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affords many of the most useful and powerful remedies 

 employed in the treatment of disease. 



Castor, a powerful antispasmodic medicine, employed in 

 hysteric affections, is a secretion of two glandular sacs, 

 which terminate at the prepuce of the Beaver. 



The well-known powerful aromatic substance, Musk, 

 which is extensively used in epilepsy, hysteria, and other 

 spasmodic diseases, is obtained from two glandular sacs 

 placed before the prepuce of the Moschus mosc h iferus, an 

 animal like a small goat, which inhabits the most dreary, 

 rocky summits of the high mountains of India, China, 

 Thibet, and other countries in the east of Asia. 



Spermaceti, which is used internally in catarrh and 

 gonorrhoea, and externally in ointments to wounds and 

 excoriations of the skin, is procured from an unctuous 

 matter, filling numerous cartilaginous cavities on the upper 

 part of the head of the Cachalot, a cetaceous animal as 

 large as a whale, which abounds in various parts of the 

 South Sea. The highly esteemed odoriferous Ambergris is 

 an induration of feculent matter found in the large intes- 

 tine of this animal in a state of disease. 



The crustaceous coverings of Crabs, which consists of the 

 carbonate and phosphate of lime, and certain concretions 

 of a similar composition, found in their stomach, have long 

 been employed as medicines to remove acidity of the di- 

 gestive organs. And various other calcareous substances 

 derived from the Animal Kingdom, as the burnt shells of 

 the common oyster, the egg-shells of the domestic fowl, 

 and the Corallina qfficinalis, have been extensively em- 

 ployed in medicine as antacids. These earthly products 

 of organization, when levigated and washed with water, 

 afford a calcareous powder, more free from silicious par- 

 ticles, or other impurities, than any other form of the 

 carbonate of lime. In the article sold by the apothecaries 

 of France, under the name of the Corallina officinalis, 

 Lamouroux detected more than a hundred distinct species 



