and so forth.
To animals amusing habits and human characteristics as well as occult virtues were sometimes ascribed by the encyclopedists. Thus in describing the lion Albert devotes half his space to the noble and genial personality of the king of beasts, and to discrediting scientific scandal about the wiles of the lioness to conceal her amours with the leopard. Then we come to marvelous virtues. A man anointed with lion's fat puts every animal to flight. A diet of lion's flesh is good for paralytics. Garments wrapped in a lion's skin are secure from moths. If the skin of a wolf is left near the skin of a lion, the hair soon falls out from the wolf-skin. The tooth of a lion, suspended around a boy's neck before he loses his first teeth, protects him from toothache when the second teeth appear. Lion's fat should be used in unguents to remove blotches from the skin. Cancer may be cured by an application of lion's blood. Drinking some of a lion's gall cures jaundice. Eating its brain is a cure for madness.
If the encyclopedists attribute marvelous medicinal virtues to individual things, the medical treatises proper prefer elaborate concoctions. Sometimes the ingredients of these formidable mixtures might excite no surprise if administered separately, but the multiplicity and diversity of their combination seems strange indeed. Sometimes the recipes are utterly fantastic. Bernard Gordon assures us that for cure of eye-troubles "God even to these times has never vouchsafed to reveal a better remedy" than a combination in varying amounts of mountain willow, majoram, eufragia, celidonia, fennel, ginger, spikenard, pepper, gariofil, thucia, Persian gum, ass's milk, aloes wood, the gall of an eagle, a hawk and a mountain goat, balsam and honey. Of these ingredients
those that need pulverizing are to be pulverized; those that ought to be shaken well are to be well shaken; those that should be reduced to liquid form are to be liquefied. Then, if it is summer time, they should for forty days be mixed in the hot sun, and stirred daily. And if it be winter, let the mixture be prepared with cinders, where the heat is about that of a sitting hen; and let it be stirred and kept in a glass vessel, and dropped into the eyes; and it is of so great virtue that it enables decrepitude to read small letters without eye-glasses.
Thus in the midst of a superstitious recipe we get evidence of a scientific invention.
Even the experiments of medieval men were affected by this belief in occult virtues, and sometimes resembled the tricks of magic more than the scientific procedure of a modern laboratory. Roger Bacon advocates experimental science at considerable length, but he calls the following an experiment.
