STRANGE MEDICINES. 755 



of a bat, the head of a stag, and carnivorous teeth, which has become 

 the stereotyped idea of the dragon in all lands. 



Even in Europe fossil bones thus found together in caves were 

 long known as dragons' bones, and accounted useful in medicine. In- 

 deed, so great was the demand for these and similar relics, that our 

 museums and scientific men have good cause to rejoice that their an- 

 cestors failed to discover what stores of old bones lay hidden in our 

 own seaboard caves as, for instance, in that wonderful Kirkdale 

 cavern, where the mortal remains of several hundred hyenas were 

 found, guarding the teeth of a baby mammoth, a patriarchal tiger, a 

 rhinoceros, and a hippopotamus ; or the caves along the Norfolk coast, 

 where Hugh Miller tells us that within thirteen years the oyster- 

 dredgers dragged up the tusks and grinders of five hundred mam- 

 moths ; or those wonderful zoological cemeteries where the fossil 

 bones of cave-lions, cave-hyenas, elephants, mammoths, hippopotami, 

 woolly rhinoceros, red deer and fallow deer, oxen, sheep, and horses, 

 have lain so securely, stored for untold ages beneath Charing Cross 

 and Trafalgar Square. 



After all, this reduction of prehistoric bones and ivory to vulgar 

 powders for medicinal use is not more strange than the fossil food 

 which forms so large a part of the daily bread of multitudes of our 

 fellow-creatures in Lapland, Finland, and Sweden, in Carolina and 

 Florida, on the banks of the Orinoco and of the Amazon, where vast 

 tracts of earth are found composed wholly of myriads of microscopic 

 shells, and this strange mountain-meal, being duly mixed with meal 

 of the nineteenth century, is freely eaten by the people. In Lapland 

 alone, hundreds of wagon-loads are annually dug from one great field, 

 and there are men who eat as much as a pound and a half per diem of 

 this curious condiment. We hear of fields, as yet untouched, having 

 been discovered in Bohemia, Hungary, and other parts of Europe ; so 

 perhaps we may ere long add these primeval atoms to the delicacies 

 of our own tables. 



Of the firm belief of the Chinese in the efficacy of medicines com- 

 pounded of the eyes and vitals of the human body we have had too 

 terrible proof ; for it is well known that one cause which led to the 

 appalling Tientsin massacre in 1870 was the wide-spread rumor that 

 the foreign doctors (whose skill all were forced to admit) obtained 

 their medicines by kidnapping and murdering Chinese children and 

 tearing out their hearts and eyes ! As this nice prescription is actu- 

 ally described in their own books as a potent medicine, the story ob- 

 tained ready credence, and we all remember the result. Moreover, 

 the same accusation has repeatedly been spread on other occasions of 

 popular excitement against foreign teachers. 



I am not certain whether the Lamas of Peking have there in- 

 troduced the fashion of administering medicine from a drinking- 

 cup fashioned from the upper part of a wise man's skull ; but 



