We must limit ourselves to a hasty survey of a few specimens of its prescriptions. Following Archigenes, ligatures and crowns are employed for headaches.[808] In contrast to Galen’s previous scepticism concerning depilatories for eyebrows we now find a number mentioned, including the blood of a bed-bug.[809] To cure lumbago,[810] if the pain is in the right foot, reduce to powder with your right hand the wings of a swallow. Then make an incision in the swallow’s leg and draw off all its blood. Skin it and roast it and eat it entire. Then anoint yourself all over with the oil for three days and you will marvel at the result. “This has been often proved by experience.” To prevent hair from falling out take many bees and burn them and mix with oil and use as an ointment.[811] For a sty in the eye catch flies, cut off their heads, and rub the sty with the rest of their bodies.[812] A cooked black chameleon performs the double duty of curing toothache and killing mice.[813] To extract a tooth in the upper jaw surround it with the worms found in the tops of cabbages; for a lower tooth use the worms on the lower parts of the leaves.[814] Pain in the intestines will vanish, if the patient drinks water in which his feet have been washed.[815] A net transferred from a woman’s hair to the patient’s head acts as a laxative, especially if the net is first heated.[816] Various superstitious devices are suggested to insure the birth of a child of the sex desired.[817] Bituminous trefoil,[818] boiled and applied hot, cures snake or spider bite, but let no one use it who is not so afflicted or it will make him feel as if he was.[819] For cataract is recommended a mixture of equal parts of mouse’s blood, cock’s gall, and woman’s milk, dried.[820] For pain on one side of the head or face smear with fifteen earthworms and fifteen grains of pepper powdered in vinegar.[821] To stop a cough wear the tongue of an eagle as an amulet.[822] Wearing a root of rhododendron makes one fearless of dogs and would cure a mad dog itself, if it could be tied on the animal.[823] A “confection” covering three pages is said to prolong life, to have been used by the emperors, and to have enabled Pythagoras, its inventor, who began to make use of it at the age of fifty, to live to be one hundred and seventeen without disease. “And he was a philosopher and unable to lie about it.”[824] [Sidenote: External signs of the temperaments of internal organs.]