numerous sorts of barks, roots, and herbs. These are all tied up in paper bags, on which the names are written in huge Chinese characters, and hung to the rafters of the room. There will be a mortar for crushing the drugs, which is made of iron in the shape of a boat. Into this the drugs are placed and crushed by rolling an iron wheel over them. Then there is a sort of cutting knife similar to that used for cutting straw for horses, which is used to cut the long weeds and barks that may be used in filling the prescriptions.
I saw a man filling a prescription which was composed of these various sorts of herbs. He carefully weighed out nine small heaps of a certain kind of herb, then he took another and weighed out the same number of piles, and so with a third sort, and so on till he had taken seven different kinds of herbs for each heap. Then he ordered that these should be taken and boiled three at a time in a bowl of water, thus making three doses of the entire lot. The bowl to be used was the common rice bowl, which holds about a quart. Strange to say, the man lived to tell the story. I have seen him many times since. Once our cook was seen taking some pills which were about the size of the end of your little finger. On being asked how many of them he took at a dose, he said that he was taking forty of them a day. One of our doctors in charge of one of our mission dispensaries told me recently of a girl that was brought to him to see if he could do anything for her eyes. She was entirely blind and her eyes very badly inflamed. On inquiring what they had been doing for her, he was told that her eyes had been
