ll be loosened. If the pain is very acute and interferes
with eating or drinking, then the tooth may be extracted;
otherwise, it should be left. Take a bream about ten ounces in
weight, rip it open and insert 1/10 of an ounce of powdered
arsenic. Then sew up the body and hang it up in the wind where it
is not exposed to the sun or accessible to cats and rats. After
being thus hung for seven days, a kind of hoar-frost will have
formed upon the scales of the fish. Preserve this, using for each
tooth about as much as covers one scale. When required, spread it
on a piece of any kind of plaster, press it with the finger on to
the aching place, and let it stick there. Then let the patient
cough, and the tooth will fall out of itself. This prescription
has been tested by Dr. Wang."

Another Method.

"Take a head of garlic and pound it up to a pulp. Mix it up
thoroughly with one or two candareens' weight of white dragon's
bones, and apply it to the suffering part. In a little while the
tooth will drop out."

It will be noticed that the above descriptions are neither without one
or other of two characteristics always to be found in the composition
of Chinese remedies. In the first recipe, the ingredients are simple
enough, and all this is required is time, seven days being necessary
for its preparation. Now, as it is very unlikely that any one would
collect the "hoar-frost" deposit from the scales of a bream stuffed
with arsenic, in anticipation of a future toothache, and as he would
probably have got well long before the expiration of the seven days if
he set to work to make his medicine only when the tooth began to ache,
the genius of the physician and the efficacy of the recipe are alike
secure from attack. In the second case, the very existence of one of
the drugs mentioned is, to say the least, apocryphal; and although
such can be purchased at the shops of native druggists, any complaint
on the part of a duped patient would be met by the simple answer, that
the white dragon's bones he bought could not possibly have been
genuine!

A few days after the above incident, we returned to the dentist's
stall, and asked him if he had any powder that would draw out a tooth
by mere application to the gum or to the tooth itself? He replied that
such a powder certainly existed, and was commonly manufactured in all
parts of China, but that he himself was out of it at the mom