Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/778

758 Africa, where bodies of drowned mariners were sometimes washed ashore, and became dried up and shriveled as they lay unburied on the burning sands. These became so light as scarcely to weigh thirty pounds. They were, however, not considered so desirable as the genuine article from Alexandria, and were, moreover, more expensive.

The learned doctors of France, Germany, and Italy all made great use of this eccentric drug, and in the seventeenth century grievous complaints arose of its adulteration. Monsieur Pomet, chief apothecary to the French king, records that the king's physician went to Alexandria to judge for himself on this matter, and, having made friends with a Jewish dealer in mummies, was admitted to his storehouse, where he saw piles of bodies. He asked what kind of bodies were used, and how they were prepared. The Jew informed him that "he took such bodies as he could get, whether they died of some disease or of some contagion; he embalmed them with the sweepings of various old drugs, myrrh, aloes, pitch, and gums, wound them about with a cere-cloth, and then dried them in an oven, after which he sent them to Europe, and marveled to see the Christians were lovers of such filthiness."

But even this revelation did not suffice to put mummy-physic out of fashion, and we know that Francis I, of France, always carried with him a well-filled medicine-chest, of which this was the principal ingredient.

Old Sir Thomas Browne, after enumerating the various diseases for which divers great doctors recommend mummy as an infallible remedy, protests against such unworthy use of the ancient heroes, and declares that to serve up Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, or that Cheops and Psammetichus should be weighed out as drugs, is dismal vampirism, more horrible than the feasts of the ghouls.

The apothecaries of England were often well content to make use of a cheap substitute which answered quite as well, namely, the bones of ancient Britons. Dr. Toope, of Oxford, writing in 1685, tells how at the circles on Hakpen Hill, in Wiltshire, he had discovered a rare lot of human bones—skeletons, arranged in circles, with the feet toward the center. He says, "The bones were large and nearly rotten, but the teeth extream and wonderfully white." Undisturbed by any questions of reverence for these ancestors of his race, he adds "I dug up many bushells, with which I made a noble medicine."

The mummy-trade was supported by various classes of the community, for artists declared that mummy-powder beaten up with oil, gave richer tones of brown than any other substance, and modern perfumers found means of preparing the perfumes and spices found inside the bodies, so as to make them exceedingly attractive to the ladies. Paper-manufacturers found that the wrappings of the