DISEASES OP THE OX AND SHEEP. 389 



dried and much shrunken, measured twenty-six inches across ; 

 but it was only a fragment ten feet in length, and was being 

 gradually consumed inch by inch to lend mystic virtue to com- 

 pounds of many strange ingredients. The perfect skin must 

 have measured very nearly fifty feet in length. There was also 

 another fragment twenty-two feet long and twelve inches wide ; 

 this also had evidently shrunk considerably in drying, and must, 

 when in life, have been a very fine specimen. 



A medical work of reference, The Chinese Repository, pub- 

 lished in Canton, a.d. 1832, states, according to the above- 

 named authoress, that the bones of the dragon are found on the 

 banks of rivers and in caves of the earth, places where the dragon 

 died. The bones of the back, and also brain, are especially 

 prized, being variegated with diff*erent streaks on a white ground. 

 The best are known by slipping the tongue over them. The 

 teeth are of little firmness. The horns are hard and strong ; 

 but, if these are taken from damp places or by women, they are 

 worthless. From his examination of these so-called relics of 

 the dragon, which prove to belong to many difi'erent animals, 

 which in successive ages have crept to the same cave to die, Mr. 

 Moseley points out how some imaginative person probably first 

 devised a fanciful picture of the monster, combining the body 

 of a vast lizard with the wings of a bat, the head of a stag, and 

 the teeth of a carnivorous creature. The whole assemblage of 

 heterogeneous factors bas become the stereotyped idea of the 

 dragon in all lands. 



Miss Gumming, further on in her contribution, tells us that 

 in the oiB&cial pharmacopoeia of the College of Physicians of 

 London, a.d. 1678, the skull of a man who had died a violent 

 death and the horn of a unicorn appear as highly-approved 

 medicines. Again, in a.d. 1724, the same pharmacopoeia men- 

 tions unicorn's horn, human fat, and human skulls, dog's dung, 

 toads, vipers, and worms, among the really valuable medical 

 stores. The pharmacopoeia was revised in 1742, and various 

 ingredients were rejected; but centipedes, vipers, and lizards 

 were retained. Among the standard medicines quoted in the 

 medical books of Nuremberg of 200 years ago are portions of 

 the embalmed bodies of man's flesh brought from the neighbour 

 hood of Memphis, where there are many bodies that have been 

 buried for more than 1,000 years, called mumia, which have 



