How superstitions and ancient rites do persist. To this hour
the mountaineers of southwestern Virginia and eastern Tennessee
believe that an iron ring on the third finger of the left hand
will drive away rheumatism, and to my personal knowledge one
fairly intelligent Virginian believed this so devoutly that he
actually never suffered with rheumatic pains unless he took off
the iron ring he had worn for fifteen years. It is an old, old
idea--this faith in the ring-finger. The Egyptians believed
that a nerve led straight from it to the heart; the Greeks and
Romans held that a blood-vessel called the 'vein of love'
connected it closely with that organ; and the medieval
alchemists always stirred their dangerous mixtures with that
finger because, in their belief, it would most quickly indicate
the presence of poison. So, too, many an ancient declared that
whenever the ring-finger of a sufferer became numb, death was
near at hand. Thus in twentieth century civilization we hear
echoes of the life that Rameses knew when the Pyramids were
building.
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