children, losing their first set, take each of the old ones as it falls out, and throw it up to the sun, crying: “O sun, take this donkey’s tooth and give me instead the tooth of a gazelle.” The formula differs amongst the fellahin of Silwan, whose children are taught to say: “O Sun! take this donkey’s tooth, and instead of it give me the tooth of one of thy children.” Amongst native Arab Jews the tooth is thrown into a well with the formula given in the text. Others say: “O Sun! take this iron tooth and give me a tooth of pearl.”
Up to the year 1868, when the new iron dome was placed over the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a great number of human teeth were to be seen sticking, as witnesses to vows made by their owners, in the cracks and interstices of the clustered columns on the left hand side of the great portal to the said Church.
