HELIC1D.E. SNAIL. 219 



with their shells and put into a piece of lmen folded 

 four times so as to make it thick, dip it in brandy, and 

 squeeze it tolerably dry; then apply it to the forehead. 



Pliny also recommends a plaster of slugs, cut up and 

 pounded, and applied to the forehead. 



M. Figuier remembers, when studying botany in the 

 garden of the School of Medicine, as a youth, at Mont- 

 pellier, seeing the celebrated tenor singer, M. Laborde, 

 every morning partake of live snails, as he was suffer- 

 ing from a w 7 eak chest. M. Figuier assisted in finding 

 the snails in the holes in the garden wall, and under 

 leaves, and M. Laborde, crushed the mollusks with a 

 stone, picking off the pieces of broken shells, then, 

 rolling the fish in powdered sugar, swallowed them. 

 The remedy was evidently efficacious, as, twenty years 

 later, M. Laborde still held his position as tenor, and 

 sang at the theatre at Brussels, and also at the opera 

 in Paris * 



In the ' Meddygon Myddvai/ published by the Welsh 

 MISS. Society, the following recipes are found : — 



" For an Impostume (Whitlow). — Take a snail out of 

 its shell, and bruising it small, pound it into a plaster 

 and apply it to the finger ; it will ripen and break it, 

 and it should then be dressed like any other wound. 

 For a patient who is burnt, it recommends a plaster of 

 mallows, snail-shells, pennywort, and linseed pounded, 

 and applied until the part is healed without even un- 

 covering it; and again, it says that an eye ointment 

 can be made of a black snail in the month of Ma} 7 , 

 roasted in the embers, preserving the oil till required, 

 and anointing your eye therewith with a feather/' 



In olden times it was supposed that the small grits 



* ' La Vie et les Moeurs des Animaux,' p. 386. 



