For
example, in Germany it is said to be an almost universal maxim among
the people that when you have had a tooth taken out you should
insert it in a mouse's hole. To do so with a child's milk-tooth
which has fallen out will prevent the child from having toothache.
Or you should go behind the stove and throw your tooth backwards
over your head, saying "Mouse, give me your iron tooth; I will give
you my bone tooth." After that your other teeth will remain good.
Far away from Europe, at Raratonga, in the Pacific, when a child's
tooth was extracted, the following prayer used to be recited:
"Big rat! little rat!
Here is my old tooth.
Pray give me a new one."
Then the tooth was thrown on the thatch of the house, because rats
make their nests in the decayed thatch. The reason assigned for
invoking the rats on these occasions was that rats' teeth were the
strongest known to the natives.
Other parts which are commonly believed to remain in a sympathetic
union with the body, after the physical connexion has been severed,
are the navel-string and the afterbirth, including the placenta.
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