If you would bone a pigeon, draw, and soak in vinegar for four and twenty hours; then pull out the bones, wash well, fill with herbs and spices and roast or boil it. To make tender a tough capon, boil it before roasting. But, if you desire to give your friends much joy, entertain them to a goose cooked alive. In the courtyard, pluck your goose except her head and neck, and cover her with lard and suet. Build a ring of faggots round her; not too narrow, lest she evade the roasting, nor too wide lest the smoke choke her, or the fire burn her. Inside the ring of faggots, on the ground occupied by your plucked and larded goose, place several pots of water mixed with salt and bearwort. Light the faggots slowly. When the goose begins to roast she will walk about; but she cannot escape; and you have her wings. When she grows weary and very hot, she quenches her thirst with the medicated water, and cools her heart and her inward parts. You continually must moisten her head and her heart with a sponge at the end of a cane. At last, you will see her run incontinently up and down; and presently stumble. Then she is empty, and there is no more moisture in her heart. Wherefore you may take her away, and set her on the table to your guests: she will cry when you pull off her pieces; and you almost may eat her before she has died. The fifteenth and last book of Natural Magic treats of various modes of conducting secret correspondence by invisible inks, writing on eggs or naked backs of drugged couriers, counterfeit seals and writing, messages by pigeon or by arrows. Those are the things of which a sober learned and most eminent physician of the Fifteenth Century seriously has written, and called Natural Magic. He shews the innocent ingenuous mind of a child rampant among new toys. * * * * * Having shewn something of this mage’s knowledge, it may be said, now, that, scattered about his Book of Natural Magic, carelessly and incidentally, there are allusions to certain venoms. He says: I. that ἐζάμβλωσις may be procured by exhibiting the wine that Pliny calls Phthorium (Φθόριος) (Plin. 4, 16, 19, § 110), made from the grapes of a vine on which hellebore, wildgourd, and scamony have been grafted: II. that Mandrakes (Μανδραγόρας), _Mandragora_ (_Atropa Officinalis_) growing by a vine, will make its grapes hypnotic: III. that one drachm of belladonna (—_gen. Atropa_) or stramonium (thorn-apple, _Datura stramonium_) in water, (which they will infect without taste or smell,) “will make men mad without any hurt, so that it is a most pleasant spectacle to behold such mad whimsies and visions. It is very pleasant to behold. Pray make trial,” he lightly says. But he adds that one ounce of these drugs will make a man sleep four days.