NOTE-BOOK OF A NATUEALIST. 83 



quartan access. If your memoiy should become a little 

 the worse for wear, their hearts, well mingled with cin- 

 namon and ammomum, will soon brighten you up again. 

 You will find water of swallows taken fasting, especially 

 if it be followed by a persevering diet on their flesh, with 

 their ashes mingled in the drink of the patient, as in- 

 fallible a remedy for epilepsy as any of the nostrums of 

 the present day. Weakness of sight, ophthalmia, in- 

 flamed tonsils, are a few only of the maladies which 

 vanished before preparations of the bird. The nests were 

 held excellent good for angina, and their blood for the 

 gout. Then there are certain small stones — you will see 

 them, curious reader, figured in the Metallotheca Vati- 

 cana Michaelis Mercati* — found in the nestlings on 

 dissection, which cured liver-complaints if suspended 

 from the right arm, while those found in the nests with 

 the young rendered the wearer safe from coughs. With 

 regard to the toilet : — he who wishes to forestal the 

 advance of age, which most men eschew, may come out 

 with a venerable white head, and the ci-devant jeune 

 homme Avith a jet black one, if he will only attend to the 

 prescriptions of Galen and Marcellus Kiranides, and 

 mingle the somewhat unsavoury ingredients which they 

 recommend with different parts and secretions of the 

 swallow. If you find you don't succeed, you must settle 

 your accounts with the authors above named — Pliny, 

 Celsus, Jacobus Olivarius, Hieronymus Montuus, and 

 other learned physicians, now, as the old covenanters 

 used to say, ' gone to their place.^ 



But, seriously, whatever may be thought of the copious 

 ^materia m,edica which a swallow was supposed to caiTy 

 about with him in the olden time, there can be little or 

 no doubt that the lajnlli, or little stones mentioned by 

 Galen and others, were actually found in the young birds, 



* Folio. Romte, mdccxix. p. 183. 



