Curiosities of Olden Times
on medical grounds, as also illustrated and elucidated by a wondrous discovery of philosophical chemistry, by Johan Heinrich Cohausen, M.D." 8vo, 1743.[1] This extraordinary book is adorned with an illustration, representing a pedagogue with a big nose, of Brobdingnagian proportions, keeping a mixed school of solemn little girls in jackets and aprons, and little prigs of boys in stocks, knee-breeches, coats, and wigs. One little boy, whose body is the size of the master's hand, sits reading a book on his right knee. On the ground at his left is a little maiden, just reaching to the top of the master's gaiters. A tiny dog is sitting up begging in the midst of a class in the middle distance; and in the background, behind a row of urchins who are not looking at their books, is a cat as big as any one of them, attacking a cage containing a singing bird. The whole of this strange work is built on a Roman inscription, said to have been found in the seventeenth century, and figured by Thomas Reinsius in his Syntagma Inscriptionum Antiquarum, and afterwards by Johann Keyser in his Parnassus Clivensis. This inscription, which is almost certainly not genuine, runs as follows:—
AESCULAPIO . ET . SANITATI .
- ↑ Original edition in Latin. A translation by John Campbell, LL.D., under the title of Hermippus Redivivus, London, 1743. A second edition much enlarged, under the title Hermippus Redivivus, or the Sage's Triumph over Old Age and the Grave, London, 1749, 8vo. We have seen also an Italian translation. That from which we quote is the German edition.
136
