50 Professor Burnett’s 
observations are, however, tedious: let them be changed for 
an example. Among the much valued vegetable medicines of 
the century before the last, was mouldiness, or mildew: not 
simply mould, not that which springs on decaying wood, or 
bread, or meat, or cheese, but mouldiness scraped from a 
human skull. This drug even stands in the catalogue of 
materia medica published by the London Royal College of 
Physicians a. D. 1618, as “‘ usnea cranii humani,” which shows 
how much it was esteemed; for the College have ever striven, 
as far as the prejudices of the age would let, to discard all 
useless articles, and to march, though with discretion, not 
hardihood, in the van of science. Again, the urine and the 
excrement of various animals were formerly much esteemed: 
and of each we find extensive lists recommended officially to 
notice. Much of the supposed efficacy of drugs seems once 
to have been attributed to the filthiness of the sources whence 
they were derived: thus, although carbonate and phosphate 
of lime are excellent absorbent earths, and exhibited with much 
benefit in many cases of cardialgia, diarrhoea, and other com- 
plaints, still a simple chalk mixture would have been formerly 
despised; while one of album grecum would have been swal- 
lowed with avidity. Now album grecum, it is all but need- 
less to observe, was only an impure bone earth, not obtained 
from the laboratory of the chemist, but elaborated in the in- 
testines of the dog. For the preparation of this precious 
drug, dogs were purposely all but starved, well-picked bones 
being their only food; and then, the gelatine of the bones 
being partly absorbed during the passage of this osseous 
matter through the alimentary canal, the earthy portions were 
evacuated in a half-blanched and semi-pulverulent condition: 
this excrement was then collected with a jealous care, and 
became the album grecum of the shops, highly prized as a 
discutient, and forming a favorite internal application to the 
throat in quinzies. I will not waste your valuable time in 
further disquisitions on this subject, although it is a point of 
curious interest to trace the progress of the art we study, and 
highly useful sometimes to unravel the absurd intricacies of 
those who loved to make medicine a greater mystery than it 
ever will inevitably be; for thus do we in our minds enhance 
the estimation of that unsophisticated and simple nomen- 
clature which signalizes the age, and with which science now 
in general is blessed: and we shall ever value more this stri- 
ving after perspicuity, even if it fail, when we contemplate 
the obscurity in which all subjects were at one time purposely 
involved; names being given to things apparently rather to 
conceal than to explain their nature, although sometimes, as 
—— 
