The notices to which I here specially refer exist in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland. The Register House, Edinburgh, contains a curious and valuable series of these Accounts, detailing the daily expenses of the kings of Scotland from the reign of James III. down to the ascension of the English throne by James VI. At the time of the first appearance of syphilis in our northern realm, the throne of Scotland was occupied by James IV., a prince who was a great patron of the arts and sciences of his time. He was a practitioner in them also, as well as a patron of them. At different times we find him busily experimenting in chemistry, in physiology, and in medicine. His daily expense-books contain many entries of purchases for instruments and materials to make the unmakeable “quinta essentia,” or philosopher’s stone; and he had laboratories for these investigations both at Edinburgh and Stirling. His alchemical assistant—John the Leeche—whom he had imported from the Continent and made Abbot of Tungland, experimented for the king in physiology as well as in chemistry. John, Dædalus-like, undertook to prove the improvability of human progression by flying to France with wings. “To that effect he causet (states Bishop Lesley[602]) mak ane pair of wingis of fedderis, quhilkis beand fessinit apoun him, he flew off the castell wall of Striveling, but shortly he fell to the ground and brak his thee bane.” But the doctrine of sympathies was in vogue in these days, and by that doctrine the afflicted Abbot easily, of course, and clearly explained all. For the cause of his fall, or “the wyt thairof he asscryvit to that thair was sum hen fedderis in the wingis, quhilk yarnit and covet the mydding and not the skyis.” Like the Egyptian king mentioned by Herodotus, King James made also a physiological or rather philological experiment to ascertain the primeval language of mankind; and for this purpose his Majesty sent a deaf and dumb woman to live with and bring up two young children upon the island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth—the same island to which we have found the first victims of syphilis previously banished, and itself the old “Urbs Guidi” of the venerable Bede. When the two children, the companions of the “dumb voman cam to the aige of perfyte speach, some sayes” (to quote the account of Lindsay of Pitscottie) “they spak guid Hebrew;”[603] but the cautious old Scottish chronicler sagely doubts the truth of this tradition. King James personally practised the art of leechcraft, as well as experimented in alchemy and physiology. “He was,” says Pitscottie, “weill learned in the airt of medicine, and was ane singular guid chirurgiane; and thair was none of that professioune, if they had any dangerous cure in hand, bot would have craved his adwyse” (p. 249). So states the ancient Scottish historian. The High Treasurer’s Account shows that the king had in one important respect a right royal way of gaining patients,—a way by the