body, and give strength to the decay of nature.
"Take the heart and liver of the fish and make a smoke, and the devil
shall smell it and flee away." During the plague at Marseilles, which
Belort attributed to the larvae of worms infecting the saliva, food, and
chyle; and which, he says, "were hatched by the stomach, took their
passage into the blood, at a certain size, hindering the circulation,
affecting the juices and solid parts." He advised amulets of mercury to
be worn in bags suspended at the chest and nostrils, either as a
safeguard, or as means of cure; by which method, through the
_admissiveness_ of the pores, effluvia specially destructive of all
venomous insects, were received into the blood. "An illustrious prince,"
Belort says, "by wearing such an amulet, escaped the small-pox."

Clognini, an Italian physician, ordered two or three drachms of crude
mercury to be worn as a defensive against the jaundice; and also as a
preservative against the noxious vapours of inclement seasons: "It
breaks," he observes, "and conquers the different figured seeds of
pestilential distempers floating in the air; or else, mixing with the
air, kills them where hatched." By others, the power of mercury, in
these cases, has been ascribed to an elective faculty given out by the
warmth of the body, which draws out the contagious particles. For,
according to this entertained notion, all bodies are continually
emitting effluvia, more or less, around them, and some whether they are
internal or external. The Bath waters, for instance, change the colour
of silver in the pocket of those who use them. Mercury produces the same
effect; Tartar emetic, rubbed on the pit of the stomach, produces
vomiting. Yawning and laughing are infectious; so are fear and shame.
The sight of sour things, or even the idea of them, will set the teeth
on edge. Small-pox, itch, and other diseases, are contagious; if so, say
they, mercurial amulets bid fair to destroy the germ of some complaints
when used only as an external application, either by manual attrition,
or worn as an amulet. But medicated or not, all amulets are precarious
and uncertain, and in the cure of diseases are, by no means, to be
trusted to.

The Barbary Moors, and generally throughout the Mahommedan dominions,
the people are strikingly attached to charms, to which, and nature, they
leave the cure of almost every disorder; and this is the most strongly
impressed upon them from their belief