tooth was extracted, the following prayer used to be recited:— “_Big rat! little rat!_ _Here is my old tooth._ _Pray give me a new one._” Then the tooth was thrown on the thatch of the house, because rats make their nests in the decayed thatch. The reason assigned for invoking the rats on these occasions was that rats’ teeth were the strongest known to the natives.​[644] In the Seranglao and Gorong archipelagoes, between New Guinea and Celebes, when a child loses his first tooth, he must throw it on the roof, saying, “Mouse, I give you my tooth; give me yours instead.”​[645] In Amboyna the custom is the same, and the form of words is, “Take this tooth, thrown on the roof, as the mouse’s share, and give me a better one instead.”​[646] In the Kei Islands, to the south-west of New Guinea, when a child begins to get his second teeth, he is lifted up to the top of the roof in order that he may there deposit, as an offering to the rats, the tooth which has fallen out. At the same time some one cries aloud, “O rats, here you have his tooth; give him a golden one instead.”​[647] Among the Ilocans of Luzon, in the Philippines, when children’s teeth are loose, they are pulled out with a string and put in a place where rats will be likely to find and drag them away.​[648] In ancient Mexico, when a child was getting a new tooth, the father or mother used to put the old one in a mouse’s hole, believing that if this precaution were not taken the new tooth would not issue from the gums.​[649] A different and more barbarous {p180} application of the same principle is the Swabian superstition that when a child is teething you should bite off the head of a living mouse, and hang the head round the child’s neck by a string, taking care, however, to make no knot in the string; then the child will teethe easily.​[650] In Bohemia the treatment prescribed is similar, though there they recommend you to use a red thread and to string three heads of mice on it instead of one.​[651] [Sidenote: Contagious magic of teeth: teeth of squirrels, foxes, beavers, etc. Teeth thrown towards the sun.]