The necklace of human fingers is not a particle more horrible than the ornaments of human bones to be seen in the cemetery of the Capuchins in Rome at the present day. I have personally known of two or three cases where American Indians cut their enemies limb from limb. The idea upon which the practice is based seems to be the analogue of the old English custom of sentencing a criminal to be "hanged, drawn, and quartered." Brand gives a detailed description of the "hand of glory," the possession of which was believed by the peasantry of Great Britain and France to enable a man to enter a house invisible to the occupants. It was made of the hand of an executed (hanged) murderer, carefully desiccated and prepared with a great amount of superstitious mummery. With this holding a candle of "the fat of a hanged man" burglars felt perfectly secure while engaged in their predatory work.[161] The belief was that a candle placed in a dead man's hand will not be seen by any but those by whom it is used. Such a candle introduced into a house kept those who were asleep from awakening. The superstition in regard to the "hand of glory" was widely diffused throughout France, Germany, Spain, and Great Britain. As late as the year 1831 it was used by Irish burglars in the county Meath. Dr. Frank Baker delivered before the Anthropological Society of Washington, D. C., a lecture upon these superstitions as related to the "hand of glory," to which the student is respectfully referred.[162] An Aztec warrior always tried to procure the middle finger of the left hand of a woman who had died in childbirth. This he fastened to his shield as a talisman.[163] The great weapon of the Aztec witches was the left arm of a woman who had died in her first childbirth.[164] Pliny mentions "still-born infants cut up limb by limb for the most abominable practices, not only by midwives, but by harlots even as well!"[165] The opinions entertained in Pliny's time descended to that of the Reformation-- Finger of birth-strangled babe, Ditch-deliver'd by a drab.[166] "Scrofula, imposthumes of the parotid glands, and throat diseases, they say, may be cured by the contact of the hand of a person who has been carried off by an early death;" but, he goes on to say, any dead hand will do, "provided it is of the same sex as the patient and that the part affected is touched with the back of the left hand."[167] A footnote adds that this superstition still prevails in England in regard to the hand of a man who has been hanged. The use of dead men's toes, fingers, spinal vertebræ, etc., in magical ceremonies, especially the fabrication of magical lamps and candles, is referred to by Frommann.[168] Grimm is authority for the statement that in both France and Germany the belief was prevalent that the fingers of an unborn babe were "available for magic."[169]