sailors, when they reach the place where they
are, fetch them out secretly and by night,
then carry them to the ship and conceal them
there, that they may not be seized ; because
certainly the Egyptians would not suffer
their removal. ln the purchase of mummy
care must be taken that too much of the
powder is not bought with it ; also, when it
is bought in large pieces, that they do not
consist of mere dry bone, but that the bone
be also nicely fat and have flesh on it, and be
full of marrow ; for in the dead bones there
is no virtue, and the powder is not always
pure, but mixen with sand and bone, for
which reason it will need purification."

Johann Jacob Marx publishing, fifteen
years afterwards, in the same town, another
book of drugs, or Material-Kammer, copied
part of his predecessor's article on mummy,
and added notice of another sort of the same
drug, having first stated that a manufactured
article had been introduced from France and
Wallachia, but that this was not held in
great esteem. " There is also a rare mumia
described in the Canary Island, Teneriffe,
where there are shown to strangers by the
inhabitants themselves various caves in which
the old dwellers upon this island, before the
Spaniards mastered it, laid aside their dead
embalmed in a particular manner. But they
are all sewn up in buckskins, and the shrouds
in which they lie are all of buckskin. Most
of the bodies are still whole, with the eyes
closed; the hair, ears, nose, teeth, lips, and
beard yet undestroyed. Some stand upright,
others are lying upon wooden beds. They
are light as if they were of straw, the nerves
and veins may clearly be distinguished in
their limbs when broken. Of this people,
however, few knew the art of embalming,
but only a class that did not make itself
common, but lived apart from the rest, as if
they were their priests. Since the Spaniards
became masters of the island, this race and
its art have disappeared. The mummy must
be black or grey, of little weight, and fleshy."

A book of high character was published in
France at the conclusion of the seventeenth
century, the General History of Drugs, by
Monsieur Pomet, chief apothecary to the
King. It was translated into English in the
year seventeen hundred and twelve, published
in London, with many plates, and inscribed
to Dr. Sloane. In this book Monsieur Pomet
expressed great indignation at the spirit of
adulteration that had crept into the mummy
trade. It was as hard then as now to get
one's drugs in any reasonable state of purity.

"We may daily," he says, " see the Jews
carrying on their rogueries as to these
mummies, and after them the Christians;
for the mummies that are brought from
Alexandria, Egypt, Venice, and Lyons, are
nothing else but the bodies of people that die
several ways, whether buried or unburied,
that are afterwards embowelled and have
their several cavities filled with the powder,
or rather sweepings of myrrh, caballine aloes,
bitumen, pitch and other gums, and then
wound about with a cere-cloth stuffed with
the same composition. The bodies being thus
prepared, are put into an oven to consume all
their moisture, and being likewise well dried,
they are brought and sold here for true
Egyptian mummies to those who know no
better."  Monsieur Pomet adds an old story
of the Sieur Guy de la Fontaine, King's
Physician, who being at Alexandria in Egypt,
went to see a Jew in that city who traded in
mummies, that he might have ocular
demonstration of what he had heard so much of.
Accordingly, when he came to the Jew's
house, he desired to see his commodity, which
he having obtained with some difficulty, the
Jew at last opened his storehouse, and showed
him several bodies, piled one upon another.
Then, after a reflection of a quarter of an
hour, he asked him what drugs he made use
of, and what sort of bodies were fit for his
service ? The Jew answered him, " That as
to the dead he took such bodies as he could
get, whether they died of a common disease
or of some contagion ; and as to the drugs,
that they were nothing but a heap of several
old drugs mixed together, which he applied
to the bodies ; which, after he had dried in
an oven, he sent into Europe ; and that he
was amazed to see the Christians were lovers
of such filthiness."

They were not lovers of that only. Man's
skull was only a hundred and fifty years ago
known widely as a specific for epilepsy, " taking
of the crude powder rasped from the fresh bone
of the skull one scruple or two in any proper
spirituous liquor." The English druggists
were at that time noted for the exhibition in
their shops of human skulls with mossy
tops, the moss growing sometimes upon the
dead skull being regarded as a sovereign cure
for many ills. " The English druggists," wrote
Monsieur Pomet, ''generally bring these heads
from Ireland; that country having been
remarkable for them ever since the Irish
massacre. You may see in the druggists' shops
of London these heads entirely covered with
moss; and some that have only the moss
growing on some parts." Such heads of the
dead Irishman were also exported into
Germany, where they were used in the
manufacture of a famous sympathetic ointment.

But to return to the medicinal mummies;
there was one sort of which mention has not
yet been made, the white mummies. White
mummies were the bodies of men wrecked on
the coast of Africa, which lay unburied,
shrivelled and dried in the hot sands. Lusty
men, it was said, after they have lain there
some time, weigh not above thirty pounds,
and are in a condition to be kept for ever.
These mummies were little used in medicine,
because they were very dear, and had
little or no virtue in them.

The genuine mummy was not only
employed in medicine, but also worked up with