emedies are at least harmless, but his pedantry and
utter want of judgment betray themselves everywhere. He piles his
prescriptions one upon another, without the least discrimination. He is
run away with by all sorts of fancies and superstitions. He prescribes
euphrasia, eye-bright, for disease of the eyes; appealing confidently to
the strange old doctrine of signatures, which inferred its use from the
resemblance of its flower to the organ of vision. For the scattering of
wens, the efficacy of a Dead Hand has been out of measure wonderful. But
when he once comes to the odious class of remedies, he revels in them
like a scarabeus. This allusion will bring us quite near enough to the
inconceivable abominations with which he proposed to outrage the sinful
stomachs of the unhappy confederates and accomplices of Adam.

It is well that the treatise was never printed, yet there are passages
in it worth preserving. He speaks of some remedies which have since
become more universally known:

"Among the plants of our soyl, Sir William Temple singles out Five [Six]
as being of the greatest virtue and most friendly to health: and his
favorite plants, Sage, Rue, Saffron, Alehoof, Garlick, and Elder."

"But these Five [Six] plants may admitt of some competitors. The
QUINQUINA--How celebrated: Immoderately, Hyperbolically celebrated!"

Of Ipecacuanha, he says,--"This is now in its reign; the most
fashionable vomit."

"I am not sorry that antimonial emetics begin to be disused."

He quotes "Mr. Lock" as recommending red poppy-water and abstinence from
flesh as often useful in children's diseases.

One of his "Capsula's" is devoted to the animalcular origin of diseases,
at the end of which he says, speaking of remedies for this supposed
source of our distempers:

"Mercury we know thee: But we are afraid thou wilt kill us too, if we
employ thee to kill them that kill us.

"And yett, for the cleansing of the small Blood Vessels, and making way
for the free circulation of the Blood and Lymph--there is nothing like
Mercurial Deobstruents."

From this we learn that mercury was already in common use, and the
subject of the same popular prejudice as in our own time.

His poetical turn shows itself here and there:

"O Nightingale, with a Thorn at thy Breast; Under the trouble of a
Cough, what can be more proper than such thoughts as these?"...

If there is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the
millipede, beginn