I don't wonder then in the least that, before
now, miraculous curatives like magic rings
have been worn, or that other marvellous
things, such as love-philters, have been
swallowed. It is only quite natural after
all that the Romans should have had
their amulets, and the Greeks their
phylacteries. It seems only a matter of course
that of yore such extraordinary note
should have been taken of Omens, and
that such wonderful regard should have been
paid to Numbers. People have evinced even
in the middle of this boasted nineteenth
century, in the scientific age of steam engines
and electric telegraphs, such an ineradicable
love of the marvellous, such an insatiable
thirst and hunger for deception—in the
preposterous matter of Table Turnings and
of Spirit Rappings—that we should fairly
have the tables turned against us, that our
sneers of incredulity would probably and
with justice be regarded as in common
parlance really not worth a rap, if directed
against the gullibility of our forefathers.
Against their search for watersprlngs by
means of the divining-rod or the dowsing-
withy—against their credence in the
significance of the palmy lines of chiromancy—
against their reverent faith in the second-
sight vouchsafed to the privileged adepts in
the pseudo-science of Deuteroscopia. With
the Mormon Creed still festering at Utah,
a social gangrene or political imposthume—
with many a sleight-of-hand and sleight-
of-ankle Medium, still procurable at a fee of
a few paltry guineas for the holding of a
séance in our drawing-rooms any evening
in the twelvemonth—I don't think that
we have any clear right to be supercilious
of the amiable wiseacres of a bygone
generation; or to wonder so very open-eyed at
the epochs when there were alchemists and
astrologers, enchanters and rosicrucians.

Did not the seed-germ of alchemy—buried
away and rotting—blossom into chemistry?
Remembering the jargon droned by alchemists
over their furnace fires—fires that were
notwithstanding kept thus perpetually kindled
by their hands, as the very Vestal lamps of
truth—may we not apply to them Pope's
wisely witty and familiar couplet:

     Fly to their altars, there they'll talk you dead;
     Yet fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Precisely thus by sheer force of their serene
and unblushing audacity have these reviled
pretenders to scientific authority often proved
to have been the pioneers to solid knowledge.

Conspicuous among the impostors who
have been really useful in their generation
is one of whose name I am but just now
reminded by a somewhat startling application
—to wit a request recently made by a sick
pauper for a bottle of Sir John Hill's
Essence of Waterdock.

A wonderful humbug was this vivacious
and versatile Sir John Hill. As Bardana Hill
he still survives to this day in a queer little
out-of-the-way corner of the world's
remembrance—so called by after times, as by his
own, in consideration of that tincture of
bardana, notable even among the many
imaginary remedies catalogued in the ridiculous
list of his spurious pharmacopœia. A
nonsensical repertory of anodynes including,
among other marvels, fever-few-tea as a
certain cure for headache, the daisy for
hectic fever, the leaves of camomile for
cholic, the flowers of camomile for ague—to
say nothing of Sir John's renowned and most
redoubtable pectoral balsam of honey, his
essence of sage, and his tincture of valerian.
Yet, outrageous quack though the man
indubitably was, Bardana Hill did some good
service in his day. Despite his absurd
exhibition of himself before the Royal Society,
decked out in tinsel-trappings, armed with a
dagger of lath, and bearing before him a shield
of pasteboard—the buffoon-censor was actually
the means of effecting, if not a total
reorganisation, a perceptible improvement in the
whole scheme of the Philosophical
Transactions. And—what is yet more extraordinary
in his regard—Sir John Hill, with all
his pretensions as a herb-doctor, truly and
literally did more than any other man of his
age towards the general development and
elevation of the science of botany, and in so
doing materially assisted the labours of the
naturalist. If he crowned himself with the
fool's cap-and-bells by publishing his
coxcombical pamphlet on the virtues of British
herbs, he secured to himself the gratitude of
all the after disciples of Linnæus by his
ingenious volume entitled Exotic Botany, and
afterwards by the most laborious and ornate of
his manifold literary productions, The
Vegetable System—a work published (plain) at
thirty-eight guineas, and (coloured) at one
hundred and sixty guineas—comprising within
it sixteen hundred four-guinea copperplate
engravings, extending over twenty-six folio
volumes, and portraying, by means at once of
the pen and the graver, no less than twenty-six
thousand different plants; everyone of them
copied from nature. No wonder the poor man
was ruined in the prosecution of this resplendent
enterprise. No wonder his health sunk
under the toil, and his life, at last, under the
failure of so very exhausting and ponderous
an undertaking.

Although Bardana Hill died of gout in the
sixtieth year of his age, on the twenty-
second of December, seventeen hundred and
seventy-five, such is the sense of vitality
about him produced in one's mind by the
scrambling records of his career, that he
appears somehow to have died in a manner
prematurely. Looking down the perspective
of those sixty years, I can hardly think of
him as having been born at Spalding in
seventeen hundred and sixteen, the son of
Mr. Theophilus Hill, a respectable clergyman
of Peterborough. It would seem more reasonable