Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/775

Rh of a bat, the head of a stag, and carnivorous teeth, which has become the stereotyped idea of the dragon in all lands.

Even in Europe fossil bones thus found together in caves were long known as dragons' bones, and accounted useful in medicine. Indeed, so great was the demand for these and similar relics, that our museums and scientific men have good cause to rejoice that their ancestors failed to discover what stores of old bones lay hidden in our own seaboard caves—as, for instance, in that wonderful Kirkdale cavern, where the mortal remains of several hundred hyenas were found, guarding the teeth of a baby mammoth, a patriarchal tiger, a rhinoceros, and a hippopotamus; or the caves along the Norfolk coast, where Hugh Miller tells us that within thirteen years the oyster-dredgers dragged up the tusks and grinders of five hundred mammoths; or those wonderful zoölogical cemeteries where the fossil bones of cave-lions, cave-hyenas, elephants, mammoths, hippopotami, woolly rhinoceros, red deer and fallow deer, oxen, sheep, and horses, have lain so securely, stored for untold ages beneath Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square.

After all, this reduction of prehistoric bones and ivory to vulgar powders for medicinal use is not more strange than the fossil food which forms so large a part of the daily bread of multitudes of our fellow-creatures in Lapland, Finland, and Sweden, in Carolina and Florida, on the banks of the Orinoco and of the Amazon, where vast tracts of earth are found composed wholly of myriads of microscopic shells, and this strange mountain-meal, being duly mixed with meal of the nineteenth century, is freely eaten by the people. In Lapland alone, hundreds of wagon-loads are annually dug from one great field, and there are men who eat as much as a pound and a half per diem of this curious condiment. We hear of fields, as yet untouched, having been discovered in Bohemia, Hungary, and other parts of Europe; so perhaps we may ere long add these primeval atoms to the delicacies of our own tables.

Of the firm belief of the Chinese in the efficacy of medicines compounded of the eyes and vitals of the human body we have had too terrible proof; for it is well known that one cause which led to the appalling Tientsin massacre in 1870 was the wide-spread rumor that the foreign doctors (whose skill all were forced to admit) obtained their medicines by kidnapping and murdering Chinese children and tearing out their hearts and eyes! As this nice prescription is actually described in their own books as a potent medicine, the story obtained ready credence, and we all remember the result. Moreover, the same accusation has repeatedly been spread on other occasions of popular excitement against foreign teachers.

I am not certain whether the Lamas of Peking have there introduced the fashion of administering medicine from a drinking-cup fashioned from the upper part of a wise man's skull; but