The great mistake of our doctors in India is dosing their patients with calomel, which, although necessary in some cases, where it is the only medicine powerful enough to arrest the rapid strides with which disease advances in tropical countries, is too often had recourse to, when simples would be just as effective. And this mistake of theirs is equalled, in bad effects only, by the practice of the Spanish doctors, who will never administer calomel at all, even in the most urgent cases, as they prefer trusting altogether to simple remedies for a cure, and if a patient dies who has had calomel administered to him, do not hesitate to tell the practitioner who gave it that the medicine killed him. Within the tropics lengthened residence is the most essential qualification in a medical attendant, as although old men may not be so well up to the latest improvements of the science as those fresh from college, yet they have from practice found out the best way of treating tropical diseases, to which the treatment applicable in a London, Edinburgh, or Paris hospital in similar cases, would be quite out of place when practised in so different a climate as the tropics, where the symptoms vary and succeed each other with ten times the rapidity they do in Europe. CHAPTER XVI. Before leaving Manilla on a lengthened country excursion, it is always desirable to procure introductions to the priests of the district you are going to visit, which may be effected with very little difficulty by almost any of your Spanish acquaintances. As although they are in general a most hospitable class of men, and usually invite any respectable looking European whom chance may throw in their way, to sleep at the convento if he be passing the night at their village, yet without an introduction one remains always a stranger to them, and sees nothing of their usual habits or modes of life. Sometimes their good-nature is put to a trial by the eccentricities of their British guests, and some odd incidents happen. A good story is told of one of the former British merchants of the place, who having taken it into his head to make an excursion, before starting provided himself with letters of recommendation from the Archbishop of Manilla, to whom he paid court by loans of newspapers, addressed to the parish priests, and set off with these in his pocket, finding them of the greatest service in insuring a welcome wherever he went, being described therein in the most favourable colours, by the high church dignitary.