From the earliest times charms of one kind or- another have been used in medicine, in love, in religion and in other relations in life. There have been a number of very interesting studies made on this subject, and almost anyone can recall numerous superstitions relating to charms of various kinds, from the good luck of the fourleaf clover to the causing of warts by the killing or handling of toads and the removal of them bv certain charms. Those familiar with Tom Sawyer will remember that stump water is good for freckles, and Garrison reminds us that Longfellow's Evangeline has a line in reference to malaria being "cured by wearing a spider hung around one's neck in a nut shell." The tying up of a lock of lhair with thread to keep off witches, or driving some of the patient's hair into a tree to transfer the chills and fever to the tree, and hundred,s of other superstitions are familiar to all. It is quite natural that many ideas of this kind should find their way into the various spoken charms and incantations, inasmuch as in the earliest timnes various words or sentences have been regarded as mystic, and as having a power to drive away disease.
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