gave their name for jaundice, because if a jaundiced man saw it, the disease left him and slew the bird.​[274] He mentions also a stone which was supposed to cure jaundice because its hue resembled that of a jaundiced skin.​[275] In modern Greece jaundice goes by the name of the Golden Disease, and very naturally it can be healed by gold. To effect a perfect cure all that you have to do is this. Take a piece of gold (best of all an English sovereign, since English gold is the purest) and put it in a measure of wine. Expose the wine with the gold to the stars for three nights; then drink three glasses of it daily till it is used up. By that time the jaundice will be quite washed out of your system. The cure is, in the strictest sense of the word, a sovereign one.​[276] {p81} A Wend cure for jaundice, like the modern Greek one, is to drink a glass of water in which a gold coin has been left overnight.​[277] A remedy based on the principle of contraries is to look steadily at pitch or other black substances.​[278] In South Russia a Jewish remedy for jaundice is to wear golden bracelets.​[279] Here the great homoeopathic principle is clearly the same as in the preceding cases, though its application is different. In Germany yellow turnips, gold coins, gold rings, saffron, and other yellow things are still esteemed remedies for jaundice, just as a stick of red sealing-wax carried on the person cures the red eruption popularly known as St. Anthony’s fire, or the blood-stone with its blood-red spots allays bleeding.​[280] Another popular remedy in Germany for the red St. Anthony’s fire and also for bleeding is supplied by the common crossbills. In this bird “after the first moult the difference between the sexes is shewn by the hens inclining to yellowish-green, while the cocks become diversified by orange-yellow and red, their plumage finally deepening into a rich crimson-red, varied in places by a flame-colour.”​[281] The smallest reflection may convince us that these gorgeous hues must be endowed with very valuable medical properties. Accordingly in some parts of Bavaria, Saxony, and Bohemia people keep crossbills in cages in order that the red birds may draw the red St. Antony’s fire and the inflammation of fever to themselves and so relieve the human patient. Often in a peasant’s cottage you may see the red bird in its cage hanging beside a sick-bed and drawing to itself the hectic flush from the cheeks of the hot and restless patient, who lies tossing under the blankets. And the dried body of a crossbill has only to be placed on a wound to stop the bleeding at once. It is not the colour only of the feathers which produces this salutary effect; the peculiar {p82} shape of the bill, which gives the bird its English and German name, is a contributory cause. For the horny sheaths of the bill cross each other obliquely, and this formation undoubtedly enables the bird to draw diseases to itself more readily than a beak of the