7 6z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Another effectual remedy, for cancer, is to bum a fresh hound's 

 head to ashes and apply to the wound. Failing relief, human excre- 

 ment, dried and reduced to dust, may be tried. " If, with this, thou 

 art not able to cure him, thou mayest never do it by any means ! " 



An excellent remedy for imperfect sight was an ointment of honey 

 mixed with the fatty parts of all manner of river-fishes. Another, 

 equally efficacious, was a compound of dumbledore's honey with the 

 ashes of burned periwinkle. It was, however, requisite that certain 

 mystic words should be uttered while gathering the periwinkle, a 

 wort which had special power to counteract demoniacal possession 

 and devil-sicknesses. The ashes of the elder-tree were applied in 

 cases of palsy, for which a plaster of earth-worms, well pounded, is 

 also accounted excellent. 



We may well believe that, for convenience' sake, many of these 

 calcined plants and animals were prepared at leisure and stored, ready 

 for use in cases of emergency. Consequently, though we can hardly 

 flatter ourselves that our ancestors were as exquisite in their neatness 

 as the Japanese, doubtless this little druggist's shop in Osaka gives 

 us a very fair notion of the surroundings of a learned Saxon leech, in 

 whose repositories were earthenware jars of every size, containing the 

 ashes of goat's flesh, of dead bees, of wolf's skull or swine's jaw, of 

 divers shell-fish, of worts and rinds without number nay, even of 

 human skulls and bones. On the walls hung bunches of dried herbs 

 and remains of birds and lizards, rats, moles, and such small deer, to- 

 gether with skins of serpents, portions of mummies, horns of stags, 

 rhinoceros, narwhal, elephants' tusks, and many other items of the 

 strange materia medica of our own ancestors. 



The foregoing "leechdoms" are fair samples of the voluminous 

 pharmacopoeia of Britain in the tenth century. But to us, who pride 

 ourselves on the medical skill of the present day, it is truly marvelous 

 to find that the early part of the eighteenth century should show so 

 little, if any, advance on the ignorance tchich prevailed at the date of 

 the Norman Conquest. Here is a rare old volume which was printed 

 in the Cowgate of Edinburgh in 1712. It is "A Collection of useful 

 Remedies for most Distempers. . . . Collected by John Moncrief, the 

 laird of Tippermalluch, a person of extraordinary skill and knowledge 

 in the art of physick, and who performed many stupendous cures by 

 these simple remedies." 



His volume contains innumerable directions for the preparation of 

 divers herbs, and also a multitude of prescriptions of animal substances 

 so inexpressibly loathsome as to make it a matter of marvel how any 

 one could be found either to prepare them, or to submit to their ap- 

 plication. Salts of ammonia in the crudest form were a favorite 

 remedy for external or internal use. 



By far the least objectionable compounds were those prepared from 

 carbonized animals in the Japanese or early Saxon manner. Thus 



