When obtained in the manner above described, this invaluable remedy is “to be taken in broth or treacle-water with a fasting” (and let us devoutly hope an unusually vigorous) “stomach.” Only one caution is necessary. The “sound young man’s” blood must have been shed “when Mercury was above the horizon and in conjunction with the sun in Gemini or Virgo.” After the broth of man’s blood, a “Balsamick Remedy for Arthritick Pains,” composed of the bones of a man “which hath not been buried fully a year,” beat up into a powder, calcined, and applied on lint, appears a comparatively mild and pleasant receipt. So, likewise, is the “Quintessence of Toads,” to be composed in the month of June or July of a “great quantity of overgrown toads,” reduced, calcined, and distilled as usual, and then “dissolved in spirit of oranges or treacle-water ready for use,” either externally, when it cures “cancers and pestilential venom,” or internally, against “all sorts of poison.” The above prescriptions are taken, be it said, not from the manual of one of those vulgar quacks to whom we are too apt to credit every absurdity of ancient medicine, but from a serious treatise by Edward Bolnest, physician in ordinary to the King (1672), dedicated to George Duke of Buckingham, and described on the title-page as “Shewing a Rational [!] Way of preparing Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals for a Physical Use, by which they are made most efficacious, safe, and pleasant Medicines for the Preservation and Restoration of the Life of Man.” How honest was the worthy author in his belief in his “Mummiall Quintessence,” and all the rest, may be judged from his frank avowal “to the Reader” that the medicines prescribed he might “_in some measure_ in time of need trust to,” because, adds Dr. Bolnest candidly, “I never yet from the best of medicines always found those certain effects I could have desired.”