Malarial fevers are diagnosed as “cold fever” or “hot fever” (tap i larza--tap i gurrum), according to whether there is a shivering stage or not. They are treated by copious bleedings and purgings, and by very low diet. Malarial fever, however, being due to the presence in the blood corpuscles of a microscopic animal, an amæba, the treatment that the hakims adopted was not likely to be very successful. Quinine in sufficient dose destroys this organism, but the hakims would rarely give it, or if, following my plan, they did so, they gave it in doses so small as to be useless, for they said, “Quinine is _hot_, and, therefore, bad for fever.” What they meant I do not know. The hakims divide not only malarial fevers into “hot and cold,” but they arrange all diseases into these two classes, and I was asked of almost every disease that came under my notice whether it were hot or cold; for instance, whether dyspepsia were hot or cold. The reason for the classification in the case of malarial fevers is obvious enough, but for the other diseases I never was able to find out upon what they founded their conclusions. It certainly was not simply whether the patient had fever or not. It was particularly embarrassing when the Amîr asked the question, and I once told His Highness that in Europe we did not speak of diseases as being either hot or cold, that it was often impossible to consider them as either one or the other. His Highness was quite indignant at my denying what apparently seemed to him such a self-evident fact, so much so that he doubted if my interpreter had translated what I had said correctly. After that, when I was asked, I told the interpreter to class the disease as hot or cold, according to the custom of the country. [Sidenote: Treatment of Disease by the People.] In the distant villages, where there is no hakim, and the priest’s amulet has failed to cure, the people either go untreated or treat themselves. A popular mode of treatment for diseases of bones and joints, and also for almost any pain in the chest, abdomen, or back, is the employment of the “actual cautery.” A piece of live charcoal is placed against the skin until a deep burn is produced; this is done in two or three places, the scars, of course, remaining till the end of the patient’s life. Another custom, mostly for diseases accompanied by fever, is to kill a sheep, skin it rapidly, and at once wrap the patient in the hot skin. I do not know that it does any harm. The Amîr himself, when suffering from gout, and when the hakims had failed to relieve him, employed this essentially Afghan mode of treatment for his leg and foot. Afterwards he sent for me.