NOTES 325

easter, 2) white—thorn, as equivalents. Not in Pliny. **Barberries
for the liver!!, says Burton.

44 Theriac (Greek 040, wild animal) is an electuary prepared
with honey, originally used for the bites of wild animals. This
composite remedy was described in a poem by Andromachus of
Crete, physician to Nero. His formula gave 45 ingredients, and
the number increased, so that some later theriacs had over 100;
that of the Code Francais has 56; opium is a regular ingredient.
Theriace was sometimes called Venice Treacle, & word derived from
theriaec.  For centuries, it was prepared in public with elaborate
ceremonies.  Pliny XX. 264 describes & more simple (her£aca,
made of herbs and wine, the formula for which was inscribed in
verse in the temple of Aesculapius on the island Cos.

4 Mühridatum was so called after Mithridates VI, King of
Pontus (120—63 &. c.), himself &a herbalist, whose physician Krateuas
wrote a Herbal with, for the first time, drawings öf all the plants. The
king made himself immune against poisons by small daily doses, so
effectively that when he tried to kill himself, he failed, and a slave
had to kill him with a sword.  He left medical commentaries which
his conqueror Pompey had translated into Latin by his freedman,
Lenaeus.  Pliny XX V . 3 says this work was of profit to the Romans.
Mithridate had 37 ingredients, according to Celsus V. 23, who
gives the formula; it was called a panacea. *Mithridatism' is &
term sometimes used for the habit of taking toxic drugs that make
one immune against an ordinary dose.

45 Dried vipers were much used in pastilles (troches), and live
female vipers, bottled in Canary wine in the spring and left to stand
for six months, made an infallible drink for cutaneous eruptions
and even for confirmed leprosy according to James, Medicinal
DichWionary, who strongly recommends three kinds. Viper!s fat
was an ingredient in the famous (Vigo plaster!, for syphilis, of which
Vigo gives the formula in his treatise. 'This plaster is still used,
though the formula is much modified. / *^We kill the viper and make
treacle of him', says Bishop Taylor.

^*Cypht (otherwise kyphi, qwuift, or cwifi) are described by
Dioscurides I. 25, &92x, as aromatic confections devised by the Egyp—
tian priests and administered in wine as a draught in antidotes and
for asthma; **Tchet oil was an ingredient in the famous incense called
Kyphi"', says Wallis Budge, 7he Divine Origin of the Craft of the
Herbalist, 1928, p. 30. 'This work is a most useful brief summary
of the earliest Oriental Herbals, and shows ^*how Sumerian, Egyp—
tian, Babylonian and Assyrian Herbals formed the foundation of
the Greek Herbals, and how these in turn were translated into
Syriae and Arabic and so became known throughout Western
Asia^ (Preface). Dioscurides gives one of the many existing
prescriptions for the preparation of Kwphi.

48 For his opinion of the value of the emerald as a remedy, see
p. 233.

49 For this theory, derived from Arabian writers, of the depura—
tive elimination of menstrual blood, see above, p. 75.