Reading over all these marvellous prescriptions, it is a refreshing exercise to picture the fashionable “leech,” the Gull or Jenner of the period, physician in ordinary to the King or Queen, suave and solemn, filled to the brim with all the conscious dignity of Science, standing beside the sick-bed of some mighty prince or peer, and giving to the awe-stricken attendants his high commands to hang the room with scarlet cloth, or to bring to the patient one of the horrid messes prepared with such infinite pains under his direction, in his own laboratory. We can almost hear him condescendingly explaining to the chief persons present what occult relationship exists between the small-pox and the scarlet cloth, or how the Arcanum of Toads comes to be specially valuable, having been composed of the fattest old toads, selected precisely at the right season,--_videlicet_ midsummer. Of course, in each successive generation there was nothing for the unlearned laity to do but to bow submissively to the dicta of the exponent of Science as it existed at the time. People may always laugh at what is past and gone; but to suspect that living men may be mistaken, or that new systems of medicine, philosophy, or theology, may be destined, like the old, to “have their day and cease to be,” is audacity to which no one should advance. We dare not, therefore, suggest that, to our grandsons, half our modern nostrums (of which the fashion comes in freshly one season and usually falls into disrepute a few years after) may possibly appear scarcely a degree less ridiculous than the Arcanum of Toads or the Mummiall Quintessence. It was not much worse, after all, to make a patient drink a dead man’s blood than to rob him of his own, in the _Sangrado_ style to which (in the memory of us all) the world owes the loss of Cavour. It would have been a mercy to a poor Florentine lady, lately deceased, had her physician counselled her merely to eat earth-worms pickled in vinegar, or green lizards boiled alive in oil, as recommended by Dr. Salmon, instead of bleeding her from the arm nineteen times in the fortnight following her confinement and (as may be readily understood) preceding her untimely death.