When a Chinese physician is not able to procure the medicines he needs, he writes the names of the drugs he desires to employ on a piece of paper, and makes the patient swallow it; the effect is supposed to be quite as good as that of the remedy itself, and certainly in many cases it would be infinitely more pleasant to take! This custom of swallowing charms is seen again in the sick-room, some of the charms which are stuck round it being occasionally taken down, burned, and mixed with water, which the patient has to drink. Gongs are beaten and fire-crackers let off to frighten away the demons which are supposed to be tormenting the sick person. “The superstition as to the powers of the ‘evil eye,’” says Denny,[311] “may almost be deemed fundamental to humanity, as I have yet to read of a people amongst whom it does not find some degree of credence.” In China a pregnant woman, or a man whose wife is pregnant, is called “four-eyed”; and children are guarded against being looked at by either, as it would probably cause sickness to attack them. One of the commonest diagrams to be met with in China is the mystic _svastika_, or “Thor’s Hammer” 卍. It is found on the wrappers of medicines, and is accepted as the accumulation of lucky signs possessing ten thousand virtues.[312] The physicians of Thibet, says M. Huc,[313] assign to the human body four hundred and forty diseases, neither more nor less. Lamas who practise medicine have to learn by heart the books which treat of these diseases, their symptoms, and the method of curing them. The books are a mere hotch-potch of aphorisms and recipes. The Lama doctors have less horror of blood than the Chinese, and practise bleeding and cupping. They pay great attention to the examination of a patient’s water. A thoroughly competent Lama physician must be able to diagnose the disease and treat the patient without seeing him. It is sufficient that he make a careful examination of the water. This he does not by chemical tests, as in Western nations, but by whipping it up with a wooden knife and listening to the noise made by the bubbles. A patient’s water is mute or crackling according to his state of health. Much of Chinese and Tartar medicine is mere superstition. “Yet,” says M. Huc very judiciously, “notwithstanding all this quackery, there is no doubt that they possess an infinite number of very valuable recipes, the result of long experience. It were perhaps rash to imagine that medical science has nothing to learn from the Tartar, Thibetian, and Chinese physicians, on the pretext that they are not acquainted with the structure and mechanism of the human body. They may, nevertheless, be in possession of very important secrets, which science alone, no doubt, is capable of explaining, but which, very possibly, science itself may never discover. Without being scientific, a man may very well light upon extremely scientific results.” The fact that everybody