. Hildanus himself
reports, in detail, the case of a lady who had received a moderate wound,
for which the Unguentum Armarium was employed without the slightest use.
Yet instead of receiving this flat case of failure as any evidence
against the remedy, he accounts for its not succeeding by the devout
character of the lady, and her freedom from that superstitious and
over-imaginative tendency which the Devil requires in those who are to be
benefited by his devices.

Lord Bacon speaks of the Weapon Ointment, in his Natural History, as
having in its favor the testimony of men of credit, though, in his own
language, he himself "as yet is not fully inclined to believe it." His
remarks upon the asserted facts respecting it show a mixture of wise
suspicion and partial belief. He does not like the precise directions
given as to the circumstances under which the animals from which some of
the materials were obtained were to be killed; for he thought it looked
like a provision for an excuse in case of failure, by laying the fault to
the omission of some of these circumstances. But he likes well that
"they do not observe the confecting of the Ointment under any certain
constellation; which is commonly the excuse of magical medicines, when
they fail, that they were not made under a fit figure of heaven." [This
was a mistake, however, since the two recipes given by Hildanus are both
very explicit as to the aspect of the heavens required for different
stages of the process.] "It was pretended that if the offending weapon
could not be had, it would serve the purpose to anoint a wooden one made
like it." "This," says Bacon, "I should doubt to be a device to keep
this strange form of cure in request and use; because many times you
cannot come by the weapon itself." And in closing his remarks on the
statements of the advocates of the ointment, he says, "Lastly, it will
cure a beast as well as a man, which I like best of all the rest, because
it subjecteth the matter to an easy trial." It is worth remembering,
that more than two hundred years ago, when an absurd and fantastic remedy
was asserted to possess wonderful power, and when sensible persons
ascribed its pretended influence to imagination, it was boldly answered
that the cure took place when the wounded party did not know of the
application made to the weapon, and even when a brute animal was the
subject of the experiment, and that this assertion, as we all know it
was, came in suc