was caused by his mother, who threw away one of his cast teeth by accident into the hog’s trough.​[640] A similar belief has led to practices intended, on the principles of homoeopathic magic, to replace old teeth by new and better ones. Thus in many parts of the world it is customary to put extracted teeth in some place where they will be found by a mouse or a rat, in the hope that, through the sympathy which continues to subsist between them and their former owner, his other teeth may acquire the same firmness and excellence as the teeth of these rodents. Thus in Germany it is said to be an almost universal maxim among the people that when you have had a tooth taken out you should insert it in a mouse’s hole. To do so with a child’s milk-tooth which has fallen out will prevent the child from having toothache. Or you should go behind the stove and throw your tooth backwards over your head, saying, “Mouse, give me your iron tooth; I will give you my bone tooth.” After that your other teeth will remain good. German children say, “Mouse, mouse, come out and bring me out a new tooth”; or “Mouse, I give you a little bone; give me a little stone”; or “Mouse, there is an old tooth for you; make me a new one.” In Bavaria they say that if this ceremony be observed the child’s second teeth will be as white as the teeth of mice.​[641] Amongst the South Slavonians, too, the child is taught to throw his tooth into a dark corner and say, “Mouse, mouse, there is a bone tooth; give me an iron tooth instead.”​[642] Jewish children in South Russia throw their cast teeth on the roof with the same request to the mouse to give them an iron tooth for a tooth of bone.​[643] Far away {p179} from Europe, at Raratonga, in the Pacific, when a child’s