tint, to be striated, and to yield a musky odour. They were further expected to strike a green colour when rubbed on white paper which had previously been prepared with chalk.
The alchemists prepared a mineral bezoar, by treating butter of antimony with nitric acid. They got antimonious acid. The livers and hearts of vipers dried in the sun furnished the animal bezoar; and a stony concretion sometimes found in cocoa-nuts, and in high repute among the Malays as a medicine was called vegetable bezoar or calatippe.
The importance attached to bezoar stones in the seventeenth century, and, incidentally, their liability to falsification, are illustrated by a minute in the records of the Society of Apothecaries, dated May 25th, 1630, as follows:—
Pretended bezar stones sent by the Lord Mayor to be viewed
were found to be false and counterfiet and fitt to be destroyed and
the whole table [or as we should say, the Court] certified the same
to the Lord Mayor.
A little later, it appears that the case of these stones
was tried at the Guildhall, a jury composed partly of
druggists and partly of apothecaries being empannelled.
This jury confirmed the verdict of the table of apothecaries
and the bezoar stones were duly burnt.
Three bezoar stones were sent by the Shah of Persia as a royal gift for his brother the Emperor Napoleon, only a hundred years ago.
Ambrose Paré, who wrote in the later half of the sixteenth century, was one of the few eminent doctors who discredited the alleged medicinal virtue of the bezoards. He was surgeon to Charles IX, and relates that one day, the king being at Clermont, a Spanish nobleman brought him a bezoar stone which he assured
