PERPETUAL YOUTH.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue XVIII, 3 November 1894, Page 415

PERPETUAL YOUTH.

Few books attained to greater household popularity in the latter half of the 16th century than this notable collection of Don Alexis, done into English by William Warde. The first ‘ secret’ which is neither more nor less than • the manner and secrete to conserve a man’s youth, and to holde back old age,’ attested by actual experiment on • an old man of three score and ten years, all withered with age, of a very evil complexion, and subject to divers kinds of diseases, who was altered and changed as unto the age of six or eight and twenty years.’ No reasonable man would expect this sort of thing to be done in a minute ; accordingly, you set about it in a leisurely way, collecting dew on fine May mornings that is fallen upon • rosemarie, barrage, and other good herbs (sage only excepted), for that under sage certain venomous beasts are wont to assemble, which infect and poyson it with their breath.’ A good many little things have next to be got together, as sugar, manna, honey, quinces, agaria, roses, fumitory, hope, March violets, and aloes. An ounce of small fine pearls is an important item, dissolved in lemon juice and added to a like quantity of red coral, mixed with blue vitriol, and well burned in a close pot. The mixture must next be made * slab and good ’ by processes too numerous to mention, and a spoonful may then be taken two or three times a week *in half a glassful of the milk of a

woman, new brought to bed of a man childe.’ The whole secret is redolent of the perfume of some old-fashioned garden, and might well make a man young again merely in the preparation. The same cannot be said of a recipe for making * an oyle of a red dog, by the mesne whereof I have healed a Friar of S. Onofres, who had by the space of twelve yeares a lame and drie withered arm like a stick.’ There are those who would find the infirmity more tolerable than association in the following process : You take a young dog ot red hair and you keep him three days without meat. Then you mercifully strangle him with a cord. Meantime you boil a kettle of oil on the fire, and put your dog in whole or in pieces, no matter how, so that he be all there with the skin and the hair. You are now to take scorpions to the number of four score or a hundred, and go through much the same process, omitting the strangling. You add a few more creeping things which need not be specified, a handful of & John’s Wort, three tortoise (if yon can get them) that live on the land and not in the water, seven ounces of * gambon ’ of a hog, and to complete all, a pound of flesh from the hinder thighs of an ass. It has * infinite virtues,’ and is a sure cure for the gout.