There were many kinds of bezoar stones sold. The most esteemed was the lapis bezoar orientale. This came from Persia and was supposed to be obtained from the intestines of the Persian wild goat. It was a calculus which had formed itself by deposits of phosphate of lime round some nucleus, such as hair, or the stone of a fruit. One in the museum of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital has a date stone for nucleus. It was believed that the special virtues of the stone were due to some unknown plant on which the animal fed. A certain kind of ape also yielded bezoar stones. These were obtained by giving the ape an emetic. There were, besides, the lapis bezoar occidentale, procured from the llamas of Peru; and the bezoar Germanorum got from the chamois of the Swiss mountains. These never commanded the same confidence as those from the East. The latter are stated by Paris and Redwood and other writers to have sold for ten times their weight in gold. No authority, however, is given for that assertion. In a paper read before the Royal Society of London, in 1714, by Frederick Slare, F.R.C.S., the claims of the bezoar stone to the possession of medical virtues are boldly challenged; and in the course of the paper the author states that the price varied from about £3 to £5 per ounce in London. He mentions that he had asked a London druggist, one “of the upper Size,” how many ounces of bezoar stones he sold yearly. He said about 500 ounces. I presume he was a wholesale druggist. Perhaps this is implied by the expression “of the upper Size.” Mr. Slare uses this fact in support of his suggestion that a large proportion of the imports of these precious commodities, though they came from India or Persia right enough, had never been inside any wild goat, antelope, or ape. He records experiments which go to show this, and also gave letters from medical officers in India, men quite competent to judge, who manifested in this particular a surprising degree of innocence. It would have been strange if the wily oriental had refrained from practising his skill on his confiding Western customers. Mr. Slare tells us that the stone was only found in about one goat out of seven killed, and that it took some twelve stones to make an ounce, which worked out to nearly 50,000 goats to be slain annually to keep this one London druggist supplied.