Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/777

Rh This treasure was scraped to dust and mixed with a cup of water, which the boy, ignorant of its contents, was make to drink! (An equally odd cure for consumption was, not long ago, fully believed in in the adjoining county of Sutherland, where the patient was made to drink warm blood drawn from his own arm. An instance of this was related to Sir James Simpson by one of the parties concerned. Dr. Mitchell has seen several epileptic idiots who had been subjected to the same treatment.)

Equally precious to the leech of the last century were the ashes of a burned witch collected from her funeral-pyre. Such were deemed a certain cure for gout or for fever, and eagerly were they gathered up and treasured.

Whatever may have been the special merit thus attaching to criminals (and we know that a strand from the rope with which a man had been hanged was long accounted an amulet against many ills), it is satisfactory to know that saints have had their share in this dubious honor. There is one sect of our fellow-Christians in Syria, namely, the Nestorians, who, while they eschew all veneration for relics, yet believe the remains of saints and martyrs to be endowed with such supernatural virtues, that at their wedding-feasts the dust of some reputed saint is invariably mixed with the wine in the marriage-cup—a custom which would seem to require numerous additions to their saintly calendar. Doubtless, however, the holy dust multiplies, that the supply may be equal to the demand.

But to return to this remarkable phase of cannibalism in Europe, we find that, just as the Chinese doctor sets most store by the animals imported from foreign lands, so did our ancestors chiefly prize a preparation of long-deceased Egyptians. Among the standard medicines quoted in the medical books of Nuremberg of two hundred years ago are "portions of the embalmed bodies of man's flesh, brought from the neighborhood of Memphis, where there are many bodies that have been buried for more than a thousand years, called mumia, which have been embalmed with costly salves and balsams, and smell strongly of myrrh, aloes, and other fragrant things." The writer further tells how, "when the sailors do reach the place where the mumia are, they fetch them out secretly by night, then carry them to the ship and conceal them, that they may not be seized, because certainly the Egyptians would not suffer their removal." Nevertheless, the sailors had no great liking for their cargo, believing it to be connected with unholy magic, and that ships having mummies on board would assuredly meet with terrible storms, and very likely be compelled to throw them as an offering to the angry waves.

These medicinal mummies were also imported from Teneriffe, where in olden days the natives used to embalm their dead, sew them in buckskin shrouds, and hide them in caves, whence they were stolen by traders. "White mummies" were also obtained from the coast of