These were, however, refined preparations compared to the prescriptions in use in still earlier generations. In the great folio of M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli (Venice, 1621), adorned with hundreds of really admirable woodcuts of medicinal herbs and flowers, there are directions for rubbing wounds with cow-dung, swallowing beeswax, silk, sweat, and saliva, and drinking hare’s blood and dog’s dung dissolved in milk as a cure for dysentery. Nervous people are to dine on cooked vipers. Persons with the toothache are to apply to their teeth a serpent’s skin steeped in vinegar, or to powder the callosities on a horse’s legs, and stuff their ears therewith. A black eye may be treated with a poultice of human milk, incense, and the blood of a tortoise. For the not very serious affection of hiccough a beverage is recommended, of which the chief ingredient is the flesh of a mummy; thus affording us further evidence that cannibalism survived in medicine, and was approved by the faculty in Italy as well as England, down to a very recent period. Besides these “strange meats,” Matthioli regularly classifies in a table a multitude of what he is pleased to call “simple medicines,” among which are to be found the bodies, or parts of bodies, of wolves, scorpions, centipedes, ostriches, beavers, and dogs, the cast-off skins of serpents, the horns of unicorns (when attainable!), the hoofs of asses and goats, beeswax, silk, asphalt, and several filthy substances which cannot here be named. Albertus Magnus (_vide_ the curious little black-letter volume, _Le Grat Albert_, in the British Museum) orders nervous patients to eat eagles’ brains, whereby they may acquire the courage of the king of birds; while the brains of the owl, the goat, the camel, etc., convey the peculiar qualities of each of those animals. Pliny’s great work, it is needless to say, is a repertory of marvellous counsels and observations. Earth taken out of a human skull acts as a depilatory, and benefit is derived from chewing plants which have happened to grow in the same unpleasant receptacle. On the principle, we presume, of “I am not the rose, but I have dwelt near the rose,” herbs growing on a manure heap are found especially efficacious as remedies for quinsy. The hair of man, taken from a cross, is good for quartan fevers, and human ear-wax is the only proper application to a wound occasioned by a human bite. The uses of saliva are numberless, and fill a whole chapter of the _Natural History_. “Fasting spittle,” in particular, applied to the eyes, is an infallible cure for ophthalmia,--a remedy which Persius treats with blameworthy scepticism as an old-womanly practice. In cases where bread has stuck in the throat, a piece of the same loaf should be inserted in the ears. The use of the fluid which exudes from the pores of the skin is so valuable that (Pliny assures us) the owners of the Grecian gymnasia made a thriving trade by selling the scrapings of the bodies of