Page:Omniana 2.djvu/330

 leave off joking, and tell him how he may obtain relief.

The prescription is, about a spoonful of salt, tied in a cloth, held in boiling oil during the time in which a man can twice repeat the creed, then laid on the jaw.

In the course of these physical questions it appears that the Friar never ate salt, because he says, that being only an earth it can afford no nutriment, an argument which I have heard a medical man assign as a philosophical reason for disliking salt, though if this condiment were not in some degree necessary to our well-being, savages and animals would not seek it with such an instinctive desire. Fray Luys also abstained from saffron, a great article in the cook-