is to be believed that even the most selfish among us would cry, “Hold! we desire no cure of disease, no scientific knowledge, at any such horrible price.” Yet, again, there was a class of Sacrificial Remedies whose merit consisted in requiring the patient to travel a long way, or to apply to some hardly accessible personage, to obtain relief. There were Holy Wells having no medicinal properties whatever, which cured all the multitudes of people who made long and painful pilgrimages to reach them. More remarkable still were the benefits derived in cases of scrofula from being touched by a king,--a privilege, it may be safely guessed, not accorded without some delay and solicitation, and possibly not without fees to royal attendants, scarcely disinterested witnesses of the miracles which followed. The history of this particular delusion would alone form a very curious chapter, since Archbishop Bradwardine, in 1348, appealed to the whole world in proof of the wonder, till Samuel Johnson’s scarred and mighty head was subjected to the royal touch. When we recall the fact that only in the eighteenth century did a special religious service for the ceremony cease to form a part of the Liturgy of the Church of England, we do not seem to ourselves to have yet advanced a great way beyond this harmless superstition. Indeed, it is only in the present generation that the scientific name of the malady has generally superseded its familiar title of the “King’s Evil,” or by ellipsis “the Evil,” by which it is even now known in remote parts of the country. Where it was impossible to obtain help from a king, there yet remained the possibility of being touched by somebody else, who might possess some rare and peculiar privilege and fitness for healing disease. The odd malady, popularly called “shingles,” for example, somehow suggested to the sufferers the desirability of having recourse to some special agency of relief; and this was found in persons who had either themselves eaten the flesh of an eagle, or whose fathers or ancestors had done so. Within the last thirty years, a gentleman’s servant in Wales has been known to perform a journey of forty miles across the mountains to be touched by a man whose grandfather had eaten an eagle.