TABLES AND PREJUDICES. 
105 
celebrated among many tribes of North America ; while 
other nations reject it, to make use of plants of the genera 
Prenanthes, Lactuca^ Helianthus, Spirma, &c., the efficacy 
of which, as antidotes against the poison, are as little proved 
as that of the former. Modern travellers of great name 
have furnished some curious facts relating to a plant, ^ 
to which the inhabitants of Colombia attribute the same 
qualities as those ascribed to the Aristolochia in India ; 
but it is much to be desired that these experiments were 
repeated by persons familiar with the nature of serpents. t 
It will be superfluous to repeat all that the ancients have 
invented concerning the innumerable antidotes of which they 
vaunt the efficacy. On consulting the passages of Pliny J 
to which we refer, it will be seen that the ancients recom- 
mend indiscriminately, for this purpose, the most hetero- 
geneous substances ; but that the attempts which they made 
were the result of the grossest empiricism. Deceptions of 
this nature are practised in India and Ceylon, where they 
sell pastilles and pills of different kinds, arbitrarily com- 
posed of substances from the vegetable, animal, and mi- 
neral kingdoms, and which merely act on the imagination 
of the sufferer. § 
We have stated above, that the practice of extracting 
from serpents the remedies against their bite, dates from 
remote antiquity : Antonius, physician to Augustus, em- 
ployed vipers in several diseases ;|| but it was not until the 
time of Nero, when the physician Andromachus of Crete,^ 
invented the theriaca^ that the practice became general. 
The theriac was an arbitrary compound of heterogeneous 
medicaments, and was afterwards employed in maladies 
of the most opposite nature : it was compounded in the 
middle ages in almost all the cities of Europe, particular- 
* PlantCQ Equinox, ii. pi. 105. 
t [The author perhaps is not aware of the curious experiments on 
the rattlesnake with the leaves of the Fraxinus Americana, by Judge 
Woodrutfe, published in Silliinan’s Journal for 1833. — Tr.] 
t Hist. Natur,, 28, 42, 29, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 32, 17, 19, 
&c. 
§ Russell, i. p. 74 ; Davy, Ceylon, p. 100. 
II Plin., 30, 39. 
^ Galex, de Antidotis, lib. i. cap. 6. 
