looked
upon as a celestial manna rained down upon these latter ages for the good
and preservation of the lives of men, and having heard it spoken of by
men of understanding for an admirable drug, and of infallible operation;
I, who have ever thought myself subject to all the accidents that can
befall other men, had a mind, in my perfect health, to furnish myself
with this miracle, and therefore gave order to have a goat fed at home
according to the recipe: for he must be taken in the hottest month of all
summer, and must only have aperitive herbs given him to eat, and white
wine to drink. I came home by chance the very day he was to be killed;
and some one came and told me that the cook had found two or three great
balls in his paunch, that rattled against one another amongst what he had
eaten. I was curious to have all his entrails brought before me, where,
having caused the skin that enclosed them to be cut, there tumbled out
three great lumps, as light as sponges, so that they appeared to be
hollow, but as to the rest, hard and firm without, and spotted and mixed
all over with various dead colours; one was perfectly round, and of the
bigness of an ordinary ball; the other two something less, of an
imperfect roundness, as seeming not to be arrived at their, full growth.
I find, by inquiry of people accustomed to open these animals, that it is
a rare and unusual accident. 'Tis likely these are stones of the same
nature with ours and if so, it must needs be a very vain hope in
those who have the stone, to extract their cure from the blood of a beast
that was himself about to die of the same disease. For to say that the
blood does not participate of this contagion, and does not thence alter
its wonted virtue, it is rather to be believed that nothing is engendered
in a body but by the conspiracy and communication of all the parts: the
whole mass works together, though one part contributes more to the work
than another, according to the diversity of operations; wherefore it is
very likely that there was some petrifying quality in all the parts of
this goat. It was not so much for fear of the future, and for myself,
that I was curious in this experiment, but because it falls out in mine,
as it does in many other families, that the women store up such little
trumperies for the service of the people, using the same recipe in fifty
several diseases, and such a recipe as they will not take themselves, and
yet triumph when th