us all the evils which arise from indigestion. A doctrine very reconcileable with Huarte's philosophy.

It is a thing certain, says that author, that there are to be found some dispositions in a man's body which the Devil coveteth with so great eagerness, as to enjoy them he entereth into the man in whom they are found, wherethrough he becometh possessed but the same being corrected and changed by contrary medicines, and an alteration being wrought in these black, filthy and stinking humours, he naturally comes to depart. This is plainly discerned by experience; for if there be a house great, dark, fonl, putrified, melancholick, and void of dwellers, the Devils soon take it up for their lodging, But if the same be cleansed, the windows opened, and the sunbeams admitted to enter, by and by they get them packing, and especially if it be inhabited by much company, and that there be meetings and pastimes and playing on

musical instruments. The Devil is so slovenly, so melancholick, and so much an enemy to things neat, chearful, and clear, that when Christ entered into the region of Genezaret, St. Matthew recounteth how certain Devils met him in dead carcases which they had caught out of their graves, crying and saying, Jesus, thou son of David, what hast thou to do with us, that thou art come before hand to torment us? we pray thee, that if thou be to drive us out of this place where we are, thou wilt let us enter into that herd of swine which is yonder. For which reason the holy Scripture termeth them unclean Spirits. Huarte, Eng. transl. P. 92. 94.

211. Valentine Gretrakes.

It is Henry* More who tells us of his civet-like odour of complection. He is

* See vol. I, p. 144, where I had supposed it was Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

explaining how an enthusiast may cure some diseases by touching or stroking the part diseased, yet it would be no true miracle,..and the perverse ingenuity with which he supports a true opinion by false reasoning, is very characteristic of this curious writer. "There may be very well, (he says) a sanative and healing contagion, as well as morbid and venomous. And the spirits of melancholy men being more massy and ponderous, when they are so highly refined and actuated by a more than ordinary heat and vigour of the body, may prove a very powerful elixir, Nature having outdone the usual pretences of chemistry in this case." Enthusiasmus Triumphatus, Sect. 58.

"This very place," he adds in the Scholia to this Treatise, "I shewed to that excellent person, Mr. Boyle, at London, as I was talking with him in a Bookseller's shop, being asked by him what I thought of the cures of Valentine Gretrakes, with the fame of which all

places rung at that time. I told him my opinion was fixed about those cures some years before they were performed: For that one Coker, (for that was the name of the person whose remarkable way of curing or healing I now mention,) by a very gentle chafing or rubbing of his hand, cured diseases ten years ago, to the best of my remembrance, as Gretrakes did, though not so many and va rious, for this cured cancers, scrofulas, deafness, king's evil, head-ach, epilepsie, fevers though quartan ones, leprosy, palsy, tympany, lameness, numbness of limbs, stone, convulsions, ptysick, sciatica, ulcers, pains of the body, nay, blind and dumb in some measure, and I know not but he cured the gout. Of all which cures Gretrakes wrote a book, attested by good hands, to which, for brevity's sake I refer the reader. But it is in general to be observed, that although he cured all throse diseases, yet he did not succeed in all his applications, nor were

his cures always lasting. Moreover it was not only his haud that had this healing quality, but even his spittle and his urine, whereby you may the more easily discover that cures have relation to the temperament of the body, Besides, it was well known that his body as well as his hand and urine, had a sort of herbous aromatic scent: though that may be no certain sign of a sanative faculty.

"This I can speak by experience of myself, especially when I was young, that every night, when going to bed I unbuttoned my doublet, my breast would emit a sweet aromatick smell, and every year after about the end of winter, or approaching of the spring, I had usually sweet herbous scents in my nostrils, no external object appearing from whence they came. Nay, my urine would smell like violets, which made me very much to wonder at the mistake of that famous physician and philosopher Henricus Regius, That no body's urine.