tation on account of his longevity; a report of the post-mortem findings was published in volume III of the Philosophical Transactions. Some years later in 1642, he accompanied the king to the battle of Edgehill, and John Aubrey says that "during the fight the prince and duke of York were committed to Harvey's care." He after ward went with the king to Oxford, where he was incorporated as Doctor of Medicine at the university, December 7, 1642, and resumed his studies and experiments. Three years later he was, by royal mandate, made Warden of Merton College, but in 1646, on the surrender of Oxford (July 24th) to the Parliament, he resigned the wardenship and returned to London, where he lived for some time with his brother Eliab, a wealthy merchant. Previous to his appointment to Merton College he had accompanied the Earl of Arundel and Surrey, then Lord High Marshal of England, as member of an embassy to Vienna.

With advancing age, Harvey's frame, which had not been robust, began to bend under the weight of years and disease. He had suffered much from gout-a disease that seems to have been very common among eminent Englishmen of his and later times. His method of treating himself has been described by Aubrey as follows: "He would then sitt with his legges bare, if it were frost, on the leads of Cockaine House,* putt them into a payle of water, till he was almost dead with cold, and betake himselfe to his stove, and so 'twas gone.' After his retirement from practice, he spent most of his time out of town, devoting himself to his studies at his country seat at Combe in Surrey. In 1651 he finished his work De generatione animalium, which would perhaps not have been published but for his friend Sir George Ent, who obtained the manuscript from him and gave it to the world. He died on the 3d of June, 1657, but was not buried, according to Pettigrew, until the 26th; the immediate cause of his death is not mentioned by any of his biographers.

The house belonging to his brother Eliab.

"His practice," says Aubrey (who is not, it must be said, considered a trustworthy source of information), "was not very great; towards his latter end he declined it, unlesse to a speciall friend, e.g., my Lady Howland, who had a cancer in her breast, which he did cut off and seared, but at last she dyed of it." As a practitioner it is not possible now to pronounce an opinion of Harvey. His works are chiefly anatomica! and physiological. Aubrey says: "All his profession would allowe him to be an excellent anatomist; but I never heard any that admired his therapeutique way. I knew several practitioners in this towne (London) that would not have given three-pence for one of his bills (prescriptions), and that a man could hardly tell by one of his bills what he did aime at. He did not care for chymistry, and was wont to speak against them with undervalue." Aubrey farther records that Harvey "understood Greek and Latin pretty well, but was no critique, and he wrote very bad Latin. The Circuitus Sanguinis was, as I take it, donne into Latin by Sir George Ent, as also his booke De Generatione Animalium; but his little booke in 12mo, against Riolan (I thinke),* wherein he makes out his doctrine clearer, was writt by himselfe, and that, as I take it, at Oxford." The same authority tells us that "he was pretty well versed in mathematiques, and had made himselfe master of Mr. Oughtred's Clavis Math. in his old age; and I have seen him (he continues perusing it, and working problems not long before he dyed, and that booke was always in his meditating apartment. He was very communicative and willing to instruct any that were modest and respectfull to him. He was not tall, but of the lowest stature; round faced, olivaster (like wainscott) complexion; little eie, round, very black, full of spirit; his haire was black as a raven, but quite white twenty years he

Aubrey here refers to the book published by Harvey, during the latter's stay at Oxford, against the celebrated anatomist Riolan, in defence of his work on the circulation: Exercitationes duae anatomicae de circulatione sanguinis: ad Joannem Riolanum filium, parisiensem.

fore he dyed. I remember he was wont to drinke coffee, which he and his brother Eliab did, before coffee-houses were in fashion in London. He was, as all the rest of the brothers, very cholerique; and in his younger days wore a dagger (as the fashion. then was); but this doctor would be apt to draw out his dagger upon every slight occasion. He rode on horseback with a footcloath to visit his patients, his man following on foot, as the fashion then was, which was very decent, now quite discontinued."

After having been in practice half a century, during a great part of that time attached to the Court, Harvey left a fortune of £20,000 on his death. A few years before, he had presented the College of Physicians with a library and museum, and with a yearly income to defray the costs of an annual oration, since known as the Harveian Oration, and still an event of scientific importance.

MONTAIGNE ON THE PHYSICIAN.

MICHAEL, SEIGNEUR DE MONTAIGNE had his immortal Essays printed in 1580; and he died in 1592, aged 59. He bore the Faculty a grudge which lasted so long as the breath remained in his body; the chief reason for which seemed to be that during his later years he suffered from a stone. True, Ambroise Paré, his contemporary, might have relieved him of it. But in those days operations hurt; no one then knew how to anesthetize, nor even how to inject such substances as stovaine into the spina! canal. And Montaigne's nature was not of the sterner sort that would willingly have endured the pain attendant upon such an operation; "I am," he observed, "very sensible of essential and corporeal pain, but not of those which only attack the mind." So he continued to endure his affliction until it overcame him, blaming and objurgating the doctors meanwhile for his sufferings.

"I have conceived a hatred and contempt of their doctrine; the antipathy I have against their art is hereditary; my father lived threescore and fourteen years, my grandfather sixty-nine, by greatgrandfa

For

It would indeed be a satisfaction could the Seigneur appear to-day with his grievous affliction; how in any hospital he could now be relieved with so little distress to himself that during the operation he could while away the time in philosophic conversation with his attendants. Montaigne thoroughly appreciated in his day what is now universally agreed upon, that health is absolutely the most precious of all human possessions. "Health," he observed, "is a precious thing, and the only one in truth that a man should lay out, not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also his life itself to obtain, forasmuch as without it life is injurious to us. Pleasure, wisdom, learning and virtue without it wither away and vanish; and in the most quaint and solid discourses that philosophy would imprint in us to the contrary, we need no more but oppose the image of Plato, being struck with an epilepsie or apoplexy; and in this presupposition to defy him to call the rich faculties. of his soul to his assistance."

In Montaigne we find further evidence, if any such is needed, that there is quite. nothing new under the sun. He indulges in a number of pleasantries upon medical practice, such as are even nowadays made with assumption of superiority in the perpetrators. But these jokes are to be found in the Essays; nor does Montaigne for his part claim originality in them; he rather frankly attributes them to the ancients. For example: "A poor wrestler turned physician. 'Courage,' says Diogenes to him. 'thou hast done well, for now thou wilt throw those who have formerly thrown

Nicocles (a contemporary of Plato) that his art was of great authority. It is so, indeed,' said Nicocles, 'that can with impunity kill so many people." "But they have this advantage, according to Nicocles, that the sun gives light to their success, and the earth covers their failures. And, besides, they have a very advantageous way of making use of all sorts of events: for what fortune, nature or any other causes (of which the number is infinite) produces of good and healthful in us, it is the privilege of physick to attribute to itself. All the happy successes that happen to the patient must be derived from thence." "He who from an ordinary cold they have thrown into a double Tertian ague, had but for them been in a continued fever." "Whoever saw one physician approve of another's prescription, without taking something away or adding something to it?"

One reason given why Montaigne is continually interesting is that his Essays furnish delectable pastime for idlers; yet beneath the agreeable surface there is much profoundity and most excellent philosophy. Montaigne was a keen observer of his times which were singularly like our own-tense, infinitely active, full of life and of conflict. But he was an observer apart; he lived not in Paris but in his ancestral home, and from the point of vantage he set down most pithy and pregnant matter-matter as a propos to-day as it was several centuries ago. Far from the seething, tumultuous, madding life of his period, in his world, but not of it, he equals Plutarch and Shakespeare in his weighty characterizations of men and things. The extracts we here give are not characteristic; for the tone generally pervasive of his writings is amiable and genial. He held medical men responsible for his sufferings and wrote of them accordingly; this was hardly fair. Nevertheless, even to-day some of his criticism would not be absolutely pointless. To those who would most profitably devote a leisure hour to him, we would heartily recommend Dowden's Montaigne, in which much of the best in the Essays is to be found.

BATRACHIAN FOLK-MEDICINE.

BY LEWIS DAYTON BURDICK.

THE little batrachians, like serpents, have figured in the lore of the ages as sources of evil, and of good, as devils and deities. Some of the gods in the Egyptian pantheon were frog-headed. Frogs were invoked as deities by a Vedic poet, who compares their croaking to the chanting of Brahmans. They are entreated jointly and severally to refresh and enrich the earth. Fallen indeed was the frog in Hebrew story, for, as an embodiment of evil, he became an instrument of punishment. The rivers brought forth frogs and they entered into the houses of the Egyptians, into their food and into their beds. Then the wise men with their enchantments brought frogs upon the land as they had seen Aaron do.. In the Apocalyptic vision, as unclean spirits frogs came "out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet."

In the New World the frog or toad was worshipped as the offspring of water and the symbol of the water-spirit. This worship accompanied the cultivation of maize from Florida to Chile. Aztecs adored a goddess of water in the figure of a frog carved from a single emerald, or of a human form holding in the hand a leaf of water-lily ornamented with frogs. Mexicans painted the earth-goddess as a irog with a bloody mouth in every joint of her body. Sacrificial yokes put on the necks of those whose hearts were to be sacrificed to the gods were carved sometimes in the form of frogs.

In a legend of the Cahrocs the little batrachian shares, with the New Zealand Maui and the Greek Prometheus, the honor of outwitting the gods and giving fire to mortals.

In primitive beliefs frogs controlled the waters. They withheld the showers till the land was parched, and disease, starvation and death followed, or they enriched the fields with abundant rain and health and happiness came. They were ceremonially

used in changing the courses of the streams according to hymns of the Atharva-Veca. Their images were placed on the tops of the hills to bring rain in Peru and Bolivia. The Thompson River Indians killed one or beat it to make it rain. Where opposite conditions prevailed their responsibility was the same. Orinoco tribes beat them to bring fair weather.

Egyptians said frogs were generated from the mud of the Nile. Diodorus thought toads were generated from dead ducks that putrefied in mud. Sir Kencim Digby believed such "insecta as mice and frogs" were only produced when the earth had grown too barren to produce perfect animals. Other old writers declared the frogs engendered from mud lacked feet. The use of the entrails of frogs in charms is mentioned by Juvenal, the Roman poet of the first Christian century.

An almanac of 1684 says an unusual number of frogs indicates a pestilential season because they are engendered of putrefaction and therefore show the tendency and condition of the air. Fire was quenched with ceremonial use of frogs according to the Vedas, and the saying is as old as Pliny, that a bone from the right side of a frog makes boiling water cold, and a bone from the left side of one makes cold water boil. As fever was conceived as only another manifestation of fire, it followed that a bone from a frog's right side was useful to lessen the fever, for which Pliny gives Democritus as authority.

An eminent surgeon in Pliny's time, the author says, used in his practice spotted frogs putrefied in vinegar. Of the "Quartane Ague," he wrote: "Either frog or toad whose nails have been clipped hung about one riddeth him of the disease for

"The right eye of a frog cured ophthalmia in the right eye, and vice versa, the frog's left eye healed the patient's left eye. Another remedy for sore eyes was fifteen frogs spitted on bulrushes and stewed in an earthen kettle. One frog boiled in vinegar cured the toothache, or the frogs might be eaten for the same trouble, espe

cially if the aching teeth were double. Legless bodies of frogs macerated in wine made fast loose teeth. Frog's liver boiled and beaten with honey preserved the teeth, and a frog bound to the jaw cooled it when feverish.

That the prestige of these animals ir medicine continued for many centuries after the time of the Roman author is attested by numerous works of the middle and later periods, and by sporadic cases even down to the present time.

In a paper sent by Dr. Stafford of Lon don to Governor Winthrop of Connecticut he gave instructions for making a black powder of toads for curing smallpox and other eruptive diseases. To make the remedy effective the toads were gathered in March. They were put into an iron pot around which a fire of charcoal was built, and left to burn itself out. When the pot was cold the toads were pounded in an iron mortar. A second roasting turned the pow der black and it was then ready for use. According to the same medical authority. a toad boiled in oil after it had feasted a few days cured the King's Evil. Dr. Gesnerus prescribed the "Oyle of frogges" for such as were "payned of gout," having found it noted among the standard remedies of the most approved authors. In 1660, Sir Kenelm Digby wrote that men used to carry about with them the powder of a toad, or spider, in a box, which drew the contagious air that otherwise might dangerously affect the party.

Writing from Selborne, in 1768, Gilbert White, the author of a classic little volume of Natural History, speaks of a woman much celebrated for curing cancers with living toads, but on careful investigation lie concludes her fame was hardly justified.

It was affirmed in an old Natural History that a toad could burst itself asunder to escape from a pursuing spider and make itself whole again by chewing toadwort. A work of 1785 vouched for the cure of cancer in the breast in the following manner : put a toad in a linen bag except the head and apply to the affected part, from which

it sucked the poison and swelled up and died, when other toads one after another took its place till a cure was effected.

Marcellus, physician to Theodorus the Great in the fourth century, prescribed for the toothache, that the patient stand booted on the ground under the open sky and, catching a frog by the head, spit in its mouth, ask it to carry away the pain, and let it go. Pliny had advised several centuries earlier to spit into the mouth of a tree-frog to cure a cough. These were quite likely only survivals of ceremonies for transferring the disease to an animal, belief in which prevailed in the oldest times and still exists in some countries.

A hymn of the Atharva-Veda relates to the transference of a fever to a frog: "May the (takman) that returns on the morrow, he that returns on two (successive) days, the impious one, pass into this frog." The use of the hymn was supposed to be accompanied with the pouring of water on to a frog which was tied with blue and red thread. The fever being washed upon the frog is quenched by its coldness and moisture. Gregor and Black have both noticed the Scotch remedy for red-water in cows, which consisted in putting a live frog down the animal's throat, as one writer says, the larger the better. The eminent Marcellus long before had suggested the rubbing of a live frog against the bowels to cure gripes, and a case in which a live frog was put down the throat of a cow to remove intestinal obstructions, was reported to the writer of this paper in central New York,

in 1902.

Black notes a case in 1875, when the patient was advised to wear around his neck a string with which a toad had been hung to cure the quinsy. The Cornish custom was to hang a toad in the chimney over night and then use the string, and, according to London papers, this remedy was stil in use in 1893. The right foot of a frog wrapped in deerskin is noted as a preven tive of gout. A toad placed in the month of one having the whooping cough, and then allowed to depart, carries away the

cough with it. In Northamptonshire a toad was carried round the neck in a bag for bleeding at the nose. In Aberdeenshire they licked the eyes of live frogs to gain the power of curing diseased eyes by licking them. In Cheshire they held a frog inside the mouth of a child to cure thrush. A Bohemian charm for curing fever was by the use of a green frog caught at the tine of the morning dew on the day preceding that of St. George, but it must be sewed in a bag and hung on the neck without the patient having knowledge of what the bag contained. Nine times on nine days before sunrise the Lord's Prayer was then recited and the bag was thrown into the river without looking backward. Apparently this was a ceremony for transferring the fever to the animal, who, as a scapegoat, carries into the water the demon causing the sickness. Hind legs of toads were carried in bags in Kenelm Digby's time, and sold for seven shillings apiece to cure goitre. That a live frog administered to a dog destroyed the power of barking was recorded by Pliny, and in an English medical work sixteen centuries later.

The medicinal use of livers of toads and blood of frogs may be partially accounted for, perhaps, as Dr. White says, on the ground that they disgust the demon that torments the body, but many of the traditions connected therewith are probably to be traced to an old belief that everything by nature evil and poisonous carries with it the antidote to its own and possibly other evils and poisons. The American Indian compounded a mixture of the most horrible things known to him to poison his arrows with, which may or may not have been poisonous of itself, but which carried fear of death with it that sometimes, maybe, was quite as effectual in its results. A living toad carried with a person was said to be a foil to the bewitchment caused by the interment of a toad.

That handling a toad brings warts is an old and persistent assertion. It is found among the Cherokees, and quite generally through the United States. The belief ex