ge 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 such a shape as to shake the incredulity of the
keenest thinker of his time. The very same assertion has been since
repeated in favor of Perkinism, and, since that, of Homoeopathy.

The same essential idea as that of the Weapon Ointment reproduced itself
in the still more famous SYMPATHETIC POWDER. This Powder was said to
have the faculty, if applied to the blood-stained garments of a wounded
person, to cure his injuries, even though he were at a great distance at
the time. A friar, returning from the East, brought the recipe to Europe
somewhat before the middle of the seventeenth century. The Grand Duke of
Florence, in which city the friar was residing, heard of his cures, and
tried, but without success, to obtain his secret. Sir Kenehn Digby, an
Englishman well known to fame, was fortunate enough to do him a favor,
which wrought upon his feelings and induced him to impart to his
benefactor the composition of his extraordinary Powder. This English
knight was at different periods of his life an admiral, a theologian, a
critic, a metaphysician, a politician, and a disciple of Alchemy. As is
not unfrequent with versatile and inflammable people, he caught fire at
the first spark of a new medical discovery, and no sooner got home to
England than he began to spread the conflagration.

An opportunity soon offered itself to try the powers of the famous
powder. Mr. J. Howell, having been wounded in endeavoring to part two
of his friends who were fighting a duel, submitted himself to a trial
of the Sympathetic Powder. Four days after he received his wounds, Sir
Kenehn dipped one of Mr. Howell's gaiters in a solution of the Powder,
and immediately, it is said, the wound