use sea-crabs. Goat’s dung applied externally to the wound with wine is a powerful remedy; or bay-leaves boiled with oil, or bay-berries, or calamint, heath, rue, parsley, southernwood, galbanum on a pledget, green marjoram pounded; also young fowls torn in pieces, and applied warm and frequently changed, the flour of tares mixed with wine, the pounded bark of radish, boiled squills, raw barley-flour in oxymel, the leaves of the wild cucumber with fine polenta, the lees of wine in like manner with fine polenta, rue with salts and honey, bran boiled in vinegar, ashes with vinegar, cedar-pitch with salts, liquid pitch with salts. Bathe also with the decoction of trefoil, or of pennyroyal, or with vinegar and brine. When the blisters become bloody let out their contents without taking off the skin, then bathe with much water, and apply a cataplasm of boiled lentils with honey till the cure is completed. The antidote of vipers is particularly efficacious, both when taken in a draught and applied externally. * * * * * COMMENTARY. Most of the ancient authorities appear to have considered the echidna the female viper; but, as will be seen below, there is reason to suppose that it was a different species altogether. It is the colubra of Celsus. (v, 27, 3.) Our author’s description of the symptoms is closely copied from Nicander, who also recommends similar treatment. Dioscorides in like manner directs us to give wine, and various articles of an acrid and calefacient nature, such as garlic, onions, pepper, squills, &c. Archigenes (ap. Aëtium, xiii, 21) affirms that eating garlic and drinking undiluted wine, constitute the most effectual part of the treatment. Of course these things were given upon general principles with the view of supporting the strength and vital heat. Hence it may be understood why the ancients reposed so much confidence in the theriac of Andromachus, most of the ingredients of which were stimulant, acrid, and calefacient substances. The body of the viper, which entered into this famous composition, is said by a modern authority on the Materia Medica, Moses Charras, to contain a certain volatile oil. (See Book VII, sec. ii, of this work.)