fowl, veal, or mutton, prepared in the same way, and as to the salt, he was sure that the salt of hartshorn or any other animal salt would answer just as well.
The vipers employed for medicine were the common vipers, which in this country are usually called adders (Vipera communis).
A common recipe for viper broth was to boil together a chicken with a middling-sized viper from which the head, skin, and entrails had been removed. These made a quart of good broth.
Mummies.
The employment of mummies in medicine does not seem to have been very ancient, nor did it become permanent. Who introduced it is not known. Ephraim Chambers in his Cyclopœdia (1738) says, "Mummy is said to have been first brought into use in medicine by the malice of a Jewish physician, who wrote that flesh thus embalmed was good for the cure of divers diseases, and particularly bruises, to prevent the blood's gathering and coagulating." Pomet also says that a Jewish physician had written about the medicinal value of mummy, but he does not suggest that he had recommended it out of malice.
The trade in mummies was evidently in the hands of the Jews and Armenians at the time when Pomet wrote, and, according to him, the fading popularity of mummy as a medicine was the result of the rogueries practised by these Jews. He tells of a Guy de la Fontaine, the King's physician, who, when visiting in Egypt, went to see a Jew in Alexandria who traded in mummies, and after some difficulty was admitted into the Jew's ware-*house, where he saw several bodies piled one upon another. "After a reflection of a quarter of an hour he
