STRANGE MEDICINES. 751 



evidently felt it humiliating that a foreigner should have seen such a 

 relic of the days of ignorance. 



The quaint old man whose loyal adherence to the customs of his 

 ancestors afforded me such an interesting illustration both of old Japan 

 and old Britain was a seller of curoyakie i. e., carbonized animals; in 

 other words, animals reduced to charcoal, and potted in small covered 

 jars of earthenware, to be sold as medicine for the sick and suffering. 

 Formerly all these animals were kept alive in the back premises, and 

 customers selected the creature for themselves, and stood by to see it 

 killed and burned on the spot, so that there could be no deception, and 

 no doubt as to the freshness of their charred medicine. Doubtless 

 some insensible foreign influence may account for the disappearance 

 of the menagerie of waiting victims and their cremation-ground ; now 

 the zoological back-yard has vanished, and only the strange chemist's 

 shop remains, like a well-stored museum, wherein are ranged portions 

 of the dried carcasses of dogs and deer, foxes and badgers, rats and 

 mice, toads and frogs, tigers and elephants. 



The rarer the animal, and the farther it has traveled, the more 

 precious apparently are its virtues. From the roof hung festoons of 

 gigantic snake-skins, which certainly were foreign importations from 

 some land where pythons flourish, Japan being happily exempt from 

 the presence of such beautiful monsters. I saw one very fine piece 

 of a skin, which, though badly dried and much shrunken, measured 

 twenty-six inches across, but it was only a fragment ten feet in length, 

 and was being gradually consumed, inch by inch, to lend mystic virtue 

 to compounds of many strange ingredients. I was told that the per- 

 fect skin must have measured very nearly fifty feet in length. I saw 

 another fragment twenty-two feet long and twelve inches wide ; this 

 also had evidently shrunk considerably in drying, and must, when in 

 life, have been a very fine specimen. 



There were also some very fine deer's horns (hartshorn in its pure 

 and simple form), a highly valued rhinoceros-horn, and ivory of 

 various animals. My companion was much tempted by a beautiful 

 piece of ivory about ten feet in length. I think it was the horn of 

 a narwhal, but the druggist would only sell it for its price as medicine, 

 namely, ten cents for fifty-eight grains, whence we inferred that the 

 druggists of Old Japan, like some nearer home, fully understand the 

 art of making a handsome profit on their sales. Some tigers' claws 

 and teeth were also esteemed very precious, and some strips of tigers' 

 skin and fragments of other skins and furs proved that these also held 

 a place in the pharmacopoeia of Old Japan, as they continue to do in 

 China (the source whence Japan derived many branches of learning, 

 besides the use of letters). 



Unfortunately for the little lizards which dart about so joyously 

 in the sunlight, they too are classed among the popular remedies, 

 being considered an efficacious vermifuge ; so strings of their ghastly 



