eadful vermin.

Before quitting Tchagen-Kouren we had bought in a chemist's shop a few
sapeks' worth of mercury. We now made with it a prompt and specific
remedy against the lice. We had formerly got this receipt from some
Chinese, and as it may be useful to others, we think it right to describe
it here. You take half-an-ounce of mercury, which you mix with old
tea-leaves, previously reduced to paste by mastication. To render this
softer, you generally add saliva, water would not have the same effect.
You must afterwards bruise and stir it awhile, so that the mercury may be
divided into little balls as fine as dust. You infuse this composition
into a string of cotton, loosely twisted, which you hang round the neck;
the lice are sure to bite at the bait, and they thereupon as surely
swell, become red, and die forthwith. In China and in Tartary you have
to renew this sanitary necklace once a month, for, otherwise, in these
dirty countries you could not possibly keep clear from vermin, which
swarm in every Chinese house and in every Mongol tent.

The Tartars are acquainted with the cheap and efficacious anti-louse
mixture I have described, but they make no use of it. Accustomed from
their infancy to live amid vermin, they at last take no heed whatever of
them, except, indeed, when the number becomes so excessive as to involve
the danger of their being absolutely eaten up. Upon such a juncture they
strip off their clothes, and have a grand battue, all the members of the
family and any friends who may have dropped in, taking part in the sport.
Even Lamas, who may be present, share in the hunt, with this distinction,
that they do not kill the game, but merely catch it and throw it away;
the reason being, that, according to the doctrine of metempsychosis, to
kill any living being whatever, is to incur the danger of homicide, since
the smallest insect before you may be the transmigration of a man. Such
is the general opinion; but we have met with Lamas whose views on this
subject were more enlightened. They admitted that persons belonging to
the sacerdotal class should abstain from killing animals; but not, said
they, in fear of committing a murder by killing a man transmigrated into
an animal, but because to kill is essentially antagonistic with the
gentleness which should characterise a man of prayer, who is ever in
communication with the Deity.

There are some Lamas who carry this scruple to a point approaching th