Witches are said to be "light weight." But a little above a hundred years ago, a woman was accused in Wingrove, England, by another, of "bewitching her spinning-wheel, so it would turn _neither the one way nor the other_." To this she took oath, and the magistrate, with pomp and dignity, "followed by a great concourse of people, took the woman to the parish church, her husband also being present, and having stripped the accused to her nether garment, put her into the great scales brought for that purpose, with the Bible in the opposite balance, which was the lawful test of a witch, when, to the no small astonishment and mortification of her maligner, she actually outweighed the book, and was honorably acquitted of the charge!" Just imagine the picture. In an enlightened age, a Christian people, in possession of the Bible, that gives no intimation of such things as witches, stripping and weighing a female in public, to ascertain if she really was heavier than a common Bible! [Illustration] XII. MEDICAL SUPERSTITIONS. "When cats run home, and light is come, And dew is cold upon the ground, And the far-off stream is dumb, And the whirling sail goes round, And the whirling sail goes round; Alone and warming his five wits The white owl in the belfry sits."--TENNYSON. OLD AND NEW.--THE SIGN OF JUPITER.--MODERN IDOLATRY.--ORIGIN OF THE DAYS OF THE WEEK.--HOW WE PERPETUATE IDOLATRY.--SINGULAR FACT.--CHRISTMAS FESTIVITIES.--"OLD NICK."--RIDICULOUS SUPERSTITIONS.--GOLDEN HERB.--HOUSE CRICKETS.--A STOOL WALKS!--THE BOWING IMAGES AT RHODE ISLAND.--HOUSE SPIDERS.--THE HOUSE CAT.--SUPERSTITIOUS IDOLATRIES.--WONDERFUL KNOWLEDGE.--NAUGHTY BOYS.--ERRORS RESPECTING CATS.--SANITARY QUALITIES.--OWLS.--A SCARED BOY.--HOLY WATER.--UNLUCKY DAYS.--THUNDER AND LIGHTNING.--A KISS. Medicine, above all the other sciences, was founded upon superstition. Medicine, more than all the other arts, has been practised by superstitions. Stretching far back through the vista of time to the remotest antiquity, reaching forward into the more enlightened present, it has partaken of all that was superstitious in barbarism, in heathenism, in mythology, and in religion. In showing the Alpha I am compelled to reveal the Omega. Let us begin with Jupiter. I know that some wise Æsculapian--no Jupiterite--will turn up his nose at this page, while to-morrow, if he gets a patient, he will demonstrate what I am saying, and further, help to perpetuate the ignorant absurdities which originated with the old mythologists, by placing "[R]"--the ill-drawn sign of Jupiter--before his recipe. [Illustration: THE GOD OF RECIPES.]