as it is being dragged out of the earth.  Then before sunrise, on a Friday, the amateur goes out with a dog, ‘all black,’ makes three crosses round the mandrake, loosens the soil about the root, ties the root to the dog’s tail, and offers the beast a piece of bread.  The dog runs at the bread, drags out the mandrake root, and falls dead, killed by the horrible yell of the plant.  The root is now taken up, washed with wine, wrapped in silk, laid in a casket, bathed every Friday, ‘and clothed in a little new white smock every new moon.’  The mandrake acts, if thus considerately treated, as a kind of familiar spirit.  ’Every piece of coin put to her over night is found doubled in the morning.’  Gipsy folklore, and the folklore of American children, keep this belief in doubling deposits.  The gipsies use the notion in what they call ’The Great Trick.’  Some foolish rustic makes up his money in a 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