parcel which
he gives to the gipsy. The latter, after various ceremonies performed,
returns the parcel, which is to be buried. The money will be found
doubled by a certain date. Of course when the owner unburies the parcel
he finds nothing in it but brass buttons. In the same way, and with
pious confidence, the American boy buries a marble in a hollow log,
uttering the formula, 'What hasn't come here, _come_! what's here, _stay_
here!' and expects to find all the marbles he has ever lost. {145} Let
us follow the belief in magical roots into the old Pagan world.

The ancients knew mandragora and the superstitions connected with it very
well. Dioscorides mentions mandragorus, or antimelon, or dircaea, or
Circaea, and says the Egyptians call it apemoum, and Pythagoras
'anthropomorphon.' In digging the root, Pliny says, 'there are some
ceremonies observed, first they that goe about this worke, look
especially to this that the wind be not in their face, but blow upon
their backs. Then with the point of a sword they draw three circles
round about the plant, which don, they dig it up afterwards with their
face unto the west.' Pliny says nothing of the fetich qualities of the
plant, as credited in modern and mediaeval Germany, but mentions
'sufficient it is with some bodies to cast them into sleep with the smel
of mandrago.' This is like Shakespeare's 'poppy and mandragora, and all
the drowsy syrups of the world.' Plato and Demosthenes {146a} also speak
of mandragora as a soporific. It is more to the purpose of magic that
Columella mentions 'the _half-human_ mandragora.' Here we touch the
origin of the mandrake superstitions. The roots have a kind of fantastic
resemblance to the human shape; Pliny describes them as being 'of a
fleshy substance and tender.' Now it is one of the recognised principles
in magic, that things like each other, however superficially, affect each
other in a mystic way, and possess identical properties. Thus, in
Melanesia, according to Mr. Codrington, {146b} 'a stone in the shape of a
pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable find,' because it
made pigs prolific, and fertilised bread-fruit trees and yam-plots. In
Scotland, too, 'stones were called by the names of the limbs they
resembled, as "eye-stane," "head-stane." A patient washed the affected
part of his body, and rubbed it well with the stone corresponding.'
{147a} In precisely the same way, the mandrake root, being th