We have again in the toad which has lain dormant for a month, the idea that it was the best time for his use, when his venom would be most active, besides the advantage also of catching him napping, when he would have no opportunity of getting rid of the poisonous principle contained in his skin. Dr. Lauder Brunton remarks with respect to this practice: “I remember reading as a child a story of how King John was poisoned by a friar who dropped a toad into his wine, but some books of natural history forty or fifty years ago scouted the idea of toads being poisonous at all. A little while ago, however, Dr. Leonard Guthie sent me an interesting account of a wicked Italian woman whose husband was dying of dropsy. He took so long about it that his wife became tired of the process, and thought that she would help him on. She accordingly caught a toad and put it in his wine, so that he should drink the liquid and die, but instead of dying he, to her astonishment and disgust, completely recovered. Forty years ago this story would have been scouted as equally mythical with that of King John, but now we know that it is precisely what the woman would have expected if she had only been acquainted with the researches of modern pharmacology. For the skin of a toad secretes a poison, the active principle of which, phrynin, has an action very much resembling that of digitalis, which is the remedy _par excellence_ for dropsy depending on heart disease.” Not less curious are the directions for gathering the poisonous hemlock at night, which has recently been shown to be the time of its greatest activity. These few instances show that the ancient apothecaries had often much greater knowledge than we give them credit for, and that some of the modern discoveries in modern science were well known to them, even if they could not account for them. In the _Taming of the Shrew_ allusion is made to the simples in vogue at the time for hurts and bruises. The lord’s directions for the treatment of Christopher Sly, who is found sleeping in the road on a cold night after a drinking bout, are curious:— “Balm his foul head with warm distilled waters, And burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet”. The distilled aromatic waters, of which the apothecary manufactured a considerable number, were much used in the middle ages for the purpose of fomentation. The burning of sweet woods, such as aloe or sandal, to take away evil smells, was a very ancient practice. An old cure for melancholy is embodied in the following lines:— “Your honour’s players, hearing your amendment, Are come to play a pleasant comedy, For so your doctors hold it very meet: Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy, Therefore they thought it good you hear a play, And frame your mind to mirth and merriment, Which bars a thousand harms, and lengthens life”.