The judgment of the theologians of the isle of Crete, proves that the employment of the mummy as a medicine was universally admitted. According to Dioscorides, it is heating and drying in the second degree--it relieves the headach, cures megraim, palsy, and epilepsy--wonderful in relieving vertigo and drowsiness--an antidote against poisons of all kinds--the bite of venomous beasts--useful, according to Rhasis, in the spitting of blood, rupture of blood-vessels, wounds, &c.;--in one word, no remedy was esteemed more efficacious for the human body, than the human body taken as a medicine. One dram of the oil of mummy of Paracelsus, rendered all poisons innocuous for twenty-four hours; the formulæ of Crollius, of Fernel, of Clauderus, produced effects equally miraculous. The _divine water of Scroder_, was the touch-stone by whose aid the issue of a disorder could be known in advance: a dram of this liquor was mixed with nine drops of the blood of the patient, or with a double proportion of his urine; if these fluids did not mix, it was an infallible sign of approaching death; on the other hand, if they mixed readily, you might anticipate the health or cure of the patient in twenty-four hours. The great king, Francis 1st, wore around his neck a piece of mummy as a preservative against all evils. Powerless preservative! I have designedly placed, after an example of superstition, facts which prove the stupidity, or charlatanism of the profession, it appearing to me instructive to preserve the progressive ascendency; the march from the little to the great, in ridicule, as in everything else, is absurd. The difficulty of obtaining mummies enough to satisfy the demand, gave rise to an abominable traffic, against which many physicians remonstrated. “The base avidity of gain increased daily, and they commenced embalming with salt and alum the bodies of those who had died of leprosy, of plague, or small pox, in order to obtain, in the course of a few months, the cadaverous rottenness which flowed from them, and to sell this for true and legitimate mummy; and even at the present time, they make no scruples to give the name of mummy to the dead bodies found in the Deserts of Arabia, and make patients take it internally.”--(_Durenou._) The characters of a mummy of good quality, had, nevertheless, been well determined. “Those bodies are not mummies,” says Penicher, “dried by the sands of Lybia, nor those buried and preserved beneath the snow; nor those bodies submerged by the sea, thrown up and dried on the coast, even to the last degree of blackness; nor of criminals, hung and dried in the sun--for these are of no use.”--(_Ant. Santorel._) The Pissasphaltum, which is the mummy of the Arabians and the ancients, according to Serapion and Avicenna, is not what we desire; because the odour is disagreeable, and it can possess no other virtue than a mixture of pitch and _asphaltum_. Neither is