d of prosperous times for them, they became predisposed
to the disease and then fell victims.

With regard to the prevention of the pest in individual cases, Father
Kircher has some very sensible remarks. He says that physicians as a
rule depend on certain medicinal protectives or on amulets which they
carry. The amulets he considers to be merely superstitious. The
sweet-smelling substances that are sometimes employed are probably
without any preventive action. Certain physicians employed a
prophylactic remedy made up of very many substances. This is what in
modern days we would be apt to call a "gunshot prescription." It
contained so many ingredients that it was hoped that some one of them
would hit the right spot and prove effective. Father Kircher has
another name for it. We do not know whether it is original with him,
but in any case it is worth while remembering. He calls it a "calendar
prescription," because when written it resembled a list of the days of
the month.

His opinion of this "calendar prescription" is not very high. It seems
to him that if one ingredient did good, most of the others would be
{132} almost as sure to do harm. The main factor in prophylaxis to his
mind was to keep in normal health, and this seemed not quite
compatible with frequent recourse to a prescription containing so many
drugs that were almost sure to have no good effect and might have an
ill effect. It is all the more interesting to find these common-sense
views because ordinarily Father Kircher is set down as one who
accepted most of the traditions of his time without inquiring very
deeply into their origin or truth, simply reporting them out of the
fulness of his rather pedantic information. In most cases it will be
found, however, that, like Herodotus, reporting the curious things
that had been told him in his travels, he is very careful to state
what are his own opinions and what he owes to others and gives place
to, though without attaching much credence to them.

It must not be forgotten that his great contemporaries, Von Helmont
and Paracelsus, were not free from many of the curious scientific
superstitions of their time, though they had, like him, in many
respects the true scientific spirit. Von Helmont, for instance, was a
firm believer in the doctrine of spontaneous generation, and even went
so far as to consider that it had its application to animals of rather
high order. For instance, one of his works contains a rath