608 
INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 
The following is extracted from a late number of the 
“ Sherborne Mercury 
“ Last week a man, of the town of Axbridge, sold his horse 
to a person at Cheddar for the dogs. After the horse was 
shot and skinned, the companion of the person to whom it 
had formerly belonged, asked for the heart. c What do you 
want to do with it?’ said the person who had purchased it. 
‘ Ta’ant I,* said the man, c but ’tis Tom there ; he da w ant to 
roast un.’ ‘ What ! to eat ?’ 6 Noa, but he’s agoing to stick 
im we pins, and roast un, for vaulk do tell he that nif’so be 
he do do that there, his horses will be better afterwards ; for 
this is two as he’ve been ’bliged to kill w’thin two months, 
and he da think he’s overlooked,’ that is bewitched, or the 
‘evil eye’ had looked upon him.” 
I was told, a short time since, of a practitioner who, on 
being called in to attend a horse lame from a prick caused by 
a nail, carefully took the nail home and anointed it. Doubt- 
less, he was a classic, and remembered the rust of the spear 
of Telephus, mentioned by Homer as a cure for the wounds 
it had been the cause of. Or else the sympathetic pow T der 
of Sir Kenelm Digby, Knight of Montpelier, which, accord- 
ing to Dr. Paris, whenever any w r ound had been inflicted, 
this pow der was applied to the weapon that produced it, while 
the weapon itself w T as covered with ointment, and dressed two 
or three times a-day ! Yet this folly led to the present rational 
system of treating those w'ounds ; it being essentially necessary 
to the perfecting of the cure, that the edges of the wound 
should be brought in apposition, and carefully bound up 
with clean linen rags ; but, above all, to be let alone for seven 
days ! Here we see that nature was allowed to carry on her 
own reparative process ; and science coming to the support 
of reason, showed that neither the unguents nor the powder 
had any influence on the w*eapon : and that sympathy should 
exist between it and the wound was too preposterous an 
opinion to be very long entertained ; therefore, the only de- 
ducible inference was, that nature being left to herself had 
brought about the cure, and thus a scientific principle 
became established. 
For diseases of cattle, I believe these ridiculous practices 
were even still more common. Travellers in the East — where, 
possibly, through the prevalence of a false religion, the mind 
is enslaved and immured in worse than Stygian darkness — 
have recorded, that in Thibet and Cashmere, the owners of 
flocks and herds, w 7 hich abound there, have boasted to them 
of the possession of charms to w 7 ard off diseases. These, on 
inspection, have proved to be nothing more than directions 
