Chapter XXVI: Appendix (4)

“You and I are constituted so strangely alike in almost every respect, that from you, beyond any other friend I possess, I feel entitled to the sympathy of a true understanding all round. This is why I cannot bear that words which are to me the expression of all that is most precious and restful in life should seem to you merely ‘ridiculous charms.’ I know you only mean that keeping such words before one’s eyes is so, but when I look back over all the years of my past life, and recognise that the consciousness of ‘continual guiding’ and the sense of perfect safety in the enfolding of ‘the Everlasting Arms’ have been my own mainstay in almost every hour of every day, I feel that simply to keep such words where my outward eyes must often rest upon them does help me continually to remember that the events of my life are not a mere matter of chance, but are all being planned for me by One who loves me.

“Alas! dear, I know this does not come home to you as it does to me; and I fear that when you see me fussing over the trivial cares of every day, you must think that my daily outward life tells little of the inward peace that passeth understanding—a just inference, I own, judging from outward seeming—yet not really true, for though I so often forget for awhile, I do most truly believe that every tiny detail of everyday life IS over-ruled, and ordered for me in perfect wisdom, as I have proven through long years.

“When you told me how a very great botanist had asserted to you the impossibility of your having found the night-blowing Cactus in a country where you had actually sat up all night to paint it, I could not but think how exactly his reasoning coincided with that of the intellectual people who cannot believe what WE KNOW of the personal Love of our LORD. YOU KNOW these flowers grow there, because you saw them. We know the Love of our dear Lord because we are conscious that He is ALWAYS present with us, and never fails or forsakes us, in sunshade or in shade.

“I quite sympathise with you as to formal ‘saying prayers,’ but if you realise that you are always in the company of a dear Friend, whose sympathy is so perfect that he understands every thought and wish of your heart, so that all day long consciously, or even unconsciously, you instinctively refer everything to Him, how can you think of a special morning and evening talk with Him as ‘saying’ a form of words, no matter how perfect?

“I do fully enter into your delight in your garden, though I have none of your scientific knowledge of plants. But apart from joy in the loveliness of flowers, I find a wondrous fascination in the perpetual showing forth of ‘the resurrection of the body that shall be’ in the ever-new miracles of glorious colour and fragrance evolved from apparently dead sticks, ugly brown bulbs, and insignificant seeds.

“All such hints from the visible world become to me increasingly precious, for the last few years have been marked by so very many wrenches in parting from our nearest and dearest, that the whole life-plant feels uprooted, at least all its fibres are loosened from Mother Earth....”

NOTE H

Among the most noteworthy social changes within my memory, none is more marked than the diminution in the use of alcoholic drinks of all sorts in “respectable” society.

I cannot myself remember, what was a common occurrence up to a few years before my birth, when the ladies frequently left the drawing-room before the gentlemen left the dinner-table, knowing from their prolonged absence that they would not be pleasant company. But up to thirty or forty years ago the amount of wine which, as a matter of course, every girl took at luncheon, dinner, and dessert, and often also at bed-time, seems strange to remember, now that fashion has happily so greatly changed. And if the girl was delicate, instead of recommending hockey or tennis, the doctor’s prescription was generally an extra bumper of port at 11 A.M.

It needed a Sir Andrew Clark to have the courage to proclaim that “Alcohol is a poison, and as such must be classed with strychnine, arsenic, and similar drugs.”

Here I must remark that although the old practice of hospitably “pressing” guests to eat is happily an abomination of the past, this is by no means the case as regards drink. If I refuse white bread at dinner, no host expresses anxiety as to whether I would prefer brown bread, or Hovis, or French roll. But in regard to wine, the variety of offers is often wearisome, ending with, “Surely you are not a teetotaller?”

And yet we know that there are a multitude of men and women to whom the use of alcohol in any form is a really grave danger, and MANY WOULD WILLINGLY ESCHEW IT BUT FOR THE DREAD OF BEING PECULIAR, AND OF HAVING ATTENTION CALLED TO THEIR ABSTINENCE. It is partly with a view to helping such as these that it is so desirable to multiply the number of total abstainers, so that this fatal standard of good-fellowship may soon become obsolete, and that it may be as much a matter of indifference whether a guest drinks wine or not as whether he eats bread.

But since we know that

“Evil is wrought by want of thought
As well as by want of heart,”

perhaps I may venture to point out to some hospitable ladies that the practice of saturating many of the most attractive sweets with brandy, rum, or liqueurs, is a most insidious source of danger to many who are honestly trying to conquer the “drink crave,” and whose good resolution has enabled them to resist the temptation when it comes undisguised, but who are thrown quite off their guard by the innocent-looking cream, or cake, or bon-bon, which contains quite enough of spirit to reawaken the craving for more. Surely this thought, together with the danger of temptation in our own kitchens, might avail to banish the use of alcohol from our cookery.[84]

But quite apart from any desire to benefit our tempted brethren, the strongest reasons for total abstinence are supplied by the plain statements of the very highest medical authorities on the evil effects on the human body of even the most moderate habitual use of alcohol, SIR ANDREW CLARK says that more than three-fourths of the disorders in what we call “fashionable life” arise from the use of alcohol, “a poison of which even very small daily doses are injurious to perfect health, and tend to gradually enfeeble various organs, whose breakdown some day is really due to no other cause.” HE ASSERTS THAT IT IS THE GREATEST ENEMY OF THE HUMAN RACE.

SIR WILLIAM GULL says: “I hardly know any more powerful source of disease than alcoholic drink. I should say that alcohol is the most destructive poison we are aware of.” DR. NORMAN KERR says he has been able to trace three-fourths of his cases of heart-disease to its use. SIR HENRY THOMPSON, in a letter to the late Archbishop of Canterbury (Temple), states that A VERY LARGE PROPORTION OF SOME OF THE MOST PAINFUL AND DANGEROUS DISEASES WHICH HAVE COME UNDER HIS NOTICE ARISE FROM THE DAILY USE OF ALCOHOLIC DRINKS, TAKEN IN THE QUANTITY WHICH IS ORDINARILY CONSIDERED MODERATE. “As to this fact,” he says, “I have a right to speak with authority, and I do so solely because it appears to me a duty not to be silent on a matter of such extreme importance.”

DR. MURCHISON ENUMERATES THE DISEASES OF VARIOUS ORGANS OF THE BODY WHICH RENDER LIFE A BURDEN, AND WHICH MIGHT NEVER HAVE OCCURRED HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR THE DAILY DOSE OF ALCOHOL. DR. ALFRED CARPENTER says: “Alcohol is a virulent poison, and as such should be placed in the list with arsenic, mercury and other dangerous drugs.”

May I advise all who are interested in the subject to invest one penny in Sir Andrew Clark’s pamphlet, _An Enemy of the Human Race_, and another in _Strong Drink and its Results_, by D. S. Govett, M.A., Archdeacon of Gibraltar, both published by the National Temperance Depot, 33 Paternoster Row, London, E.C. The latter contains the evidence of many leading medical men, and sums up thus: “Let no man think himself or his family safe from drink’s deadly fascination. Remember how in every generation men of the highest genius have become its slaves. _Every one of these was once a moderate drinker, and intended so to continue._ Let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.”

Most noteworthy is the change in the attitude of the clergy in this matter. Fifty years ago it would have been considered _infra dig._ for a clergyman to be a total abstainer. Now a very large proportion of all denominations are so, and many of our Bishops and Archbishops throw the whole weight not only of their teaching, but of their very practical example into this effort to check the moral and physical ravages wrought in our own land, as well as in those other countries to which we so largely export the cruel fire-water.

This question in all its bearings formed the subject of many of Archbishop Temple’s most powerful appeals to his countrymen. But I cannot refrain from here quoting one passage from Dean Farrar, partly because of the one Scriptural quotation which is so frequently waged against total abstinence, namely concerning our Lord Himself having provided wine at the marriage-feast—wine which was probably the non-fermented juice of the vine. But few people seem ever to notice the Scriptural references to THE TEETOTALERS OF JUDEA.

Dean Farrar writes:—

“You sneer at Total Abstainers from the altitude of your worldly
superiority, but the Scripture gives them its heartiest approbation.
GOD commanded His prophets to pronounce ON THE RECHABITES a
conspicuous blessing because they abstained from wine. Jeremiah speaks
of the health and happiness of the NAZARITES as the flower of the
youth of Jerusalem, for their strength and their beauty. SAMSON was a
Total Abstainer, whose drink was only from the living brook, and he
was the strongest man time records. JOHN THE BAPTIST, whom CHRIST
calls ‘the greatest of those born of woman,’ was a Total Abstainer.
The angel of the LORD in announcing his birth said, ‘He shall be great
in the sight of the LORD, _and shall drink neither wine nor strong
drink, and he shall be filled with the Holy Ghost_.’”

NOTE I
_Use of the Rosary_

This widespread tendency to the telling of beads is certainly one of the strangest developments of devotion. We are apt to consider such vain repetitions as peculiar to the Church of Rome, whereas we find that not only do some four hundred and fifty million Buddhists find solace therein, but also a vast multitude of Brahmins and Mohammedans.

Now, that Brahmins and Buddhists should thus keep a numerical tally of their devotions is strange enough, but the adoption of this spiritual treadmill by Mohammedans is more remarkable (though whoever has heard the frenzied shouts of “_Allah el Allah! Allah el Allah!_” can never doubt their faith in the efficacy of much speaking.) But that a

practice so little in accordance with the spirit of Christianity could
have been a spontaneous growth appears quite impossible, so it is only
natural to assume that it was imported from some heathen land, just as
the veneration for relics, the canonization of saints, the use of
rosaries, the divers orders of monastic life, the rigid vows of
poverty and asceticism, celibacy of the clergy, priestly robes and
shaven crowns, processions carrying banners, chanted litanies, use of
incense and holy water, and very many other ecclesiastical details—can
only be accounted for on the supposition, which, indeed, is well-nigh
a certainty, that they were adopted by the Christians of Egypt from
the practice of the Buddhists, by whom all these things were as
religiously observed long before the Christian era, as they continue
to be at this day.

Concerning the origin of the use of the rosary in Christendom (not its
Pagan origin, however!) Dr. Rock tells us that in early days the truly
devout were in the habit of reciting the whole Psalter daily. But as a
hundred and fifty psalms were certainly rather a lengthy recitation,
it became customary to substitute short prayers, which might be
uttered rapidly amid the stir and business of life, without requiring
undivided attention. Hence a hundred and fifty short “Aves” varied by
ten intervening Paternosters, and five Doxologies (thus dividing the
whole into ten decades, came to be accounted as meritorious an act of
devotion as the repetition of the whole Psalter.)

But as the omission of any of the number would have been esteemed
sinful, and the calculation was apt to be inexact, some mechanical aid
was desirable, and various expedients were devised. Thus Palladius has
recorded how the Abbot Paul, who made a point of repeating the
Paternoster three hundred times daily, that he kept count of his
prayers by the aid of a number of small pebbles, which he dropped into
his lap one by one till the tale was told. Then the simpler method of
counting on a string of beads worn round the neck was suggested, and
soon found favour with the devout.

The division of the Rosary into the fifteen decades of small beads for
the _Ave Maria_, with the large intervening beads for the Paternoster,
is generally ascribed to St. Dominic (born in Old Castille A.D. 1170);
but there is little doubt that this use of beads was common in Spain
before his time, and that it had been borrowed by the Spanish
Catholics from the Mohammedan dervishes who accompanied the Moors on
their invasion of Spain in A.D. 711, and who, in common with their
Syrian brethren, had adopted it from nations further east.

The ordinary Mohammedan rosary or _tasbih_ numbers ninety-nine beads,
often made of sacred earth brought from Mecca, but frequently only of
date-stones. Instead of a large bead to mark each tenth, a silken
tassel does this duty, and assists the pious Islamite in his
repetition of the ninety-nine names of God.

The Mohammedan rosary figures in a very curious ceremony practised on
the night immediately following a burial, commonly called “the night
of desolation” while the soul is believed still to abide with the
body, ere winging its flight to the place of spirits. About fifty
devout men assemble to perform an act of merit on behalf of the dead.
After reciting certain chapters of the Khoran, they repeat “_Allah el
Allah_” three thousand times, while one of the party keeps count on a
rosary of a thousand beads, each as large as a pigeon’s egg. Between
each thousand the exhausted worshippers pause to rest and drink
coffee. Afterwards several short prayers are uttered, each being
repeated a hundred times. The whole merit of this very severe bodily
exercise is formally assigned to the deceased; and on behalf of
wealthy men it is sometimes repeated for three nights running—a fact
rather suggestive of the pecuniary cost of such services!

How far Christianity has improved on this original may be somewhat a
nice question, for in such means of acquiring merit for the dead
neither Christians nor Buddhists are lacking, and in all Catholic
countries oft-told rosaries number Christian prayers for the deceased
by ten thousand times ten thousand.

It is believed that this celestial _abacus_—this method of reckoning
with heaven—originated with the Hindoos, who certainly are known to
have kept count of their oft-told prayers by means of bead-strings
from very early ages; but whether the invention was due to Hindoo
Buddhists or Hindoo Brahmins is not known. Probably, however, the
former may claim this merit, as they were so long the dominant
religion of India, and indeed three centuries before the Christian era
they had overspread all Asia, so that traces of their influence and
teaching are discernible even where successive waves of differing
faith have overswept the land.

To this day, the Brahmins of Guzerat and some other parts of India
carry chaplets of one hundred small and eight large beads, made of
sacred wood; and a truly devout man recites the _gāyatri_ one hundred
and eight times at the rising of the sun ere he proceeds to wash and
dress his idols. This mystic sentence is a short extract from the _Rig
Veda_—a meditation on the divine glory of the sun-god, and a prayer
that the Divine Giver of Life and Light may enlighten his
understanding.

The rosary commonly used by the worshippers of Vishnu numbers 108
smooth beads, made of the wood of the sacred Tulasi shrub.[85] These
represent the 108 most sacred titles of Krishna. In the course of the
elaborate daily morning ritual, certain formulas of worship are
repeated 108 times, count being kept by the aid of the rosary, which,
together with the counting-hand, is concealed under a cloth or in a
bag (which is called a Go-mukhi). Why this concealment is necessary
does not appear, unless there is some idea of not letting the left
hand know what the right is doing!

But it is equally incumbent on the worshippers of Siva, who, while
reciting his 1008 names and sacred attributes, keep count of their
task on rosaries of 32 or 64 rough berries of the Rudrāska tree,[86]
which are said to have originally been formed from the tears shed by
Siva in passionate anger. These berries have five sides, which are
considered symbolic of Siva’s five faces.

The hideous Saiva Yogis occasionally use grim rosaries of human teeth
collected from funeral-pyres, a more agreeable variety allowed by the
Vishnuvites being the use of lotus-seeds. The various sects have
slight differences in this respect. One at least, (that of Vallabha)
bestows the rosary of 108 Tulasi beads on each child as a token of
church membership, when it attains the age of from three to four
years, and is capable of repeating the eight-syllabled charm,
“_Sri-Krishnah saranam mama_,” which is, being interpreted, “Great
Krishna is the refuge of my soul.” Another Vishnuvite sect invests
each member with two rosaries—one in honour of Krishna, and the other
for the worship of Radhā.

The votaries of Ganesa, the elephant-headed god, use the seeds of the
kumala, or lotus, for this purpose, while the worshippers of Surya,
the Sun, prefer a string of small balls of crystal—miniatures of the
great crystals which symbolize the sun on the Shinto altars of Japan.

NOTE J
_Hair Offerings_

It is always interesting to note the same superstitions in divers
countries. In my book on _The Hebrides_, page 39, I related the
Gaelic-Danish legend of the “Whirlpool of Corrie Vreckan,” in which
the young Danish prince might have anchored in safety had he been
provided with a cable woven entirely of the long fair tresses of
Danish maidens of faultless purity. But, alas! one lock had been shorn
from the head of one whose fair fame was no longer spotless, so the
cable parted, and the prince and his vessel were sucked down, down, in
the raging waters.

I am told that in Malabar a cure for some diseases, and also a
recognised penance, is being tied up to a tree and undergoing a severe
flogging, after which a piece of growing hair is securely pegged into
the bark, and by a sudden wrench it is torn from the head and left
hanging on the tree as a votive offering.

Strange to say, this identical ceremony (minus the flogging) was long
practised at the village of Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire. The object
to be gained was the cure of ague, and a group of fine old oaks was
the scene of action.

I am told that in Sunderland a popular cure for whooping-cough is to
shave the crown of the head and hang the hair on a bush, in full faith
that as the birds carry away the hair, so will the cough vanish. In
Lincolnshire, a girl suffering from ague cuts a lock of her hair and
binds it round an aspen tree, praying it to shake in her stead. In
Ross-shire, where within the last fifty years living cocks were
occasionally buried as a sacrificial remedy for epilepsy, some of the
hair of the patient was generally added to the buried offering.

In Ireland, at Tubber Quan, near Carrick-on-Suir, there is a holy tree
beside a holy well, which are held in the deepest veneration. Thither,
chiefly on the last three Sundays in June, Roman Catholic peasants
make pilgrimage to worship St. Quan (whoever he may be); and having
gone thrice round the holy tree on their bare knees, each cuts off a
lock of his own hair and ties it to a branch as a charm against
headache. By the end of June the tree is fringed with countless locks
of human hair of all shades.

A recent visitor to some of these Irish holy wells enumerated amongst
many other votive offerings, thirty-nine crutches, six hand-sticks,
and a pair of boots!

NOTE K
_On the Medicinal Use of Animals in China and Britain_

These quaint druggists’ shops were indeed a strangely vivid
illustration of what must have been the general appearance of the
laboratory of the learned leeches of Britain from olden times until
really quite recent days—literally until the eighteenth century—as we
know from the official pharmacopœia of the College of Surgeons of
London, published in A.D. 1724, that unicorn’s horn, human fat, human
skulls, dog’s dung, toads, vipers, worms, and all manner of animal
substances, either dried, seethed, or calcined, were accounted
valuable medical stores. In the same medical directory for A.D. 1724,
centipedes, vipers, and lizards are especially enumerated as
possessing valued properties!

It will be interesting to glance at a few of these old prescriptions
as compared with those still in favour in China. Here is a letter from
a French Catholic Missionary in Mongolia. “May Heaven preserve us from
falling ill here! It is impossible to conceive who can have devised
remedies so horrible as those in use in the Chinese pharmacopœia, such
as drugs compounded of toads’ paws, wolves’ eyes, vultures’ claws,
human skin and fat, and other medicaments still more horrible, of
which I spare you the recital. Never did witches’ den contain a
collection of similar horrors!”

Mr. Mitford has told us how at Peking he saw a Chinese physician prescribe a decoction of three scorpions for a child struck down with fever; and W. Gill, in his _River of Golden Sand_, mentions having met a number of coolies laden with red-deers’ horns, some of them very fine twelve-tyne antlers. They are only hunted when in velvet, and from the horns in this state a medicine is made which is one of the most highly prized in the Chinese pharmacopœia.

With regard to the singular virtues supposed to attach to the medicinal use of tiger, my cousin, General Robert Warden, told me that on one occasion when, in India, he was exhibiting some trophies of the chase, some Chinamen who were present became much excited at the sight of an unusually fine tiger-skin. They eagerly inquired whether it would be possible to find the place where the carcase had been buried, because from the bones of tigers dug up three months after burial, a decoction may be prepared which gives immense muscular power to the fortunate man who swallows it.

I was indebted to the same informant for an interesting note on the medicine folklore of India, namely, that while camping in the jungle, one of his men came to entreat him to shoot a night-jar for his benefit, because from the bright, prominent eyes of this bird of night an ointment is prepared which gives great clearness of vision, and is therefore highly prized.

Miss Bird, when travelling in the Malay Peninsula, was eyewitness of a very remarkable scene when, a tiger having been killed, a number of Chinamen flew upon the body, cut out the liver, heart, and spleen, and carefully drained every drop of its blood. Those who failed to secure these, cut out the cartilage from the joints. She learnt that the blood, dried at a temperature of 110°, is esteemed the strongest of all tonics and gives strength and courage. The powdered liver and spleen are good for many diseases, but the centre of the tiger’s eyeball is supposed to possess well-nigh miraculous virtues. So all these treasured fragments were sold at high prices to Chinese doctors, who doubtless knew they would not lose on the retail price!

From the qualities here attributed to tigers’ blood, we can better understand how it came to pass that in the Tai-ping rebellion the Imperial troops, having captured a rebel leader at Shanghai, roasted him, and ate his heart and other vital organs in order to make them brave! The case is not unique, as in that same terrible civil war the Tai-pings were guilty of similar atrocities during the siege of Nanking, though cannibalism _per se_ is a crime as deeply abhorred in China as in Britain.

In Perak Miss Bird saw rhinoceros’ horn selling at a high price in the drug-market, a single horn being priced at fifty dollars; and in Japan a native doctor showed her a small box of unicorn’s horn which, he said, was worth its weight in gold. He also expressed his faith in the value of rhinoceros’ horn. One of the said rhinoceros’ horns was, as we have seen, among the most valued treasures of the old druggist of Osaka. This horn, and that of the unicorn, which seems generally to mean the narwhal,[87] have ever been held in high repute throughout the East as an antidote to poison, and cups carved from these horns were used as a safeguard, because they possessed the property of neutralising poison, or at least of revealing its presence.

And indeed the same virtue was attributed to them by the learned leeches of Europe. At the close of the sixteenth century, the doctors of medicine in Augsberg met in solemn conclave to examine a specimen of unicorn’s horn, which they found to be true _monoceros_ and not a forgery, the proof thereof being that they administered some of it to a dog which had been poisoned with arsenic, and which recovered after swallowing the antidote. They further administered _nux vomica_ to two dogs; and to one they gave twelve grains of unicorn horn, which effectually counteracted the poison; but the other poor dog got none, so he died. Similar statements concerning this antidote, and also concerning the value of elk’s and deer’s horns powdered, as a cure for epilepsy, appear in various old English medical works of the highest authority.

Not less remarkable is the efficacy supposed to attach to antediluvian ivory, more especially the tusks of the mammoths which have been so well preserved in Siberian ice that their very flesh has been found untainted. There they have lain hermetically sealed for many a long century, and now, when the rivers from time to time wash away fragments of the great ice-cliffs, they reveal the strange treasures of that wondrous storehouse. It may be a great woolly elephant with a mane like a lion, and curly tusks, or a huge unwieldy hippopotamus, or a rhinoceros, and the hungry Siberian bears and wolves fight and snarl over these dainty morsels.

Here, then, in these marvellous ice-fields lie inexhaustible stores of finest ivory, and this it is which the learned professors of the Celestial Medical Hall value so highly. So these precious tusks are dragged forth after thousands of years to be ground down and boiled to a jelly, for the cure of vulgar Chinese diseases of the twentieth century. Alas! poor mammoth!

Nor are these the only antediluvian relics which are thus turned to account. Professor H. N. Moseley tells us of the “Dragon’s teeth and bones” which he bought from the druggists of Canton, where they are sold by weight as a regular medicine, and are highly prized in the _materia medica_ both of China and Japan as specifics in certain diseases.

They proved, on examination, to be the fossil teeth and bones of various extinct mammalia of the tertiary period, including those of the rhinoceros, elephant, horse, mastodon, stag, hippotherium, and the teeth of another carnivorous animal unknown. He obtained a translation of the passage in the medical works of Li-She-Chan, which specially refers to the use of this medicine. It states that “Dragon’s bones come from the southern parts of Shansi, and are found in the mountains.” Dr. To-Wang-King says that if they are genuine, they will adhere to the tongue. This medicine must not come in contact with fish or iron. “It cures heart-ache, stomach-ache, drives away ghosts, cures colds and dysentery, irregularities of the digestive organs, paralysis, etc., and increases the general health.”

Another medical authority, _The Chinese Repository_, published in Canton A.D. 1832, states that the bones of dragons are found on banks of rivers, and in caves of the earth—places where the dragon died. Those of the back and brain are highly prized, being variegated with different streaks on a white ground. The best are known by slipping the tongue lightly over them. The horns are hard and strong, but if these are taken from damp places, or by women, they are worthless.

From his examination of these so-called relics of the dragon (which prove to belong to so many different animals which, in successive ages, have crept to the same cave to die), Mr. Moseley points out how some imaginative person probably first devised a fanciful picture of the mythical animal combining the body of the vast lizard with the wings of a bat, the head of a stag, and carnivorous teeth, which has become the stereotyped idea of the dragon in all lands.

Even in Europe, fossil bones thus found together in caves were long known as dragon’s bones, and accounted useful in medicine. Indeed, so great was the demand for these and similar relics, that our museums and scientific men have good cause to rejoice that their ancestors failed to discover what stores of old bones lay hidden in our own sea-board caves—as, for instance, in that wonderful Kirkdale cavern where the mortal remains of several hundred hyenas were found guarding the teeth of a baby mammoth, a patriarchal tiger, a rhinoceros, and a hippopotamus. Or the caves along the Norfolk coast where Hugh Miller tells us that within thirteen years the oyster-dredgers dragged up the tusks and grinders of five hundred mammoths! Or those wonderful zoological cemeteries where the fossil bones of cave-lions, cave-hyenas, elephants, mammoths, hippopotami, woolly rhinoceros, red deer and fallow deer, oxen, sheep, and horses, lay so securely stored for untold ages beneath Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square!

Of the firm belief of the Chinese in the efficacy of medicines compounded of the eyes and vitals of a human body we have had too terrible proof, for it is well known that one cause which led to the appalling Teintsin massacre in 1870 was the widespread rumour that the foreign doctors (whose skill all were forced to admit) obtained their medicines by kidnapping and murdering Chinese children and tearing out their hearts and eyes. As this nice prescription is actually described in their own books as a potent medicine, the story obtained ready credence, and we all remember the result. Moreover, the same accusation has repeatedly been spread on other occasions of popular excitement against foreign teachers, and we need scarcely wonder that it should obtain credence, when we find that one of the most esteemed acts of filial devotion is for a son or a daughter to bestow a good slice of his or her own flesh, to be administered, with other ingredients, to parents suffering from certain forms of disease, which are otherwise deemed incurable. Archdeacon Grey of Canton was personally acquainted with various persons who had endured this voluntary mutilation![88]

I am not aware whether the Lamas of Peking have there introduced the fashion of administering medicine from a drinking-cup fashioned from the upper part of a wise man’s skull, but such medicine-cups are greatly esteemed in Thibet and Mongolia, where they are mounted in gold, silver, or copper.

Such details as all these are apt to sound to us somewhat as far-fetched travellers’ tales, but it is certainly startling to realise how exactly they describe the medicine-lore of our own ancestors, of which traces survive amongst us even to this day. We know of several cases within recent years when in the north of Scotland the skull of a suicide was with great difficulty procured, and used as a drinking-cup for an epileptic patient. Still surer was it deemed to reduce part of the skull to powder and swallow it. Even the moss which grew on such skulls was deemed a certain cure for divers diseases. In the official prescription of the London College of Physicians, A.D. 1678, the _skull of a man who has died violent death_, and the horn of a unicorn, appear as highly approved medicines. In 1724 all human skulls are declared useful, and multitudes were exported from Ireland to Germany for the manufacture of a famous ointment.

Equally precious to the British leech of the last century were the ashes of a burnt witch collected from her funeral-pyre. Such were deemed a certain cure for gout or for fever, and eagerly were they gathered up and treasured.

But just as the Chinese doctor sets most store by the animals imported from foreign lands, so did our ancestors chiefly prize a preparation of long-deceased Egyptians, or, as they were described among the standard medicines quoted in the medical books of Nuremberg only two hundred years ago, “The embalmed bodies of man’s flesh, called _mumia_, which have been embalmed with costly salves and balsams, and smell strongly of myrrh, aloes, and other fragrant things.”

The learned doctors of France, Germany, Italy, and Britain all made great use of mummy, which was pronounced to be an infallible remedy for many diseases. And so great was the demand for this ingredient, as to lead to the establishment in Alexandria of a secret factory for converting all manner of dead bodies into such profitable articles of trade.

The apothecaries of England found an economical substitute in the bones of ancient Britons. Thus Dr. Toope of Oxford, writing in 1685, tells how, at the circles on Hakpen Hill, in Wiltshire, he had discovered a rare lot of human bones—skeletons—arranged in circles, with the feet towards the centre. He says, “The bones were large and nearly rotten, but the teeth extream and wonderfully white.” Undisturbed by any qualms of reverence for the ancestors of his race, he adds: “_I dug up many bushells_ WITH WHICH I MADE A NOBLE MEDICINE!”

In truth, the human form divine received small veneration from the philosophers of those days, when the bait most highly recommended for the luring of fish was a compound of _man’s fat_, cat’s fat, heron’s fat, powdered mummy, assafœtida, and various oils. In _The Angler’s Vade Mecum_, published in 1681, it is stated that man’s fat for this purpose could readily be obtained from the London chirurgeons concerned in anatomy!

Referring to the little shops of the old Japanese apothecaries; the most remarkable point of similarity between these and those of early English druggists is suggested by the extensive use of calcined animal-matter, recommended in the prescriptions which were most highly valued in England before the Norman Conquest, and which are recorded in the elaborate Saxon manuscripts, carefully preserved in our national archives.

These “Leechdoms” are written in ancient black-letter characters, and are curiously illustrated with pictures of the herbs and animals which are recommended for medicinal use. From these it appears that upwards of eight hundred years ago the Saxon hairdressers prevented the hair from falling by applying a wash of dead bees burnt to ashes, and seethed in oil with leaves of willow; but should hair be too thick, then must a swallow be burnt to ashes, and these be sprinkled on the hair.

Wood ashes seethed in resin, or goat’s flesh or goat’s horn burnt to ashes and “smudged on with water,” are recommended for any hard swelling. For pain in the jowl, burn a swallow to dust, and mingle him with field-bees’ honey, and give the man to eat frequently. For erysipelas, failing a plaister of earthworms, take a swallow’s nest and burn it, with its dung, rub it to dust, mingle with vinegar, and smear therewith.

But, in truth, all animals were turned to good account in these Saxon leechdoms, and the wolf seems to have been as highly esteemed as is the tiger in Japan—a wolf’s head under the pillow was a pleasant cure for sleeplessness, and the skull of a wolf, when burnt thoroughly and finely powdered, would heal racking pains in the joints. An ointment made from the right eye of a wolf was the best prescription the Saxon oculist could command.

The bite of a mad dog might be cured by laying on the ashes of a swine’s jaw; while the head of a mad dog, burnt to ashes and spread on the sore, was a cure for cancer. The ashes of the elder-tree were applied in cases of palsy, and imperfect sight was improved by an ointment of honey mixed with the ashes of burnt periwinkles, always provided that certain mystic words were uttered while gathering this plant (a wort which had special power to counteract demoniacal possession).

Such “Leechdoms” as these were all very well in the tenth and eleventh centuries; but it certainly is startling to find how little, if any, advance medical science had made by the early part of the eighteenth century, when the medical works most in repute contain numerous prescriptions of animal substances, so inexpressibly loathsome as to make it a matter of marvel how any one could be found either to prepare them or to submit to their application. Salts of ammonia in the crudest form were a favourite remedy for external or internal use.[89]

By far the least objectionable compounds were those prepared from carbonised animals in the Japanese or early Saxon manner. We find the ashes of burnt swallows and of their nests still in high favour for the cure of dangerous sore-throats, and among the remedies for beautifying the hair are enumerated, “burnt ashes of little froggs,” “ashes of bees mixt with oyl,” ashes of goat’s dung, goat’s hoof, and cow’s dung, as also the blood of a shell-crab. But a preparation of the burnt ashes of swan’s bones, and the blood of a bat or a little frog, with the milk of a bitch, is effectual for preventing the growth of hair.

For the disease called lethargie, the whole skin of a hare must be burnt, also “the smoak of kid’s leather burnt, holden to the nose.” The burnt hairs of the hare cures erysipelas, ashes of a hare burnt whole, with ashes of burnt willow or ashes of the bark of the elm-tree cureth scalding. The burnt hoofs of a cow or ankle-bones of a swine are the cure for colic. For cancer, nothing better has been discovered than the ashes of a dog’s head, or burnt human dung. As a valuable styptic to staunch bleeding of the nose, burn the blood of the patient and snuff up the powder thereof. Ashes of hen’s feathers burnt, and ashes of nettles are also beneficial. So likewise were spiders pulverised, or a dried toad worn round the neck. “Ashes of a burnt frog gleweth veins and arteries and cures burning.”

The merit of these simple remedies was greatly enhanced by the use of fine Latin names. Thus the most powerful known remedy in the treatment of smallpox and dropsy, both for internal and external use, was a preparation of powdered toad, administered under the name of _Pulvis Æthiopicus_. In fact, the more nonsensical the remedy, the more need was there for a high-sounding name!

We may well believe that for convenience sake many of these calcined plants and animals were prepared at leisure, and stored, ready for use, in cases of emergency. Consequently (though we can hardly flatter ourselves that our ancestors were as exquisite in their neatness as the Japanese) there is no doubt that the little druggist shops in Osaka gave us a very fair notion of the surroundings, not only of an ancient Saxon leech, but of the learned, Latin-quoting doctors of the last century, in whose magician-like laboratories were stored earthenware jars of every size containing the ashes of goat’s flesh, of dead bees, of wolf’s skull, or swine’s jaw, of divers shell-fish, of worts and rinds without number—nay, even of human skulls and bones. On the walls hung bunches of dried herbs, and remains of birds and lizards, rats, moles, and such small deer, together with skins of serpents, portions of mummies, horns of stags, rhinoceros, narwhal, elephants’ tusks, and many another item of the strange _materia medica_ of our own ancestors.

Nor need we at the beginning of the twentieth century (with all the amazing progress made by medical science in the last fifty years) pretend to have altogether extinguished faith in the old superlatively nasty remedies. Certainly the simple ingredients are now generally so refined as to be unrecognisable. Who that inhales the fragrance of _eau de mille fleurs_ remembers that its principal ingredient is the drainage of the cow-byre? or that the brilliant, transparent gelatine which enfolds our bonbons is made from the sweepings of the slaughter-house?

But what I allude to is the survival of the old specifics as popular folk-medicine, in use to this day among the peasantry in various districts of Great Britain. The catalogue is almost endless, including divers methods of applying black snails, eels’ blood, the hand of a dead child or of a suicide, living spiders, hairy caterpillars, and other strange remedies. For instance, there are places in England where the country people still believe that the best specific for all complaints of the human eye is to burn the flesh of a swallow and apply the ashes to the part affected. The Japanese, who carefully prepared his dried frogs, toads, and lizards, may learn with interest that the approved treatment for scrofula at the present day in Devonshire is to dry the hind leg of a toad and wear it round the neck in a silken bag, while for rheumatism the toad must be burnt to ashes, and its dust, wrapped in silk, is to be worn round the throat. Both in Cornwall and Northampton poor toads are still made to do duty for the cure of nose-bleeding and quinsy, while in various parts of England “toad-powder,” or even a live toad or spider shut up in a box, is accounted a charm against contagion.

Frogs are well-nigh as valuable as toads to the sick poor. In Aberdeenshire it is accounted a sure cure for sore eyes to lick the bright eyes of a live frog, while the peasants of Donegal find wondrous comfort in rubbing rheumatic limbs with dissolved frog’s spawn. It is also believed in Ireland that the tongue which has licked a lizard all over will thenceforth be endowed with a wondrous gift of healing whatsoever it touches.

But it is when we come to the mystic serpent that we find the most startling connection between the folk-medicine-lore of Britain and Japan. Considering what insignificant little creatures are our British snakes, it certainly is strange that they should be quite as highly esteemed as are the great python-skins in the Chinese school of medicine, wherein the skin of a white spotted snake is valued as the most efficacious remedy for palsy, leprosy, and rheumatism.

Strange to say, in our old Gaelic legends there is a certain white snake which receives unbounded reverence as the king of snakes; and another legend tells of a nest containing six brown adders and _one pure white one_, which latter, if it can be caught and boiled, confers wondrous medical skill on the lucky man who tastes of the serpent broth.[90]

In some of the Hebridean Isles, notably that of Lewis, the greatest faith prevails in the efficacy of water in which a so-called serpent-stone has been dipped. Should such a charmed stone be unobtainable, _the head of an adder may be tied to a string and dipped in the water with equally good result_.

In Devonshire any person bitten by a viper is advised at once to kill the creature, and rub the wound with its fat. I am told that this practice has survived in some of the Northern States of America, where the flesh of a rattlesnake, and especially its oil, are accounted the best cures for its own bite. Some of the sturdy New Englanders even wear a snake-skin round their neck, from a firm faith in its power of curing rheumatism, a faith certainly carried by their fathers from Britain, where the same remedy is still sometimes applied.

It is not many years since an old man used to sit on the steps of King’s College Chapel, at Cambridge, and earn his living by exhibiting common English snakes, and selling their cast-off sloughs to be bound round the forehead and temples of persons suffering from headache—a valuable remedy for overworked students!

In Durham an eel’s skin, worn as a garter round the naked leg, is considered a preventive of cramp, while in Northumberland it is esteemed the best bandage for a sprained limb.

So, too, in Sussex, the approved cure for a swollen neck is to draw a snake nine times across the throat of the sufferer, after which operation the snake is killed, and its skin is sewn in a piece of silk and worn round the patient’s neck. Sometimes the snake is put in a bottle, which is tightly corked and buried in the ground, and it is expected that as the victim decays the swelling will subside.

This, however, relates to a different class of subject to that which has led me into this long digression—namely the little drug-stores at Osaka, with all their curious contents. I can only hope that, should these pages ever meet the eye of my Japanese friend, he will acknowledge that my interest in the medicine-lore of his ancestors was certainly justifiable.

NOTE L
_Magazine Articles_

My first experience of writing a magazine article was in 1869, when I sent a sketch of our “CAMP LIFE IN THE HIMALAYAS” to Dr. Norman Macleod, who promptly inserted it in _Good Words_.

In subsequent years I contributed many papers to a great variety of periodicals and newspapers, chiefly on topics which afterwards found a place in my books of travel, such as one on “OILING THE WAVES,” which appeared in the _Nineteenth Century_ for April 1882, and contained much information gleaned from many sea-captains, seamen, and fishers on the practical value of a very small amount of oil in preventing waves from breaking in white crests, and so swamping vessels. So many cases were quoted of ships which were undoubtedly saved by this simple safeguard, that Lord Cottesloe called the attention of the House of Lords to the paper, with the result that some small experiment by a lifeboat was ordered, but the result was _nil_. The principal evidence on the subject was reproduced in my book, _In the Hebrides_.

Of other oily papers I may mention one on “THE WORLD’S OIL SUPPLY,” which appeared in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ in September 1884, and some papers on “WASHING MADE EASY,” which told how some ingenious women in New Zealand had discovered that by adding a little paraffin to the water in which they were boiling their dirty linen all the dirt separated, and scarcely involved any further trouble.

I was told that those papers attracted much attention; and it was interesting to note how many new soaps straightway came into existence, and have ever since been enormously advertised. But only one of them gave any clue to the simple new ingredient to which they owe their success, and of that one I have never seen a single advertisement, therefore I have real pleasure in confiding to all my readers that it is called “Evelyn’s Paraffin Soap,” made by Messrs. Ogston and Sons, soap-makers, Aberdeen, and I consider it the best of any I know. (Of course it will be said that this is an advertisement, but it is simply the statement of a fact.)

In looking over a list of the subjects about which I wrote, not connected with any of my books, I see that NOW they would be quite commonplace; but they were by no means so at the time they were written—as, for instance, my paper on cremation in the _Contemporary Review_ for June 1883, “DE MORTUIS.”

So also in regard to a paper on “THE LEPER HOSPITALS OF BRITAIN,” which appeared in _The Gentleman’s Magazine_, September 1884. The subject was then so old as to be practically new to the current generation, so of course it was pleasant to have been the one to disinter it. Rather a curious thing occurred with regard to its publication. I had offered it to one of the principal periodicals, which detained it for so many months that I was satisfied that it had been accepted, and so I abstained from asking troublesome questions. At length, however, I ventured to do so, and my paper was at once returned to me, and at the same time I observed that an article on the same subject was advertised for the next number of the magazine in question. I at once despatched mine to _The Gentleman’s Magazine_, and by the exceeding courtesy of Messrs. Chatto and Windus (who at the very last moment managed to postpone an article and insert mine), it was launched on the same day as its rival. The similarity of the two was remarkable, all quotations being identical.

A paper of specially curious interest, and for which I collected a great number of very telling illustrations from ancient sculptures and from modern life in many countries, was one to prove the evolution of the tall pagoda from the original honorific umbrellas carried in procession before or after a great man, not for use, but as a badge of rank. At last, as in Burmah, seven or nine came to be placed above one another, and so doubtless led to these silken umbrellas being reproduced in stone erections of five, seven, nine, or even thirteen stories in height. This paper, which I called “UMBRELLAS, AURIOLES, AND PAGODAS,” was published in the June and July numbers of the _English Illustrated Magazine_ for 1888, and was very well received by the world which cares about such matters.

Of some interest also were such papers as—

SOME EVENTFUL VOYAGES. _Blackwood’s Magazine_, March 1890.

WOLVES AND WERE-WOLVES. _Temple Bar_, November 1890.

UNFATHOMED MYSTERIES. (Spiritualism at Boston.) _Blackwood’s
Magazine_, May 1883.

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS AND THEIR HOMES. _Blackwood’s Magazine_, April
1891.

PROFESSIONS FOR DOGS. _Blackwood’s Magazine_, November 1888.

STRANGE MEDICINES. _Nineteenth Century_, June 1887.

THE LOCUST WAR IN CYPRUS. _Nineteenth Century_, August 1883.

LOCUSTS AND FARMERS OF AMERICA. _Nineteenth Century_, January 1885.

THE WORLD’S WONDERLANDS. (In Wyoming and New Zealand.) _Overland
Monthly_, January 1885.

IN THE OLD MUNIMENT ROOM OF WOLLATON HALL. _New Review_, October and
December 1889.

OUR OLDEST COLONY, BOMBAY. _Macmillan’s Magazine_, January 1887.

SUNNY DAYS IN MALTA. _National Review_, September 1886.

OF FURRED AND FEATHERED FOES. (New Zealand.) _Gentleman’s Magazine_,
May 1882.

REVERED FOOTPRINTS. (Held sacred.) _Time_, July 1886.

FOOTPRINTS OF OLD. (Fossil and other.) _Sun_, March 1891.

PROPHECIES BY A HIGHLAND SEER. (Very remarkable facts in Ross-shire.)
_Belgravia_, September 1884.

A LEGEND OF INVERAWE AND TICONDEROGA. _Atlantic Monthly_, September
1884.

A NIGHT OF HORROR AT A HIGHLAND CASTLE. _Belgravia_, October 1886.

TWO BRITISH PILGRIMAGES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (to Iona and
Lindisfarne). _Cornhill Magazine_, August 1883.

STRIKING “ILE.” (Petroleum springs.) _Atalanta_, July 1889.

EARTH’S FIERY FOUNTAINS OF MOLTEN ROCK. _Atalanta._

EARTH’S BOILING FOUNTAINS. _Atalanta_, February and March 1888.

A FIERY FLOOD IN PENNSYLVANIA. _Atalanta_, August 1892.

DIVINING RODS, ANCIENT AND MODERN. _Quiver_, July 1887.

THE POSTMEN OF THE WORLD. _Cassell’s Family Magazine_, July and August
1885.

THE NEWSPAPERS OF THE WORLD. _Cassell’s Family Magazine_, August 1884.

ON CUTTLE-FISH AS A DAINTY DISH. _Cassell’s Family Magazine_, July
1883.

ON THE SOCIAL POSITION OF DIVERS ANIMALS. _Cassell’s Family Magazine_,
May 1887.

ALLIGATOR-FARMING. _Cassell’s Family Magazine_, June 1883.

DESTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN BISON. _Good Words_, June 1884.

HOW MOTHER EARTH ROCKED HER CRADLE. (In Japan.) _Newberry House
Magazine_, July and August 1892.

REAL ESTATE IN VOLCANIC REGIONS. (Japan.) _Cornhill Magazine_,
February 1890.

VOLCANIC FROLICS. _Monthly Packet_, September 1886.

THE ERUPTION OF MOUNT TARAWERA. (Destruction of the Pink and White
Terraces, New Zealand.) _Leisure Hour_, October 1886.

THE ENDING OF THE CARNIVAL. (On the Riviera.) _Leisure Hour_, May
1887.

EARTHQUAKES IN DIVERS PLACES. _Leisure Hour_, June 1887.

THE GREAT YELLOW RIVER INUNDATION. _Leisure Hour_, March 1886.

THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD. _Leisure Hour_, April 1888.

OUR BORROWED PLUMES. (Fine feathers make fine birds in many lands.)
_Leisure Hour_, August 1883.

THE HOT LAKES OF NEW ZEALAND. _Sunday at Home_, October and November
1886.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

INDEX

Abercromby, Louisa, Lady, 31.

Aberlour, 159.

—— Orphanage, 167.

Accident to my father, 124.

Adam’s Peak in Ceylon, 212.

Affectation, 33 and _note_.

Agnostic, 351, _note_.

Airthrie Castle, 151.