STRANGE MEDICINES. 757 



This treasure was scraped to dust and mixed with a cup of water, 

 which the boy, ignorant of its contents, was make to drink ! (An 

 equally odd cure for consumption was, not long ago, fully believed in 

 in the adjoining county of Sutherland, where the patient was made to 

 drink warm blood drawn from his own arm. An instance of this was 

 related to Sir James Simpson by one of the parties concerned. Dr. 

 Mitchell has seen several epileptic idiots who had been subjected to 

 the same treatment.) 



Equally precious to the leech of the last century were the ashes of 

 a burned witch collected from her funeral-pyre. Such were deemed a 

 certain cure for gout or for fever, and eagerly were they gathered up 

 and treasured. 



Whatever may have been the special merit thus attaching to crimi- 

 nals (and we know that a strand from the rope with which a man had 

 been hanged was long accounted an amulet against many ills), it is 

 satisfactory to know that saints have had their share in this dubious 

 honor. There is one sect of our fellow-Christians in Syria, namely, 

 the Nestorians, who, while they eschew all veneration for relics, yet 

 believe the remains of saints and martyrs to be endowed with such 

 supernatural virtues, that at their wedding-feasts the dust of some 

 reputed saint is invariably mixed with the wine in the marriage-cup 

 a custom which would seem to require numerous additions to their 

 saintly calendar. Doubtless, however, the holy dust multiplies, that 

 the supply may be equal to the demand. 



But to return to this remarkable phase of cannibalism in Europe, 

 we find that, just as the Chinese doctor sets most store by the animals 

 imported from foreign lands, so did our ancestors chiefly prize a prep- 

 aration of long-deceased Egyptians. Among the standard medicines 

 quoted in the medical books of Nuremberg of two hundred years ago 

 are "portions of the embalmed bodies of man's flesh, brought from 

 the neighborhood of Memphis, where there are many bodies that have 

 been buried for more than a thousand years, called mumia, which 

 have been embalmed with costly salves and balsams, and smell strong- 

 ly of myrrh, aloes, and other fragrant things." The writer further 

 tells how, " when the sailors do reach the place where the mumia are, 

 they fetch them out secretly by night, then carry them to the ship 

 and conceal them, that they may not be seized, because certainly the 

 Egyptians would not suffer their removal." Nevertheless, the sailors 

 had no great liking for their cargo, believing it to be connected with 

 unholy magic, and that ships having mummies on board would assured- 

 ly meet with terrible storms, and very likely be compelled to throw 

 them as an offering to the angry waves. 



These medicinal mummies were also imported from Teneriffe, 

 where in olden days the natives used to embalm their dead, sew them 

 in buckskin shrouds, and hide them in caves, whence they were stolen 

 by traders. " White mummies " were also obtained from the coast of 



