MISCELLANEA. 
OLDEN REMEDIES. 
If our reader happen to have lived in the good old time— 
the Arcadian period of “merrie England,’" when, according 
to romantic writers, a few* herbs and simples sufficed to 
medicine the ills that flesh was heir to in those robust days— 
“ a falling sickness/" we find, would have been treated with 
any of the following receipts, or perhaps with a succession of 
them “The blood of a weasel, to be drunk ; the liver of an 
ass roasted, eaten fasting; an asse’s hoofe burned, to be 
drunk; the brine excrescence growing on the coronet of a 
horse"s hoofe, bruised and drunk in vinegar; stones found 
in the belly of a sw : allow 7 ’s first brood tied in a piece of buck¬ 
skin and worn about the neck ; cud of a sea-calf, to be drunk; 
gall of a beare ; gall of a tortoise put in the nose; stork’s dung 
drunk in water. 5 " These are receipts taken exactly as they 
come from the book of domestic medicine of the days of 
Cromw 7 ell. There w T as a higher class of prescriptions, how r ever, 
then in use, w r hich w as evidently aimed at the superstitious 
feelings of the poor people drugged. The moss from a dead 
man’s skull is recommended for a patient by Sir Kenhelm 
Digby, scrapings from human bones, poundings of a w'olf’s 
teeth, and even the hemp of a rope with wffiich. a man had 
hung himself, are to be found among the remedies prescribed 
less than tw r o hundred years ago by learned doctors of the 
College of Physicians .—From s: Doctor’s Shtff,” m the ‘London 
Jxevieu 
MRS. PARTINGTON’S LAST. 
“So old Doctor Quill is dead,” said Mrs. Partington, as 
she put an extra piece of butter on her bread. “They do 
say that he died of information of his brain ; but they mustn’t 
try to make me believe sich an unprobable story 7 as that— 
information on the brain, truly ! Why, he w : as the greatest 
fool I know 7 on ! I can’t help laughing at his presumptuous 
ignorance. Why, didn’t he, at one of his lectures one cold 
night last winter, try to make me believe, together vdth the 
rest of a large respectable ordinance, that the sun w 7 as then 
nearer the earth than it w*ould be in the hottest day in sum¬ 
mer?—and didn’t he try to suppress on my mind, when he 
called on me, that time is money? O, the dolt! Why, 
there’s Cousin Slow 7 (he has his wffiole time—he never was 
known to do anything), and the w T orld knows how poor he is. 
O, you can’t make me believe sich stuff! I w r onder what 
will carry me off, if he died of information ?” and she arose 
from the table flushed w r ith excitement. 
ERRATUM IN NO. 402 . 
At page 366 ,/or John Hanley, read John Hauly. 
