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l was esteemed a salutary remedial process, and was paid for at a correspondently extravagant price. Doubtless, in many instances it did effect cures; not, however, by any peculiar inherent sanative property, but merely through the unbounded confidence of the patient: similar cases are well known to medical science; and at the present day, when the manufacture and sale of an alleged universal heal-all is said to be one of the shortest and surest paths that lead to fortune--when in our own country 'the powers that be' encourage rather than check such wholesale empiricism--we cannot consistently condemn the more ancient quack, who having, in all faith, given an immense sum for a piece of nut-shell, remunerated himself by selling draughts of water out of it to his believing dupes. The extraordinary history of the nut, as it was then told, assisted to keep up the delusion. The Indian merchants said, that there was only one tree in the world that produced it; that the roots of that tree were fixed, 'where never fathom-line did touch the ground,' in the bed of the Indian Ocean, near to Java, among the Ten Thousand Islands of the far East; but its branches, rising high above the waters, flourished in the bright sunshine and free air. On the topmost bough dwelt a griffin, that sallied forth every evening to the adjacent islands, to procure an elephant or rhinoceros for its nightly repast; but when a ship chanced to pass that way, his griffinship had no occasion to fly so far for a supper. Attracted by the tree, the doomed vessel remained motionless on the waters, until the wretched sailors were, one by one, devoured by the monster. When the nuts ripened, they dropped off into the water, and, carried by winds and currents to less dangerous localities, were picked up by mariners, or cast on some lucky shore. What is this but an Eastern version--who dare say it is not the original?--of the more classical fable of the dragon and the golden fruit of the Hesperides?
Time went on. Vasco de Gama sailed round the Cape of