very explicit as to the aspect of the heavens required for different
stages of the process.] "It was pretended that if the offending weapon
could not be had, it would serve the purpose to anoint a wooden one made
like it." "This," says Bacon, "I should doubt to be a device to keep
this strange form of cure in request and use; because many times you
cannot come by the weapon itself." And in closing his remarks on the
statements of the advocates of the ointment, he says, "Lastly, it will
cure a beast as well as a man, which I like best of all the rest, because
it subjecteth the matter to an easy trial." It is worth remembering,
that more than two hundred years ago, when an absurd and fantastic remedy
was asserted to possess wonderful power, and when sensible persons
ascribed its pretended influence to imagination, it was boldly answered
that the cure took place when the wounded party did not know of the
application made to the weapon, and even when a brute animal was the
subject of the experiment, and that this assertion, as we all know it
was, came in such a shape as to shake the incredulity of the keenest
thinker of his time. The very same assertion has been since repeated in
favor of Perkinism, and, since that, of Homoeopathy.

The same essential idea as that of the Weapon Ointment reproduced itself
in the still more famous SYMPATHETIC POWDER. This Powder was said to
have the faculty, if applied to the blood-stained garments of a wounded
person, to cure his injuries, even though he were at a great distance at
the time. A friar, returning from the East, brought the recipe to Europe
somewhat before the middle of the seventeenth century. The Grand Duke of
Florence, in which city the friar was residing, heard of his cures, and
tried, but without success, to obtain his secret. Sir Kenehn Digby, an
Englishman well known to fame, was fortunate enough to do him a favor,
which wrought upon his feelings and induced him to impart to his
benefactor the composition of his extraordinary Powder. This English