Wiseman, the great surgeon, was discoursing eloquently on the efficacy of the royal touch in scrofula. The founder of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, consorting with alchemists and astrologers, was treasuring the manuscripts of the late pious Dr. Richard Napier, in which certain letters (Rx Ris) were understood to mean Responsum Raphaelis,--the answer of the angel Raphael to the good man's medical questions. The illustrious Robert Boyle was making his collection of choice and safe remedies, including the sole of an old shoe, the thigh bone of a hanged man, and things far worse than these, as articles of his materia medica. Dr. Stafford, whose paper of directions to his “friend, Mr. Wintrop,” I cited, was probably a man of standing in London; yet toad-powder was his sovereign remedy. See what was the state of belief in other matters among the most intelligent persons of the colonies, magistrates and clergymen. Jonathan Brewster, son of the church-elder, writes the wildest letters to John Winthrop about alchemy,--“mad for making gold as the Lynn rock-borers are for finding it.” Remember the theology and the diabology of the time. Mr. Cotton's Theocracy was a royal government, with the King of kings as its nominal head, but with an upper chamber of saints, and a tremendous opposition in the lower house; the leader of which may have been equalled, but cannot have been surpassed by any of our earth-born politicians. The demons were prowling round the houses every night, as the foxes were sneaking about the hen-roosts. The men of Gloucester fired whole flasks of gunpowder at devils disguised as Indians and Frenchmen. How deeply the notion of miraculous interference with the course of nature was rooted, is shown by the tenacity of the superstition about earthquakes. We can hardly believe that our Professor Winthrop, father of the old judge and the “squire,” whom many of us Cambridge people remember so well, had to defend himself against the learned and excellent Dr. Prince, of the Old South Church, for discussing their phenomena as if they belonged to the province of natural science. Not for the sake of degrading the aspect of the noble men who founded our State, do I refer to their idle beliefs and painful delusions, but to show against what influences the common sense of the medical profession had to assert itself. Think, then, of the blazing stars, that shook their horrid hair in the sky; the phantom ship, that brought its message direct from the other world; the story of the mouse and the snake at Watertown; of the mice and the prayer-book; of the snake in church; of the calf with two heads; and of the cabbage in the perfect form of a cutlash,--all which innocent occurrences were accepted or feared as alarming portents.