NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES 289 



fies the lungs, helps asthma, heats stomach and liver, cures enlargement of the 

 spleen, 



and so forth. 



To animals amusing habits and human characteristics as well as 

 occult virtues were sometimes ascribed by the encyclopedists. Thus 

 in describing the lion Albert devotes half his space to the noble and 

 genial personality of the king of beasts, and to discrediting scientific 

 scandal about the wiles of the lioness to conceal her amours with the 

 leopard. Then we come to marvelous virtues. A man anointed with 

 lion's fat puts every animal to flight. A diet of lion's flesh is good for 

 paralytics. Garments wrapped in a lion's skin are secure from moths. 

 If the skin of a wolf is left near the skin of a lion, the hair soon falls 

 out from the wolf-skin. The tooth of a lion, suspended around a boy's 

 neck before he loses his first teeth, protects him from toothache when 

 the second teeth appear. Lion's fat should be used in unguents to re- 

 move blotches from the skin. Cancer may be cured by an application 

 of lion's blood. Drinking some of a lion's gall cures jaundice. Eat- 

 ing its brain is a cure for madness. 



If the encyclopedists attribute marvelous medicinal virtues to in- 

 dividual things, the medical treatises proper prefer elaborate concoc- 

 tions. Sometimes the ingredients of these formidable mixtures might 

 excite no surprise if administered separately, but the multiplicity and 

 diversity of their combination seems strange indeed. Sometimes the 

 recipes are utterly fantastic. Bernard Gordon assures us that for cure 

 of eye-troubles " God even to these times has never vouchsafed to reveal 

 a better remedy" than a combination in varying amounts of mountain 

 willow, majoram, eufragia, celidonia, fennel, ginger, spikenard, pepper, 

 gariofil, thucia, Persian gum, ass's milk, aloes wood, the gall of an 

 eagle, a hawk and a mountain goat, balsam and honey. Of these in- 

 gredients 



those that need pulverizing are to be pulverized; those that ought to be shaken 

 well are to be well shaken ; those that should be reduced to liquid form are to be 

 liquefied. Then, if it is summer time, they should for forty days be mixed in 

 the hot sun, and stirred daily. And if it be winter, let the mixture be prepared 

 with cinders, where the heat is about that of a sitting hen; and let it be stirred 

 and kept in a glass vessel, and dropped into the eyes; and it is of so great vir- 

 tue that it enables decrepitude to read small letters without eye-glasses. 



Thus in the midst of a superstitious recipe we get evidence of a 

 scientific invention. 



Even the experiments of medieval men were affected by this belief 

 in occult virtues, and sometimes resembled the tricks of magic more 

 than the scientific procedure of a modern laboratory. Roger Bacon ad- 

 vocates experimental science at considerable length, but he calls the 

 following an experiment. 



VOL. LXXXVTI. 20. 



