While Galen thus employs ligatures and suspensions and sanctions magic logic, he draws the line at use of images, characters, and incantations. In the passage just cited he goes on to say that he has found other suspended substances efficacious, but not the barbarous names such as wizards use. Some say that the gem jasper comforts the stomach if bound about the abdomen,[805] and some wear it in a ring engraved with a dragon and rays,[806] as King Nechepso directs in his fourteenth book. Galen has employed it suspended about the neck without any engraving upon it and found it equally beneficial. In illustrating the virtue of human saliva, especially that of a fasting man, Galen tells of a man who promised him to kill a scorpion by means of an incantation which he repeated thrice. But at each repetition he spat on the scorpion and Galen afterwards killed one by the same procedure without any incantation, and more quickly with the spittle of a fasting than of a full man.[807] [Sidenote: Belief in magic dies hard.] The preceding paragraph gives a good illustration of the slow progress of human thought away from magic and towards science. Men are discovering that marvels can be worked as well without characters and incantations. Similar passages may be found in Arabic and Latin medieval writers. But while Galen questions images and incantations, he still clings to the notions of marvelous virtue in a fasting man’s spittle or in a gem suspended about the neck. And these and other passages in which he clung to old superstitions were unfortunately equally influential upon succeeding writers, who sometimes, we fear, took them as an excuse for further indulgence in magic. Indeed, we shall find Alexander of Tralles in the sixth century arguing that Galen finally became a believer in the efficacy of incantations. Thus the old notions and practices die hard. [Sidenote: _On easily procurable remedies._] In the treatise on easily procurable remedies, where popular and rustic remedies enter rather more largely than in Galen’s other writings, superstitious recipes are also met with more frequently, and, if that be possible, the doses become even more calculated to make one’s gorge rise, it being felt that the unfastidious tastes and crude constitutions of peasants and the poorer classes can stand more than daintier city patients. Another reason for separate consideration of the contents of this treatise is the possibility, already mentioned, that it is interpolated and misarranged, and the fact that it is in part of much later date than Galen. [Sidenote: Specimens of its superstitious contents.]