ll sour medicines are capable of impeding and
retaining; bitter medicines of causing looseness and warmth as well as
hardening; sweet possess the qualities of strengthening, of harmonising,
and of warming; acids disperse, prove emollient, and go in an athwart
direction; salt medicines possess the properties of descending; those
substances that are hard and tasteless open the orifices of the body and
promote a discharge. This explains the use of the five tastes."

Coming from Szechuen, we frequently met porters carrying baskets of
armadillos, leopard skins, leopard and tiger bones. The skins were for
wear, but the armadillos and bones were being taken to Suifu to be
converted into medicine. From the bones of leopards an admirable tonic
may be distilled; while it is well known that the infusion prepared from
tiger bones is the greatest of the tonics, conferring something of the
courage, agility, and strength of the tiger upon its partaker.

Another excellent specific for courage is a preparation made from the
gall bladder of a robber famous for his bravery, who has died at the
hands of the executioner. The sale of such a gall bladder is one of the
perquisites of a Chinese executioner.

Ague at certain seasons is one of the most common ailments of the
district of Chaotong, yet there is an admirable prophylactic at hand
against it: write the names of the eight demons of ague on paper, and
then eat the paper with a cake; or take out the eyes of the paper
door-god (there are door-gods on all your neighbours' doors), and devour
them--this remedy never fails.

Unlike the Spaniard, the Chinese disapproves of blood-letting in fevers,
"for a fever is like a pot boiling; it is requisite to reduce the fire
and not diminish the liquid in the vessel, if we wish to cure the
patient."

Unlike the Spaniard, too, the Chinese doctors would not venture to
assert, as the medical faculty of Madrid in the middle of last century
assured the inhabitants, that "if human excrement was no longer to be
suffered to accumulate as usual in the streets, where it might attract
the putrescent particles floating in the air, these noxious vapours
would find their way into the human body and a pestilential sickness
would be the inevitable consequence."

For boils there is a certain cure:--There is a God of Boils. If you have
a boil you will plaster the offending excrescence without avail, if that
be _all_ you plaster; to get relief you must at the same