One often sees in these ancient remedies a foreshadowing of the homœopathic notion of like to like; thus Porta prescribes “a present remedy” for the poison of the viper, declaring that “the viper itself, if you slay her, and strip off her skin, cut off her head and tail, cast away all her entrails, boil her like an Eele, and give her to one that she hath bitten, it will cure him,” but in another place he says “for serpent’s bites I have found nothing more excellent than the earth which is brought from the isle of Malta, for the least dust of it put into their mouths kills them presently.” There is evidently here some sort of connection endeavoured to be established between the escape of St. Paul while in Malta from the evil effects of the poison of a viper and this present prescription, and it no doubt arose from the old legend that, like St. Patrick in Ireland, St. Paul, after his experience of them, banished all snakes from the island. Once granted that a serpent cannot live on the soil of Malta, it follows almost as a matter of course that a little of this same soil administered to it anywhere the wide world over will prove fatal to it. The recipe is, nevertheless, a little vague, as it deals exclusively with the destruction of the serpent, which is not at all the same thing as the restoration to health of the sufferer from its poison fangs. Prevention being better than cure, the hint that Cogan gives in his “Haven of Health” should prove of value. “The setting of Lauender within the house in floure pots must needes be very wholesome, for it driueth away venemous wormes, both by strawing and by the sauour of it,” and he adds that “being drunke in wine it is a remedie against poyson.” Tusser, in his book on Husbandry, gives a long list of “strowing herbes,” their fragrance and remedial value being held in high esteem by our forefathers:— “No daintie flowre or herbe that growes on grownd, No arborett with painted blossoms drest, And smelling sweete, but there it might be fownd To bud out faire, and throwe her sweet smels al around.”[123] The bunches of flowers that are still presented to the Judges on the opening of the Law Courts are the graceful and now happily needless developments of the bunches of herbs that were once placed on their desks to avert the dangers of the gaol fever, that with its noxious breath slew not the hapless prisoners alone, but the judges on the bench, and administered wild justice on all alike for the contempt of sanitary laws, and for the brutality that was rampant and supreme.[124]