and rubbed on in the bath over an itch of the atrabilious kind, it causes the disease to disappear. Masticated 

 and projected into the mouths of snakes and vipers, it kills them instantaneously. Mixed with oil of eggs and 

 used as an ointment for white leprosy, after preliminary lotions, it cures the disease, especially if the treatment 

 is prolonged." 



IV. pp. 34-35 (from Leclerc's French translations, Vol. II, pp. 334-335-) 



Ar-Razi in The Continent. — Athour the Wise says that man's hair soaked in vinegar and applied to the 

 bite of a mad dog, cures it in a moment. Soaked in pure wine and oil and applied to a wound on the head, it 

 prevents inflammation. The smoke of burnt hair inhaled combats hysteria and uterine discharges. Burnt 

 hair triturated with vinegar is applied with benefit to pimples. Triturated with honey and used as an 

 embrocation in the case of aphtheses of children, it has a marked success. If it is triturated with incense and 

 spread on sores on the head after anointing them with pitch, or even if it is beaten up with honey and applied 

 to the sores, it cures them. If burnt hair is triturated with litharge and rubbed in for the itch and for 

 irritation of the eye, it causes them to pass away. Burnt hair triturated with sheeps' milk, butter and rubbed 

 in on ecchvmoses and swellings caused by flies, is a certain remedy. Mixed with oil of roses and injected 

 into the ear it cures ear-ache. Ibn Zuhr's Properties. — The hair of a young infant, before it has acquired 

 consistency, carried on his person by a man who is gouty or has been stung by a scorpion, relieves him and 

 takes away the pain. Fumigation with human hair makes objects which the smoke reaches yellow. Water 

 distilled from it rubbed on the head, causes hair to grow. 



V. p. 35 (from Berthelot's La Chinie au Moyen Age, Vol. II, p. 155). 



" We can bring it about that a vegetable turns into an animal, and that an animal produces another (kind of) 

 animal. Take, for example, hair. When human hair putrifies, after a time it becomes a living snake. In 

 the same way, ox's flesh changes into bees and hornets ; eggs become dragons ; ravens engender flies. Many 

 things in putrifying and changing engender different kinds of animals. From the putrefaction of plants certain 

 animals originate. Basil, as it putrifies, engenders venomous scorpions. In the same way a great number 

 of plants produce animals as they putrify and change." 



P. 35 (from the same work, Vol. Ill, p. 255). 



"We have seen several times over, that it is possible to create animals without knowing the specific 

 differences between them ; with earth and straw it is possible to cause scorpions to be born, and with hair 

 to make snakes. Take a further case (of artificial production) mentioned by authors who deal with 

 agriculture: when bees become scarce, a swarm can be extracted from the dead body of a calf. Let us also cite 

 the way in which seeds are produced by planting the horns of hoofed animals, and how sugarcane is 

 produced by filling the horns with honey before planting them." 



VI. pp. 36-37 (from the Pretiosa Margareta Novella). 



" Thus also this stone works in leprous metals, and therefore it is sometimes called poison, sometimes the 

 " Antidote." For the corrupt metals, which are four, are afflicated by four kinds of leprosy, from one or 

 other of the four corrupt humours, and their disease is cured by the said stone, just as human leprosies are 

 cured by the right kinds of snakes.,. ...Gold, however, is the purest metal, and the noblest, and of the evenest 

 humour, like the sun among the siars, and like the pure blood in the body of a man of temperate 

 complexion, lacking all extraneous matter and having in itself the sum of health. And so art, following 

 nature, wishes to cure all things with this stone [it is both poison and the "Antidote"] and to 



transform them into gold alone, as nature does. Hali says too in his Secrets, "This is the 



red sulphur, shining in darkness. It is the red hyacinth, the flame of venom, the murderer and the 



victorious lion, the evil-doer, the cleaving sword, the Antidote healing all infirmity/' etc Haly says, 



"This stone is the life of the dead and their reformation : it. is also a medicine which preserves and purges 



