The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-07-12
THE HAIR OF THE DOG.
4 COMMON SAYING AND COMMON
 SUPERSTITION.
lden Is Biased on the same Feeling Which is Common to All the Nations in the World Some Stories.

Dll nm, IS quite familiar, and ln lt
 form as a superstition it is equally ia
 miliar. l remember very distinctl!
 how, when in play with a dog the chile
 or a friend has been bitten rather SC
 verely, this old colored nanny went
 out and clipped them under the clotl that had been tied about the wound
 There is no doubt that numbers of peo pie actually believe that this is the
 most efficient way of stopping the ev
 results of the bite of dog, and at this
 season of the year, when the yelp oi the mad dog, and the crowd that chasas
 him so, in the land, it becomes of pe-
 culiar interest to follow up this form | of superstition little distance back
 into the racebrain, and see what lies
 at the bottom of it.
 The student admits that there are
 several factors of human life which all
 men have in common. Every man, no
 matter where or when born; no mat
 ter what the color of his skin or the
 l1ink of his shair, will always show | signs of the effort of self preservation.
 This is q law of nature, and all men 1 have it in common. The gre3arious
 instinct, also, is common. Men will get together and talk things over, whether
 they do so in a kraal in South Africa,
 or in the ice-hut of the Esquimau or in the crossroads country store, or in
 a New England town meeting, or in a primary for ward purposes only. Self
 preservation and herding are laws of
 nature, and no man is free from them.
 In the same way, there are other com
 mon traits, such as the law, of pro cre-
 ation, the law of the desire to impart
 which is a distinctly human trait; the law of election or of recognition of the right of one, or of body, to rule and of others to submit, and number of others.
 As the human mind recognizes the fact of these laws, it also recognizes a number of other facts, and it does so quite distinctly and readily. It recog- nizes a peculiar law of similars, on which the proverb and the superstition rest, and of which it is the foreshadow ing. Nor does this recognition stand alone. The race-brain also recognizes the law of attraction, of assimilation, of aggregation, of mutation or change, and it does so with an inerrancy pecu- liar to the subconcious mind, as Hud- son has proven. Let us go back lit tie in the history of the sentence on which this article is based.
 In the first instance it grows out of a series of myths and sagas connected with transformation ideas. Every reader of fairy tales, is, of course, fa- miliar with the idea that things change foi, ta1 Ntn hero turns into a bird as easily as leaf stirs in the wind. The heroine turns into tree or a brook of water, or flame as readily as the pink of sunset turns into the green that fol- lows it. But not every reader of fairy lore may be familiar with the fact that this is the way in which the race recog- nizes a law. For does not the eye of man behold constant changes going on around and within him? Does not all nature and all of the mental world | teach him, with all it's phenomena, | that he is subject to constant change, | not only from summer to winter, not | 1nly from heat to cold. but also in ev | ny detail, there is one constant ele- | nent of change? The blossom turns nto a flower; the flower into fruit; he fruit into a seed: the worm turns nto a pupa, and this into butterfly; he egg turns into bird, steam into yapor, the cloud into rain, and even the ood he eats turns into different chemi- al elements as soon as it hos passed lis lips. And so man found himself and involved in vast tur- noil of changes, many of them sudden. Why should he not write these things nto his stories, into his fairy tales, nto his hero-sagas, and even become ccustomed to seeing them In the pages f his Iol Book where water turns O blood or to wine, as the story seems 0 demand it.
 And so comes it about that there are many stories of transformation Let 1e quote just few of the 36O odd stor- es of this kind. A Neo-Greek story els of hero who changes into mule, ut the mother is to retain the halter. IS long as she has this he can resume is human form at will. Then he hanges into a bathhouse, of which she eeps the key; then he changes into of which she keeps few aeds. In Northern and Western Flu 1pe, where the pomegranate does not row, grain of wheat does service in S place. In Cashmere it is a rose; Turkey they tell the story also as lat of a rose, which presently changes ito millet As long as a single petal the rose, a single seed of the pome- ranate. single grain of the millet list, the ehro cannot be destroyed by is enemy. This idea of the persistence the hero throughout a series of langes is very peculiar. Let me em- 1asize it. The North American In- ans tell a story in which the hero is lied, after he has changed into an Lgle. But from a single feather of e eagle. the hero is restored. The me occurs in a story in the Tyrole,
 another in Pennsylvania, in another
 Germany, in Switzerland in Austria,
 almost every civilized country of lrope. If we hold this matter in mind, and en go back to any one of the nature rces and study up carefully the ing called Conservation of Energy" , instantly realize that the race mind S tacitly and subconsciously recog- zed this primal law ot all forces mely, that all forces are really a se- IS of manifestations of one force Q hero of the story of Transforma- ms.
 For whether we take light, or heat, electricity, or magnetism, or any oer force of which we know anything