352 



THE OLD-WORLD ELK 



Medieval practitioners of medicine — and the 

 Middle Ages in the healing art have continued 

 down almost to our own time — were perhaps no 

 more dishonest than their successors today. Dis- 

 ease was a mystery, and it was believed that nature 

 had given the key to the mystery in a system of 

 symbols, called ''signatures." It was the physi- 

 cian's function to trace the resemblances between 

 symptoms of disease on the one hand and natural 

 objects on the other, for such resemblances were 

 the "signatures" — the signs and symbols which 

 nature had provided — to guide mortals in the 

 search for health. The physician whose knowl- 

 edge of chemistry was gained in the alchemist's 

 laboratory might honestly see in the distinction 

 between the right hoof and the left a possible clue 

 to one of nature's many secrets. Thus, groping 

 in the dark as they were after the truth, the worst 

 that can be said of the medical men of the later 

 Middle Ages is that they failed to find it. And 

 the ghost of the old superstitions still haunts the 

 best regulated apothecary shops. 



Ancient writers who gave accounts of the elk 

 were as imaginative as any of the early travelers 

 in America who left descriptions of the moose. 

 The elk's size invited exaggeration, and a full 



