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 for making it which Galen wrote some fifty years after Andromachus had completed his invention.

At this point the book tells us there was an interval, and some music was performed. When the lecturer resumed he proceeded to tell of the risks which princes and nobles ran of being poisoned in those old times, and of the precautions taken against such crimes. Of the rings and amulets they wore, of the tasters they employed, and of the treatment such as Mithridates went through of accustoming his system to poisons to such an extent that they took no effect on him. He quotes in support of the belief in this method of ensuring immunity against poisons two or three stories from the classics which one would have thought would have been too strong even for a professional eulogist of Theriaca.

One case was that of a girl who ate spiders from her childhood, and was so fortified against poisons as not to be afraid to take any of them. A man is alluded to by Galen who would drink a cup of wine in which a live viper had been drowned. We have also the account of a girl whose system had been so saturated with aconite that an Indian king had sent her as a present to Alexander the Great in the hope that he would kiss her, and thus imbibe the poison with which her lips would be charged; but, fortunately, Aristotle saw her first, and recognised by her flaming eyes that she was filled with some sort of poison, and thus the Indian's purpose was frustrated.

After another interval and some more music, the lecturer came to the third part of his subject, in which be expounded the special virtues of the drugs before him. These were grouped, and it was shown that some were good for the brain, others for the chest, for the