Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/83

 bloomed in the spring, of a white lotus that had bloomed in the summer, of a white poppy that had bloomed in the autumn, and of a white plum-blossom that had bloomed in the winter; of each of these twelve ounces. All these pistils were to be kept over till the vernal equinox of the succeeding year, dried in the sun, mixed into powder, and dissolved in twelve mace-weight of rain, and the same amount of pure dew, hoar-frost, and snowflakes, all of which must have fallen on that particular day. These ingredients were then to be mixed in equal proportions, made into pills the size of a dragon's-eye [lungan], and placed in an old porcelain jar, which must be buried under the root of a flower. When the patient felt her illness coming on, she was to dig up the jar and swallow one of the pills in a hot decoction of juniper-bark. It is, of course, evident that the due preparation of this medicine depends upon an impossible concatenation of coincidences; and it is just a bit of graceful humour at the expense of the medicos of China, whose abracadabra and affectation of mysticism are a fitting object of ridicule. The fact is, indeed, that the description is scarcely overdrawn, and any one who has had the patience or the curiosity to dip into many of the books which deal with the pharmacopoeia in China will testify to the existence of so-called remedies almost, if not quite, as preposterous. In many instances, as in one for toothache, the chances are that the patient would be either dead or cured weeks before the first ingredients of the marvellous panacea had been obtained.