The _Times_ says (October 10th, 1892) that the character of the accusations made in the publications against Europeans has created as much astonishment amongst the foreign residents in China as it has in the West. Missionaries especially were charged—and the charges have been made frequently during the past thirty years—with bewitching women and children by means of drugs, enticing them to some secret place, and there killing them for the purpose of taking out their hearts and eyes. Dr. Macgowan, a gentleman who has lived for many years in China, has published a statement showing that from the point of view of Chinese medicine these accusations are far from preposterous. It is one of the medical superstitions of China that various portions of the human frame and all its secretions possess therapeutic properties. He refers to a popular voluminous Materia Medica—the only authoritative work of the kind in the Chinese language—which gives thirty-seven anthropophagous remedies of native medicine. Human blood taken into the system from another is believed to strengthen it; and Dr. Macgowan mentions the case of an English lady, now dead, who devoted her fortune and life to the education of girls in Ningpo, who was supposed by the natives to extract the blood of her pupils for this purpose. Human muscles are supposed to be a good medicament in consumption, and cases are constantly recorded of children who mutilate themselves to administer their flesh to sick parents. Never, says Dr. Macgowan, has filial piety exhibited its zeal in this manner more than at the present time. Imperial decrees published in the _Pekin Gazette_, often authorising honorary portals to be erected in honour of men, and particularly women, for these flesh offerings, afford no indication of the extent to which it is carried, for only people of wealth and influence can obtain such a recognition of the merit of filial devotion. It is very common among the comparatively lowly, but more frequent among the _literati_. A literary graduate now in his own service, finding the operation of snipping a piece of integument from his arm too painful, seized a hatchet and cut off a joint of one of his fingers, which he made into broth mixed with medicine and gave to his mother. It is essential in all such cases that the recipient should be kept in profound ignorance of the nature of the potion thus prepared, and in no case is the operation to be performed for an inferior, as by a husband for a wife, or a parent for a child. This belief in the medical virtues of part of the human body (of which a large number of instances which cannot be repeated here are given) has led to a demand from native practitioners which can sometimes only be supplied by murder. Of this, too, examples are given from official records and other publications, some of them of quite recent date. Dr. Macgowan reminds us that men capable of these atrocities have been found in other civilized lands. He says:—