[14]. The discovery of the virtues of the Peruvian bark may here serve as an instance. The story goes, that an Indian (some say a monkey) being ill of a fever, quenched his thirst at a pool of water, strongly impregnated with the bark from some trees having accidentally fallen into it, and that he was in consequence cured.
[15]. John Atkins, author of the Navy Surgeon: 1742.
[16]. Turner, in his collection of Cases, p. 406, gives one of a woman who died hydrophobical, from a mad dog biting her gown; and of a young man who died raving mad, from the scratch of a cat, four years after the accident.
[17]. This species of delusion reminds us of the Florentine quack, who gave the countryman his pills, which were to enable him to find his lost ass. The pills beginning to operate on his road home, obliged him to retire into a wood, where he actually did find his ass. The clown, as a matter of course, soon spread the report of the wonderful success of the empiric, who, no doubt, in consequence of this circumstance, reaped an ample reward from the proprietors of strayed cattle.
[18]. James the First wrote a philippic against it, entitled a “Counterblaste to Tobacco,” in which the royal author, with more prejudice than dignity, informs his loving subjects, that “it is a custome loathsome to the eye, hatefull to the nose, painfull to the braine, dangerous to the lungs; and in the black stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomlesse.”
[19]. The prohibition of the bath was numbered among the restrictions to which certain priestesses were bound by the rigid rules of their order.
[20]. An eminent physician of the fourth century, born at Pergamus, or, according to others, at Sardis, where he resided for some time.
[21]. Called Amidenus, from the place of his birth, flourished at Alexandria, about the end of the fifth century.
[22]. The word Alchymy seems to be compounded of the Arabic augmentative particle al, and the Latin Kemia or Greek χημια, chemistry. This etymology, however, is objected to by some, who deny the Arabians any share in the composition of the word; urging that alchemia occurs in an author who wrote before the Europeans had any commerce with the Arabians, or the Arabians any learning, i. e. before the time of Mahomet.
[23]. Philosoph. Magazine, Vol. vi. p. 383.