because the cones of the pine tree resembled the front teeth, a gargle of vinegar in which they had been boiled was classed as a most efficacious remedy for the tooth-ache.

But the Doctrine of Signatures was surpassed in its absurdity by the remedies and ingredients prescribed for the cure of diseases generally. For consumption, pills of powder of pearls and whiteamber were prescribed; for this disease, and also for dropsy, water distilled from a peck of garden snails and a quart of earth worms was good; and cockwater was also recommended, and was made from the water in which a cock that had been chased, beaten, and plucked alive, had been boiled. For broken bones, the oil of swallows was prescribed; this was made by pounding twenty live swallows in a mortar a grey eel with a white belly, closed in an earthen pot, and buried alive in a dunghill, gave forth an oil which was good for the hearing; but the water of man's blood was the most famous and expensive of all the old remedies, and, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was "an invention whereof some princes had very great estimation." To make it a strong man of a warm nature, and twenty-five years old, was to be selected and well dieted for a month with meat, spices and wine; when the month had elapsed, veins in both his arms were to be opened and as much blood as he could bear taken from him. One handful of salt was to be added to six pounds of the blood, and this was to be seven times distilled, water being each time poured upon the residuum. This was to be taken three or four times a year, in doses of an ounce at time-health and strength. were supposed to be transferable by means of this mixture. May not the doctrine of transfusion have its origin in this custom ?

The practice of surgery was still more curious. It was necessary that a dangerous and difficult operation for the stone should be performed on Louis XIV., and several men afflicted with a like disease were carried to the house of Louvois, the Minister, where the chief surgeon Felix operated upon them before Fagon, the physician of the King. Most of those operated on died; and that the King might know nothing of his dangerous condition, or, of the means adopted to ensure certainty and safety in the cure, they were buried privately and by night. The operation was performed successfully upon the king; but Felix was so much agitated, that a nervous tremor settled upon him for life, and in bleeding a friend, on the day succeeding that upon

which the king had been so happily cured, he disabled the patient irreparably. When Felip de Utre went in search of the Omeguas from Venezuela, he was wounded by a spear, thrust through the ribs just beneath the right arm. A Spaniard, who was ignorant of surgery, undertook to cure him, and De Utre's coat of mail was placed upon an old Indian who was mounted on a horse; the amateur surgeon then drove a spear into the Indian's body, through the hole in the armour, and his body having been opened, the spear being still kept in the wound, it was discovered that the heart was uninjured-thus they assumed that De Utre's wound was not mortal, and being treated as if the wound were an ordinary one, he recovered. When Henry II. of France was mortally wounded by a splinter from a spear, in tilting with Montgomerie, which entered his visor and pierced his eye, the surgeons, for the purpose of discovering the probable injury done to the King, cut off the heads of four criminals, and thrust splinters into their eyes, as nearly at the same inclination as the fatal one had entered that of the King. Ambrose Paré's chapter on poisons, and his "Strange Cure for a Cut Off Nose," which we give in the words of his translator, Johnson, are remarkable :

"There was a Surgeon of Italy, of late years, which would restore or repair the portion of the Nose that was cut away, after this manner. He first scarified the callous edges of the maimed Nose round about, as is usually done in the cure of Hair-lips; he then made a gash or cavity in the muscle of the arm, which is called biceps, as large as the greatness of the portion of the Nose, which was cut away, did require; and into that gash or cavity so made, he would put that part of the Nose so wounded, and bind the patient's head to his arm, as if it were to a post, so fast that it might remain firm, stable and immovable, and not lean or bow any way; and about forty days after, or at that time when he judged the flesh of the Nose was perfectly agglutinated with the flesh of the arm, he cut out as much of the flesh of the arm, cleaving fast unto the Nose, as was sufficient to supply the defect of that which was lost, and then he would make it even, and bring it, as by licking, to the fashion and form of a Nose, as near as art would permit; and in the meanwhile he did feed his patient with panadoes, gellies, and all such things as were easy to be swallowed and digested. The flesh that is taken out of the arm is not of the like temperature as the flesh of the Nose is; also the holes of the restored Nose cannot be made as they were before."

Our space does not permit us to extend the subject farther, we have but glanced at it; to pursue it fully would be to fill some volumes. It is indeed but little to be wondered at,

that writers should exhaust their invention in search of novel ideas and topics, when making an attempt to fix themselves in the minds of men, and in the annals of literature. The selection of a strange or unusual subject, or a peculiar and remarkable mode of treating a common one, are but evidence of a desire to be remembered, and if not cherished as a genius, at least to be preserved in memory as a curiosity.

In a future paper we shall return to the consideration of this subject, and at greater length.

ART. V. THE ROMANCE OF LIFE: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO.

The Count of Monte Cristo. By Alexander Dumas. London': Chapman and Hall. 1847.

In resuming the subject to which we devoted a small portion of our last number, we proceed to detail the facts upon which the principal incidents of the very entertaining novel of Alexandre Dumas, ushered into public notice under the aristocratic title of "The Count of Monte Cristo," have been founded, and we feel it necessary here to premise, that we are not to be considered as imputing plagiarism, or a deficiency of imaginative or descriptive power, to the gifted Frenchman. who has won for himself an European reputation, second perhaps only to that transcendant genius, whose romances have made us familiar with the characters of former kings, the habits of bye-gone times, the chivalrous honour of knight or noble, and the plain, simple, natural, feelings of man in his humblest phase-the immortal Scott. We rather accord the ready meed of our praise to Dumas, for the ingenuity with which he adopts and adapts transactions of recent date to the construction of tales equally interesting as the choicest legends of the middle ages, and to which their greatest graces are imparted by the drapery of his imaginative power. He commences the novel to which we refer, by a scene in Marseilles, in which the arrival of a ship from a distant voyage is naturally described, and we rejoice with the hero of the tale upon his

perils past, his promotion gained, his old father comforted and relieved in bis necessity, and his intended bride visited and won to name the nuptial day; envy and malice are depicted at their baleful work, the ingenuous young sailor is involved in a false accusation, and consigned to hopeless captivity as a state prisoner. We are soon introduced to the "small cabinet of the Tuileries," and Louis the XVIII. is placed before us almost as distinctly as the lion-hearted Richard appears in Ivanhoe, or the crafty and cruel Louis the XI. in Quentin Durward. The first of the restored Bourbons was not a man calculated to win attention as a character; much had been done for him, nothing had been done by him, he was cunning but not sagacious, pedantic but not learned, confident but not courageous, fearful but not cautious, and we have all these points fully pourtrayed by Dumas, in his description of the scene which terminated by the announcement of Napoleon's return from Elba. It is not our intention to go farther with the narrative, we notice its early pages as justifying our previous remarks, and we now proceed to give the real story on which the remainder of the work is founded.

There lived at Paris in 1807, a shoemaker. of the description called chamber masters, named Francois Picaud, he was young, tolerably well-looking, and was on the point of effecting a matrimonial union with an agreeable, lively damsel, who possessed a very handsome dowry. Full of the excitement consequent on his expected good fortune, and arrayed in his best attire, he betook himself to a café kept by an acquaintance of his own rank and age, but who was more wealthy than the shoemaker, and was remarkable for an extraordinary jealousy of any neighbour who appeared to be thriving, or even likely to prosper.

Mathieu Loupian, who had as well as Picaud, been born at Nismes, kept a well frequented house of refreshment near the place Sainte Opportune. He was a widower having two children, and three persons all from the department of Gard, were peculiarly intimate with him.

"What now," said the host," ch! Picaud, but you are stylish, one would imagine that you were about to dance las -treilhas," (a popular ballet much practised in lower Languedoc.)

"I am on a better project, my friend Loupian, I am about to marry."

"And whom have you selected to plant your horns," demanded one of the company named Allut.

"Not the second daughter of your mother-in-law, for in that family they manage inatters so awkwardly that your antlers are breaking through your hat."

It required only a look to perceive a large rent in the old felt hat of Allut, so the laugh was on the side of the son of Crispin.

"But jesting apart," said the host, "who is your intended, Picaud ?"

"The damsel de Vigoroux." "Marguerite the rich ?"

"The same."

"But she has one hundred thousand franes," exclaimed the astonished host.

"I shall pay her for them in love and happiness, so friends I invite you to the ceremony which is to be performed at Saint Leu, and to the dance which we are to have in the evening, it is to be a bal champetre in les bosquets de Venus, rue aux Ours, at M. Latignac's, the fifth house, and in the gardens at its rere."

The four friends could scarcely reply in some common-place phrases, so much did the good fortune of their comrade surprize them.

"And when is the wedding?" asked Loupian.

"Next Tuesday, I shall expect you, I am now going to the Mayor and the Curé."

He departed, they looked at each other.

"What a lucky rascal!"

"He is a sorcerer."

"A girl so handsome and so rich."

"And to a cobbler."

"And in three days."

"I will wager that I stop his progress," said Loupian. "What are you about ?".

"Oh, just a joke."

"But what?"

"It is an excellent joke, the commissary is just coming here, I shall say that I suspect Picaud to be an agent of the English; you understand, he will be summoned and examined, he will be frightened at his position, and for at least eight days, the marriage will have to wait."