Page:Chronicles of pharmacy (Volume 2).djvu/309

 think it was adopted to indicate that a month was necessary for a solvent to exercise its full power. Dr. Johnson says the idea originated "in some notion of the old chemists about the influence of the moon in the preparation of dissolvents." Sir J. Murray says "Menstruum was a mediæval term used in alchemy to express belief that the base metal undergoing transmutation into gold corresponded with the seed within the womb which was being acted upon by the agency of the menstrual fluid." It is possible, however, that the old belief in the extraordinary solvent power of the menstrual fluid may have better accounted for the adoption of the term in pharmacy. Dr. C. S. Carrington, of Brooklyn, has quoted from a French narrative of the conquest and conversion of the natives of the Canary Islands, published in one of the Hakluyt volumes, a passage written by two monks giving an account of the Flood. Describing the Ark, they say it was so perfectly joined by "Betun," a glue so strong that the pieces united by it could not be separated by any art "sinon par sang naturel de fleurs de femmes."

Moxa. In the middle of the seventeenth century Ten Rhyn and afterwards Kaempfer, both surgeons in the service of the Dutch East India Company, described a process of cauterisation largely adopted in China and Japan in the treatment of various maladies. They used the hairy leaves of the Chinese artemisia and made it up into a cylindrical shape which they placed on any part on which they wished to act, and then set fire to it, allowing it to smoulder slowly down to the skin. It was adopted by many European surgeons, especially by Van Swieten in gout, rheumatism, and paralysis, but carded cotton, lint, hemp, or other substances were employed in the same way. Sydenham mentions this