In England, there is a large class of persons who believe that a certain pill is able to cure all diseases, however opposite their natures, and however different the constitutions of the patients. It is in vain the analytical chemist describes publicly the component parts and real qualities of the quack medicine--their faith is unshaken. In India, this low and paltry credulity acquires a character of the poetical; for there the popular confidence reposes--not more irrationally--on the prayers and incantations of the practitioner. But this sort of practice, in the wilder parts of the country, renders the medical profession somewhat unsafe to its professors; for the doctor is looked upon as a wizard, with _power_ to cure or kill as he chooses. In such places--the jungly districts--there are diseases of the liver and spleen, to which the children, more especially, are subject; and when so affected, the patient pines away and dies without any external token of disease. This result is, of course, attributed to preternatural means; and if there is not an old woman at hand obnoxious to suspicion, the doctor is set down as the murderer. 'I have in these territories,' says Colonel Sleeman, 'known a great many instances of medical practitioners being put to death for not curing young people for whom they were required to prescribe. Several cases have come before me as a magistrate, in which the father has stood over the doctor with a drawn sword, by the side of the bed of his child, and cut him down, and killed him the moment the child died, as he had sworn to do when he found the patient sinking under his prescriptions.' Another superstition of the country, originating no doubt in local circumstances, found its way into Europe, where no such circumstances existed. In India, a man suddenly vanishes. His family, perhaps, are expecting him at home, but from that moment he is never more heard of. He has been destroyed in the jungle by a tiger, and his remains so completely devoured by other animals, that there is scarcely a relic of his body left to give assurance of a man, far less as a proof of his identity. These mysterious disappearances, however, are connected with their real cause; and men are believed to be frequently metamorphosed--sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily--into tigers. The voluntary transformation is effected merely by eating a certain root, whereupon the man is instantly changed into a tiger; and when tired of his new character, he has only to eat another, when, _presto!_ he subsides from a tiger into a man. But occasionally mistakes happen. An individual of an inquiring disposition once felt a strong curiosity to know what were the sensations attendant on such a transformation; but being a prudent person, he set about the experiment with all necessary precaution. Having provided himself with ----the insane root That takes the reason prisoner,