Lord Bacon, with all his philosophy, betrayed a disposition to believe in the virtue of charms and amulets; and Boyle[25] seriously recommends the thigh bone of an executed criminal, as a powerful remedy in dysentery. Amongst the remedies of Sir Theodore Mayerne, known to commentators as the Doctor Caius of Shakspeare, who was physician to three English Sovereigns, and who, by his personal authority, put an end to the distinctions of chemical and galenical practitioners in England, we shall find the secundines of a woman in her first labour with a male child; the bowels of a mole, cut open alive; mummy made of the lungs of a man who had died a violent death; with a variety of remedies, equally absurd, and alike disgusting. It merits notice, that the medicinal celebrity of a substance has not unfrequently survived the tradition of its superstitious origin, in the same manner that many of our popular customs and rites have continued, through a series of years, to exact a respectful observance, although the circumstances which gave origin to them have been obscured and lost in the gloom of unrecorded ages. Does not the fond parent still suspend the coral toy around the neck of her infant, without being in the least aware of the superstitious belief[26] from which the custom originated? while the chorus of _derry down_ is re-echoed by those who never heard of the Druids, much less of the choral hymns with which their groves resounded, at the time of their gathering the misletoe; and how many a medical practitioner continues to administer this sacred plant, (_Viscus Quercinus_) for the cure of his epileptic patients, without the least suspicion that it owes its reputation to the same mysterious source of superstition and imposture? Nor is this the only faint vestige of druidism which can be adduced. Mr. Lightfoot states, with much plausibility, that in the highlands of Scotland, evidence still exists in proof of the high esteem in which those ancient Magi held the Quicken tree, or Mountain Ash, (_Sorbus Aucuparia_) for it is more frequently than any other, found planted in the neighbourhood of druidical circles of stones; and it is a curious fact, that it should be still believed that a small part of this tree, carried about a person, is a charm against all bodily evils,—the dairy-maid drives the cattle with a switch of the _Roan_ tree, for so it is called in the highlands; and in one part of Scotland, the sheep and lambs are, on the first of May, ever made to pass through a hoop of _Roan wood_.