Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/291

Rh persons" that a serpent with the virgin countenance of a beardless man was recently killed in an island of Germany. Another "trustworthy person" told him that he saw in an eagle's nest 500 ducks, over 100 geese, about 40 hares, and many large fish, which were all required to satisfy the hunger of the young eaglets.

Besides miscellaneous instances of credulity, and the errors of alchemy and astrology already mentioned, we find medieval books on nature full of marvelous and fantastic properties attributed to plants, stones, birds and beasts. Especially wonderful powers are attributed to gems. A French Bishop Marbod in his book on stones tells us that the sapphire nourishes the body and preserves the limbs intact. One who carries it can not be injured by fraud or envy, and is impervious to fear. It sets prisoners free; and is even represented as placating God and rendering him favorable to prayers. It makes peace between foes. By means of it the future can be predicted. It cools one off and checks perspiration. Applied in a pulverized state with milk, it heals ulcers, cleans the eyes, cures headache and ills of the tongue.

But plants, too, as well as gems, have remarkable powers. The German abbess Hildegard, in her work on "The Subtleties of Diverse Creatures," mentions certain plants which fish eat, and which, if a man could procure and eat, would enable him to go without food for four or five months. Adam used to eat them now and then, after he had been cast out of Eden, but not when he could get other food, since they make one's flesh tough. As for the strange virtues possessed by birds, Hildegard tells us that mistiness is marvelously removed from the eyes by catching a nightingale before daybreak, adding a single drop of dew found on clean grass to the bird's gall; and anointing the eyebrows and lashes frequently with the mixture.

Hildegard's chapters on quadrupeds are delightfully quaint. The camel is peculiar in that its different humps possess different virtues. The hump next its neck has the virtues of the lion, the second of the leopard, the third of the horse. Unicorns can never be caught except by means of girls, for they flee from men, but stop to gase diligently at girls, because they marvel that they have human forms, yet no beards. "And," adds Hildegard,

When a weasel is sick, another weasel digs up a certain herb and breathes on it for the space of an hour and then brings it to the sick weasel who is cured thereby. This herb is unknown to other animals and to men, and it would do them no good if they did know of it, since its own virtue is not efficacious, nor would their breathing upon it make it so. But the heart of a weasel, dried and placed with wax in the ear, benefits deafness or headache. A fine cure for epilepsy is to