drugs, seldom brought to
Europe on account of its great demand among the rulers of the East,
and its extreme rarity, was a nut of alleged extraordinary curative
properties--of such great value, that the Hindoo traders named it
_Trevanchere_, or the Treasure--of such potent virtue, that Christians
united with Mussulmen in terming it the Nut of Solomon. Considered a
certain remedy for all kinds of poison, it was eagerly purchased by
those of high station at a period when that treacherous destroyer so
frequently mocked the steel-clad guards of royalty itself--when
poisoning was the crime of the great, before it had descended from the
corrupt and crafty court to the less ceremonious cottage. Nor was it
only as an antidote that its virtues were famed. A small portion of
its hard and corneous kernel, triturated with water in a vessel of
porphyry, and mixed, according to the nature of the disease and skill
of the physician, with the powder of red or white coral, ebony, or
stag's horns, was supposed to be able to put to flight all the
maladies that are the common lot of suffering humanity. Even the
simple act of drinking pure water out of a part of its polished shell
was esteemed a salutary remedial process, and was paid for at a
correspondently extravagant price. Doubtless, in many instances it did
effect cures; not, however, by any peculiar inherent sanative
property, but merely through the unbounded confidence of the patient:
similar cases are well known to medical science; and at the present
day, when the manufacture and sale of an alleged universal heal-all is
said to be one of the shortest and surest paths that lead to
fortune--when in our own country 'the powers that be' encourage rather
than check such wholesale empiricism--we cannot consistently condemn
the more ancient quack, who having, in all faith, given an immense sum
for a piece of nut-shell, remunerated himself by selling draughts of
water out of it to his believing dupes. The extraordinary history of
the nut, as it was then told, assisted to keep up the delusion. The
Indian merchants said, that there was only one tree in the world that
produced it; that the roots of that tree were fixed, 'where never
fathom-line did touch the ground,' in the bed of the Indian Ocean,
near to Java, among the Ten Thousand Islands of the far East; but its
branches, rising high above the waters, flourished in the bright
sunshine and free air. On the topmost bough dwelt a griffin, th