The Basutos are careful to conceal their extracted teeth, lest these
should fall into the hands of certain mythical beings who haunt
graves, and who could harm the owner of the tooth by working magic
on it. In Sussex some fifty years ago a maid-servant remonstrated
strongly against the throwing away of children's cast teeth,
affirming that should they be found and gnawed by any animal, the
child's new tooth would be, for all the world, like the teeth of the
animal that had bitten the old one. In proof of this she named old
Master Simmons, who had a very large pig's tooth in his upper jaw, a
personal defect that he always averred was caused by his mother, who
threw away one of his cast teeth by accident into the hog's trough.
A similar belief has led to practices intended, on the principles of
homoeopathic magic, to replace old teeth by new and better ones.
Thus in many parts of the world it is customary to put extracted
teeth in some place where they will be found by a mouse or a rat, in
the hope that, through the sympathy which continues to subsist
between them and their former owner, his other teeth may acquire the
same firmness and excellence as the teeth of these rodents.
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