Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/771

Rh evidently felt it humiliating that a foreigner should have seen such a relic of the days of ignorance.

The quaint old man whose loyal adherence to the customs of his ancestors afforded me such an interesting illustration both of old Japan and old Britain was a seller of curoyakie—i.e., carbonized animals; in other words, animals reduced to charcoal, and potted in small covered jars of earthenware, to be sold as medicine for the sick and suffering. Formerly all these animals were kept alive in the back premises, and customers selected the creature for themselves, and stood by to see it killed and burned on the spot, so that there could be no deception, and no doubt as to the freshness of their charred medicine. Doubtless some insensible foreign influence may account for the disappearance of the menagerie of waiting victims and their cremation-ground; now the zoölogical back-yard has vanished, and only the strange chemist's shop remains, like a well-stored museum, wherein are ranged portions of the dried carcasses of dogs and deer, foxes and badgers, rats and mice, toads and frogs, tigers and elephants.

The rarer the animal, and the farther it has traveled, the more precious apparently are its virtues. From the roof hung festoons of gigantic snake-skins, which certainly were foreign importations from some land where pythons flourish, Japan being happily exempt from the presence of such beautiful monsters. I saw one very fine piece of a skin, which, though badly dried and much shrunken, measured twenty-six inches across, but it was only a fragment ten feet in length, and was being gradually consumed, inch by inch, to lend mystic virtue to compounds of many strange ingredients. I was told that the perfect skin must have measured very nearly fifty feet in length. I saw another fragment twenty-two feet long and twelve inches wide; this also had evidently shrunk considerably in drying, and must, when in life, have been a very fine specimen.

There were also some very fine deer's horns (hartshorn in its pure and simple form), a highly valued rhinoceros-horn, and ivory of various animals. My companion was much tempted by a beautiful piece of ivory about ten feet in length. I think it was the horn of a narwhal, but the druggist would only sell it for its price as medicine, namely, ten cents for fifty-eight grains, whence we inferred that the druggists of Old Japan, like some nearer home, fully understand the art of making a handsome profit on their sales. Some tigers' claws and teeth were also esteemed very precious, and some strips of tigers' skin and fragments of other skins and furs proved that these also held a place in the pharmacopœia of Old Japan, as they continue to do in China (the source whence Japan derived many branches of learning, besides the use of letters).

Unfortunately for the little lizards which dart about so joyously in the sunlight, they too are classed among the popular remedies, being considered an efficacious vermifuge; so strings of their ghastly