and to each was attributed special properties. The heliotrope, or blood-stone, now worn in seal rings so much, " stancheth blood, driveth away poisons, preserveth health; yea, and some write that it provoketh raine and darkeneth the sunne, suffering not him that beareth it to be abused. A topaze healeth the lunaticke person of his passion of lunacie. The garnet assisteth sorrow, and recreates the heart; the crysolite is the friend of wisdom and enemy of folly. The great quack, Dr. Dee, had a lump of cannel-coal that could predict." In the fancied resemblances found among talismans none are extraordinary than those associated with color. Because Avicenna had said that red corpuscles moved the blood, red colors must be employed in diseases of that fluid; and even in 1765 the Emperor Francis I. was wrapped up in scarlet cloth to cure the small-pox and so died. Flannel dyed nine times in blue was good for scrofula. Among amulets that of Pope Adrian was curious: it consisted of dried toad, arsenic, tormentil, pearl, coral, hyacinth, smaragd, and tragacanth, and was hung around the neck, and never removed. The arsenic amulets worn during the plague in London were active on the principle that one poison would prevent the entry of another. Ashmole's cure for ague was to take, early in the morning, a good dose of elixir, and hang three spiders round his neck, "which drove it away, God be thanked."

Necklaces and bracelets were originally not articles of ornament, but real amulets; those found of Egyptian mummies are carved with characters relating to the future of the body, the scarabæus, or tumble-bug, typifying symbolically by his performances the resurrection.Delusions in Medicine.

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RAPER, JOHN WILLIAM, an American physiologist and chemist; born at St. Helens, near Liverpool, England, May 5, 1811; died at Hastings-on-the-Hudson, N. Y., January 4, 1882. He received his early education in a Wesleyan school, studied natural science and the higher mathematics under private teachers, and then went to the University of London to study chemistry and medicine. In 1833 he came to the United States — most of his family having preceded him and entered the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1836. He was soon appointed to the chair of Chemistry and Physiology in Hampden Sidney College, Va., in 1839, to that of Chemistry and Natural History in the University of the City of New York, and in 1841 became Professor of Chemistry in the University Medical College. He was afterward President of the scientific and medical department of the University. He was a contributor to the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Journals, and to the American Journal of Science and Arts. Among his works are a Treatise on the Forces which Produce the Organization of Plants (1844), a Text-Book on Chemistry (1846); Human Physiology, Statistical and Dynamic (1856), History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1862); Thoughts on the Future Civil Policy of America (1865); History of the American Civil War (1867-70); History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874); Scientific Memoirs (1876).

THE DECLINE OF THE GREEK MYTHOLOGY.

Whenever man reaches a certain point in his mental progress he will not be satisfied with less than an application of existing rules to ancient events. Experience has taught him that the course of the world to-day is the same as it was yesterday; he unhesitatingly believes that this will also hold good for to-morrow. He will not bear to contemplate any break in the mechanism of history; he will not be satisfied with a mere uninquiring faith, but insists upon having the same voucher for an old fact that he requires for one that is new. Beforc the face of History Mythology cannot stand. The operation of this principle is seen in all directions throughout Greek literature after 670 B. C., and this the more strikingly as the time is later. The national intellect became more and more ashamed of the fables it had believed in its infancy. Of the legends, some are allegorized, some are modified, some are repudiated. The great tragedians accept the myths in the aggregate, but decline them in particulars; some of the poets transform or allegorize them; some use them ornamentally, as graceful decorations. It is evident that between the educated and the vulgar classes a divergence is taking place, and that the best men of the times see the necessity of either totally abandoning these cherished fictions to the lower orders, or of gradually replacing them with something more suitable. Such a frittering away of sacred things was, however, very far from meeting with public approbation in Athens itself, although so many people in that city had reached that state of mental development in which it was impossible for them to continue to accept the national faith. They tried to force themselves to believe that there must be something true in that which had been believed by so many great and pious men of old, which had approved itself by lasting so many centuries, and of which it was by the common people asserted that absolute demonstration could be given. But it was in vain; intellect had outgrown faith. They had come into that condition to which all men are liable