It seems curious in face of such an expression as “Mad as a March Hare” and such an epithet as “hare-brained” applied to anything especially wild and foolhardy, to find the great Bacon in his “Natural History” recommending the brains of hares as invaluable for strengthening the memory[56] and brightening up the faculties. Those who have “frekels,”[57] and would like to get rid of them, should “take the bloude of an hare, anoynte them with it, and it will doe them awaye.” Another eccentric prescription is for the benefit of sufferers from rheumatism, and if it were only efficacious, its simplicity would be a great point in its favour, as it merely consists in the carrying in the pocket of the right fore-foot of a hare, the only caution to be exercised being that in the case of a man it must be the foot of a female hare, while a male hare must supply the remedy if the patient be a woman. Cogan, in his “Haven of Health,” declares “thus much will I say as to the commendation of the hare, and of the defense of hunters’ toyle, that no beast, be it never so great, is profitable to so many and so diverse uses in Physicke as the hare,” and he then proceeds to give numerous prescriptions in which it is the principal feature. “The knee-bone of an Hare taken out alive and worne abute the necke is excellent against Convulsion fitts,”[58] we are told, and perhaps it may be so, but the point that more especially strikes us, and it impresses one over and over again in these mediæval recipes, is the cold-blooded cruelty and indifference to animal suffering that is shown in so many of them. Fried mice were considered a specific in small-pox, but it was necessary that they should be fried alive; while for cataract a fox should be captured, his tongue cut out, and the animal released; the member thus barbarously procured was placed in a bag of red cloth and hung round the man’s neck. For erysipelas a favourite old remedy was to cut off one-half of the ear of a cat and let the blood drop on the part affected, while for fits one popular recipe was to take a mole alive, cut the tip of his nose off, and let nine drops of the blood fall on to a lump of sugar: the swallowing of this was held to be a certain cure. It would be easy to multiply these illustrations of atrocious cruelty by the score, since one comes across such barbarities in abundance.