were all of great use in
magnetic medicines. Paracelsus enumerates six kinds of
mummies; the first four only differing in the composition
used by different people for preserving their dead, are the
Egyptian, Arabian, Pisasphaltos, and Libyan. The fifth mummy
of peculiar power was made from criminals that had been
hanged; "for from such there is a gentle siccation, that
expungeth the watery humour, without destroying the oil and
spirituall, which is cherished by the heavenly luminaries,
and strengthened continually by the affluence and impulses of
the celestial spirits; whence it may be properly called by
the name of constellated or celestial mummie." The sixth kind
of mummy was made of corpuscles, or spiritual effluences,
radiated from the living body; though we cannot get very
clear ideas on this head, or respecting the manner in which
they were caught.--_Medicina Diatastica; or, Sympathetical
Mummie, abstracted from the Works of Paracelsus, and
translated out of the Latin_, by Fernando Parkhurst, Gent.
London, 1653, pp. 2, 7. Quoted by the _Foreign Quarterly
Review_, vol. xii. p. 415.

Kircher the Jesuit, whose quarrel with the alchymists was the means of
exposing many of their impostures, was a firm believer in the efficacy of
the magnet. Having been applied to by a patient afflicted with hernia, he
directed the man to swallow a small magnet reduced to powder, while he
applied at the same time to the external swelling, a poultice made of
filings of iron. He expected that by this means the magnet, when it got to
the corresponding place inside, would draw in the iron, and with it the
tumour; which would thus, he said, be safely and expeditiously reduced.

As this new doctrine of magnetism spread, it was found that wounds
inflicted with any metallic substance could be cured by the magnet. In
process of time, the delusion so increased, that it was deemed sufficient
to magnetise a sword, to cure any hurt which that sword might have
inflicted! This was the origin of the celebrated "weapon-salve," which
excited so much attention about the middle of the seventeenth century. The
following was the recipe given by Paracelsus for the cure of any wounds
inflicted by a sharp weapon, except such as had penetrated the heart, the
brain, or the arteries. "Take of m