Let us cull a few illustrations of the ingenious development of those principles by the invention of nostrums distinguished by one or other of the grand characteristics, roughly definable as costliness or nastiness. Perhaps, ere the close of our brief review, we may find we have less reason than we fancy at starting to congratulate ourselves on the disappearance of this phase of human folly, or to rest assured that inductive science alone now rules in the sick-room, and that neither doctors nor patients retain any faith in sacrificial medicine. The use of costly things as remedies for disease constitutes a kind of _haute médecine_ necessarily of limited application. With the exception of the great search for the _Aurum Potabile_ in the Middle Ages, there are much fewer traces of it than of the other form of sacrifice, in which the patient _payait de sa personne_. Everybody could be scarified or made to swallow worms and filth; but there were not many patients who could afford to pay for emeralds to tie on their stomachs in cases of dysentery, as recommended by Avenzor, nor for “eight grains of that noble lunar medicine, the wine of silver,” nor for “dissolved pearls,” either of which (Matthioli assures us) is “sovereign against melancholy.” Dioscorides might in vain recommend powdered sapphires for starting eyes, or St. Jerome vaunt their virtues for many other troubles, to the majority of sufferers in their own or any other age. Coral was more within popular reach; and probably a considerable number of believing souls have followed Galen’s prescription and tried its use for spitting of blood, and Pliny’s recommendation of it for the stone. Avicenna found that a cordial made of it is “singularly productive of joy”; and Matthioli says it has “truly occult virtues against epilepsy,” whether “hung about the neck or drunk in powders.”[26] Emeralds or rubies, and even silk (then a rarer substance in Europe than now), afford, according to Dioscorides, relief in a variety of ailments; but of course nothing could be so generally, and indeed universally, useful as gold. He who could discover how to make men actually drink the most costly of metals would teach them nothing less than the secret of immortality. The _Aurum Potabile_, or noble “Solar Oyl,” especially when mixed with the “Lunar Oyl” of silver, and “Mercurial Oyl,” forms, as Bolnest assures us, “a great Arcanum, fit to be used in most diseases, _especially in chronick_.” By itself alone, indeed, the drinkable gold was understood to be an elixir of life,--a conclusion not a little remarkable, when we consider that the only real value of the metal is its convenience as a circulating medium and for the fabrication of ornaments, and that the artificial importance thus attached to it must have so affected men’s minds as to cause them to idealize it as a sort of divine antidote to disease and death.