coot The Bone called " Luz With notes on Medical Allusions in the Poems and Literary Remains of Samuel Butler, o . [New York], 1910. Repr. fr. New York Med. Jrnl., 23 July and 6 Aug., 1910- FROM THE LIBRARY OF SIR WILLIAM OSLER , Bart . OXFORD T /73, 4 -, / y If ^ t< ^-iZ t/U> CtZ. R &//*S//3Go Reprinted frotn the New York Medical Journal for July 23 and August 6, 19 to . THE BONE CALLED “ LUZ ” With Notes on Medical Allusions in the Poems and Lit- erary Remains of Samuel Butler. By Fielding H. Garrison, M. D., Washington, D. C., Assistant Librarian, Surgeon General’s Office. I. Among the many shafts of sarcasm which the author of Hudibras aimed at the Rump Parliament, the following, if it did not afford ‘daughter for a month and a good jest forever,” may well have fur- nished “argument for a week” among anatomists : The learned Rabbins of the Jews, Write there’s a bone which they call Luz I' the rump of man, of such a virtue, No force of nature can do hurt to ; And therefore at the last great day, All th’ other members shall, they say, Spring out of this, as from a seed All sorts of vegetals proceed ; From whence the learned sons of art Os sacrum justly style that part. Then what can better represent Than this Rump Bone, the Parliament, That after several rude ejections, And as prodigious resurrections, With new reversions of nine lives, Starts up and like a cat survives ? 1 Was the sacrum really the bone to which Butler refers, and if so how did it come by the name of 1 Butler, Hudibras. Part iii, canto ii, 1615-1630. Copyright, 1910, by A. R. Elliott Publishing Company. Garrison : Bone Called Luz . Luz? The term in question is derived from an old Aramaic word lus, meaning a nut or almond, and for this reason the hypothetical bone Luz was styled the Judenknochlein by the earlier German anatomists. The first reference to the name Luz in any work on anatomy is to be found in the Frank- furt edition of the Theatrum anatomicum of Caspar Bauhinus (1621) 2 and reads substantially thus: “Hebrew writers affirm that there is a bone in the human body just below the eighteenth ver- tebra which cannot be destroyed by fire, water, or any other element, nor be broken or bruised by any force ; this bone God shall, in his ex- ceeding wisdom, water with the celestial dew, whence the other members shall be joined to it, coalescing to form the body, which breathed upon by the Divine Spirit, shall be raised up alive. Such a bone they call Lus (not Luz) ; and its site, they say, is in the spine, from the eight- eenth vertebra to the femur. The author of this fable is the Rabbi Uschaia, who lived 210 A. D ; , about which time he wrote the book called Bercschit Rabbi , i. e., Glossa magna in Pentateuchum , from which many later Rabbins have taken this fiction. This bone, they say, can never be burned or cor- rupted in all eternity, for its ground substance is of celestial origin and watered with the heavenly dew wherewith God shall make the dead to rise, as with yeast in a mass of dough. They insist, more- over, that this bone will outlast all the others be- cause it does not assimilate food as they do and be- cause it is harder than the rest, being the funda- mental part of the body, from which it is built up. We read further that the Emperor Hadrian once asked Rabbi Joshua, the son of Chanin, how God 2 Lib. i, cap. 48, p. 167. The passage is not to be found in the earlier editions of Bauhinus. Garrison : Bone Called “Luz: would resurrect man in the world to come. He made answer: From the bone Luz in the spinal column. Whence Hadrian asked him how he came by this knowledge and how he could prove it. Whereupon Rabbi Joshua produced the bone so that he could see it. When placed in water it could not be softened ; it was not destroyed by fire, nor could it be ground by any weight ; when placed on an anvil and struck with a hammer, the anvil was broken in sunder but the bone remained intact. Munsterus says the Rabbins believe it to be located in the neck. But Vesalius writes that this ossicle is called Albadaran by the Arabs, resembling a chickpea in size and shape, and he questions whether, being notably hard, it may not be the ossi- cle between the two bones of the great toe. Hier- onymus Magius represents that, according to the Talmudists and other Hebrew commentators, the real bone is near the base of the skull, whether it be in the base itself or in the spine. To others it stands apart as the twelfth of the dorsal vertebrae, with which w.e incline the head and bend the neck. But what Joshua said to Hadrian the Emperor, no one can be persuaded to believe. For if bones, as Plato bears witness, are highly durable, neverthe- less we see daily that they can be pulverized by hammer or stones or reduced to ashes by fire ; as Plato testifies and the ancients point out, only the teeth can survive, being more enduring than the fire which subdues and effaces all other remains.” So far Bauhinus, who winds up with sundry superflu- ous slaps at the learned Rabbins for their credulity. The bone which Rabbi Ushaia locates “in fine octodecim vertebrannn,” which the other Rabbins describe variously as “os spince dor si in homine ” “os parvum in fine vertebrar'am^ ; and “Ins verte- brarurn ” which Baal Aruch describes as “like an 3 * Garrison ; Bone Called "Luz. almond” (simile amygdala:)' and Cornelius Agrippa as "the size of a shelled pea” (magnxtudine cuerts mundatiY was never found as such, and was held bv different anatomists to be the sacrum, the coccyx, the twelfth dorsal vertebra, one of the \\ ornuan bones in the skull, and one of the sesamojds of the great toe. We may first consider what has been said about it in relation to the spine. The notion that there were only eighteen verte- brae in the spine was one of the many errors that were perpetrated and propagated by the anatomists of the School of Salernum, who believed that the lumbar vertebra were part of the cauda equina. Thus Magister Ricardus, as cited by Hyrtl. 1 states conclusively: “Sunt autcm octodecim vertebra, vn collo sex, in dorso duodecim. From this mediae- val viewpoint 'the twelfth dorsal vertebra ( the raroe- teenth in all) should be the bone Luz, and the dder Retzius argues* that this idea might vert’ wriH have been entertained for the following reasons:: Even Galen had remarked upon this part eff tfhe as a sort of centre or turning point, abowe or Mow which the vertebral apophvses point in opposite dinemems. As we know, however, Gdten's anatomy., tased largely upon that of the lower animals wbadh he dissected, is onlv rudimentary arofl uiagrammaBr so far as man is concerned. But the ttwidfth dorsal m man does stand out from the other venteibtrae t® sat its inferior articular processes are convex an turned outward like those of the hinthar vertebra? below it, while the superior and inferior tulsoroes on its transverse processes correspond to the mam- •Cited by R cl fink in Dissert at io anatoms ai, ^ $4- ♦Cornriics Agrippa, De occulta philosophise Jib- i. ^ by HyrlL •HyrtL Das Arabische and Hebraische in der A mat-rime ,, 1879, 166. •A- Retrains. Om benet Lns CSwedisfo Sti»c4iboalm, 2 - 4 - 4 Garrison: Bone Called “Luz.” miliary and accessory processes of the lumbar ver- tebrae. The twelfth dorsal thus marks the point of transition between the dorsal and lumbar vertebrae, and, to show that Galen’s view is not unreasonable, Retzius gives cuts representing the spines of two mammals he had prepared — the fox and the jump- ing rat, or jerboa. In the former ( Canis zmlpes), the turning point of the spine is at the eleventh dor- sal, the spinous processes of the vertebrae above and below this bone pointing in opposite directions, while its costal and accessory processes are more uni- formly developed than in the other vertebrae. In the spine of the jerboa ( Dipus sagitta) the turn- ing point is at the tenth dorsal, above and below which the spinal apophyses again point in opposite directions. These comparative data show how Galen may have come to regard the twelfth dorsal as the centre of the spine and how the Aramaic tradition of the Luz may have become assimilated to this no- tion through the devout interest of the Jewish and Arabian physicians in the Galenical writings. The idea that the spine is the centre and origin of all the other bones and parts of the body is as old as Aristotle, who detected the foetal heart beats three days after the formation of the embryo and had probably seen the notochord and speculated as to its significance. Goethe’s well known theory that the bones of the skull are developed from the ver- tebrae is a variant of this idea and that Aristotle’s philosophic generalization should lead to romancing when it fell into tfce hands of the scribes is (Ret- zius thinks) perfectly natural and simple of expla- nation. I hat the author of Hudibrcts and other writers should have confounded the Luz with the os sacrum is also natural enough on account of the name given to the bone by the ancients, and for the reason that Garrison: Bone Called "Luc. the Talmudists, as cited by Bauhinus, assert that the bone extends anywhere from the eighteenth verte- bra to the femur (quod siturn dicunt in spina dorsi post decimam octavam vertebram ad os femoris). The usual derivation of the term os sacrum is from the Greek Updv otrreov (sacred bone), and this is commonly explained on the ground that the ad- jective lepos was often synonymous with (large). In aid of this theory Hyrtl 7 * cites Spige- lius, Greeds omnia magnet sacra vocabantur , and Cselius Aurelianus, Majora omnia . , vulgus sacra vocat. This derivation Hvrtl holds to be more cor- rect than the one which treats the Latin adjective sacrum as equivalent to detestandum, in this in- stance on account of the proximity of the bone to the rectum. Ramsbotham, 9 who once wrote a fa- mous treatise on obstetrics, holds that iep6v^ is a corruption of the Hebrew ‘ ‘Heron, ” signifying conception, gestation, parturition, from which he thinks is derived the name of the Goddess Hera, the Hellenic patroness of childbirth. In this view, our author claims, the Latins merely translated lap 6'; as sacrum without knowing its original meaning. In any case the bone which supports that part of the body which Lowell once called ‘‘the seat of the muses” (because in schoolboys knowl- edge was mainly imparted by the application of birchen rods to it) cannot be regarded as the true bone of Luz, because the latter was said to be small, almond shaped, and so hard as to be indestructible. The assumption that the Lua may be the coccyx might seem reasonable at first sight, on account of 7 Hyrtl. Lehrbuch der Anatomic des Menschen, 17. Auflage, Wien, 1884, p. 345. H Ibid, 346. For instance, in the Laws of the Twelve Tables: 4< Hon\o sacer is est, quern populus judicarit oh maleficium.” And also “ Patronus . si clienti fraudem fecerit, sacer esto.” »F. H. Ramsbotham. Obstetric Medicine and Surgery, London, 1867, 698. \ 6 \ Garrison: Bone Called “ Luz ” the small size of the latter, and this, indeed, was the current Mohammedan view. Thus, Sale says, in his introduction to the Koran: “Mohammed has taken care to preserve one part of the body, what- ever becomes of the rest, to serve as a basis to the future edifice. For he taught that a man’s body was entirely consumed in the earth, excepting only the bone called al ajb, which we name os coccygis or rump bone ; and as it was first formed in the human body, it will also remain incorruptible until the last day, as a seed from whence the whole is derived (Sale’s Koran, 1821, p. 104). The only objection to this view would seem to be the friable, destructi- ble nature of the coccyx itself, made up, as it is, of four rudimentary vertebrae; and the fact that the very derivation of its name ( xoxzu is from its resemblance to a cuckoo’s bill. So Vesalius writes '‘os cuculi, a similitudine rostri cuculi avis and from these considerations of size, shape, and rela- tive hardness, it is plain that the coccyx cannot be the true Luz. It was among the Wormian bones of the skull that the Luz was first sought for, according to Hyrtl, and of these the triangular Wormian at the junction of the sagittal and lambdoidal sutures was usually regarded as the true sacred bone, all sorts of mystic properties having been ascribed to it. Taken from the skull of an executed criminal, it was supposed to have marvelous curative proper- ties, notably in epilepsy, whence it was called the ossiculum antiepilepticum Paracelsi . 10 But as this particular Wormian is not always found in the cra- nium, and there may be as many as three hundred other Wormian bones, it became clear that the Luz must be sought elsewhere. i°Hyrtl, Das Arabische und Hebrdisclie in der Anatomie, pp. 167- > / Garrison : Bone Called Luz. There remains the assumption that the Luz might be one of the sesamoids of the great toe, and this theory can best be considered in the light of what Vesalius says about it. At the time V esalius wrote, the Jewish tradition had been pretty well filtered through Arabic sources and, in the drastic passage subjoined, he disposes of it with his usual lively scorn for anything savoring of superstition. Speak- ing of the sesamoid bones in the foot, Vesalius says I 11 “Another one of these bones is that which the magicians and followers of occult philosophv so often call to mind as being fashioned like a chick- pea, liable to no decay, and which, buried in the earth after death, will (they affirm) reproduce man like a seed on the day of the Last Judgment. This may perhaps be the bone on either side, but is more likely to be the exterior, which is somewhat like a shelled pea, if we think of the middle part [of the split pea] ; for on bringing both bones in apposition we should obtain a whole pea. Then the internal os- sicle is so large in men of great stature that a die might easily be made out of it. These bones dif- fer, however, from those noted by the Arabs in that they may be burned or broken like other bones, as well as in being surely liable to decay to some ex- tent, although of durable structure. But the dogma which asserts that man will be regenerated from this bone, of which we have just narrated the im- mense fiction, may be left for elucidation to those philosophers who reserve to themselves alone the right to free discussion and pronouncement upon the resurrection and the immortality of the soul. n Vesalius, De httmani corporis fabrica. Rasilese, 1543* P- I2 ^. The name Albadaran, to which Vesalius alludes, was always applied to the larger internal sesamoid of the great toe by the older anatomists, but Hvrtl holds that it is not good Arabic, being merely a fanciful term like Abracadabra, invented by the Cabbalists and Mystics, the occulti et tenebriosi philosophi, to whom Vesalius refers (Hyrtl, op. cit., p. 24 ). 8 Garrison : Bone Called “Lus.” And even on their account we should attach no im- portance whatever to the miraculous and occult powers ascribed to the internal ossicle of the right great toe, however much one may be concerned about it. At our public dissections and even as an amateur, we have often obtained a better supply of these bones than those truculent male strumpets of the Venetian horde, who to obtain the bone for pur- poses of comparison, as also the heart of an unpol- luted male infant [puernli virginis masculi ], lately killed a child, cut the heart from its living body, and were punished, as they richly deserved, for the foul- est of crimes. Moreover, this ossicle, called Alba- daran by the Arabs and the truly occult and obscure philosophers alluded to, is less known to actual stu- dents of anatomy than to certain superstitious men who are capable of likening the fourth carpal bone {quart urn brachialis os) to a chickpea/’ This pas- sage, a translation from the editio princeps of the Fabrica (Basle, 1543) was, on account of the ex- treme violence of its language, not a little pruned and condensed in later editions of Vesalius’s great treatise. But with the publication of the Fabrica, anatomy became a practical working science, and the bone of Luz and other anatomical mares’ nests were gradually relegated to the limbo of folklore. The legend survived for a span, as we find Bauhinus and Butler discussing it late in the seventeenth cen- tury. But the time did come when, as Hyrtl aptly concludes, die Fabel ist vergessen, die Worte sind verklungen “ 12 Readers who wish to pursue the Aramaic tradition further may consult with profit Rabbi Kohler’s learned and inter- esting paper in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, (viii, p. 219, ist col.), which contains many valuable references. Rabbi Kohler is inclined to think that the legend of the Luz may owe its origin to the ancient Egyptian rite of “burying the, spinal column of Osiris” at the close of the period of mourning for the god and prior to the celebration of his resurrection. 9 Garrison: Bone Called “Lnz.” II. Samuel Butler, the son of a Worcestershire farmer, was a striking example of the fact that a “decayed gentleman” is often a man educated out of his class. Of his actual schooling we know noth- ing beyond the fact of his undisputed scholarship, but his real education for life consisted in residences in various capacities at the houses of people of rank and station above his own. First, a page to a countess, he wound up his career as secretary to Lord Carbury and steward at Ludlow Castle, where the court met, which post he eventually resigned to marry for money. Circumstances like these had undoubtedly a great deal to do with the develop- ment of an innate satiric or sardonic disposition and the composition of the “immense lampoon” which gives Butler his name and fame in literature. For if the professed object of Hudibras was to ridi- cule the meddlesome pragmatism, the churlish hy- pocrisy and ungraciousness of Cromwellian Puri- tanism, its appearance (in 1663), four years after CromwelPs death, two years after the Restoration, was somewhat late in the day ; and with all respect for Butler’s satiric genius one leading motive that can be assigned for its publication, when the author was turned fifty, would seem to be a certain desire to please the great and to gain preferment and emolument thereby. 1 Praise of Hudibras is one of the commonplaces there ^be any doubt of this, witness the only lines in which lnitler has spoken out,” in the sense of leaving a personal record of his feelings: May he be damned who first found out that curse, To imprison and confine his thoughts in verse- To hang so dull a clog upon his wit. And make his reason to his rhyme submit Without this plague, I freely might have spent My happy days with leisure and content Had past my time as pleasantly away Slept all the night, and loitered all the day ” etc Garrison: Bone Called Luzr of literary criticism. Who can say anything new of a poem of which a great critic once claimed that “more than half the lines are got by heart" or of a writer who has been described as “a whole species of poets in one.” Fatally dull as some of Butler’s facile octosyllables may seem to us now, the best specimens of his satire are still keenly alive and in- tensely modern. Even the doggerel corduroy metre he employed, “framed so as to be the very voice of mocking laughter,” and the rhymes “which seem to chuckle and sneer of themselves,” still help out the fame which his critics assign him — as the supreme “artist in burlesque.” Medical interest in Butler centres in his remark- able learning and the quaint way in which he em- ploys it to ridicule quackery, humbuggery, and su- perstition. At this time of day it is difficult to say whether he was a sciolist or a grind, but it is certain that he had a unique power of assimilating some of the best knowledge of his time and employing it for his especial purpose in the lightest and most adroit manner. His Parthian arrows are of the kind described by Sainte Beuve — des fleches acerrees qui arrivent brusquement et sifflent encore — and such fine sarcasm and raillery were not reserved entirely for the Presbyterian elders and committeemen: “Grave synod men that were revered For solid face and depth of beard,” but the student of medical curiosities may be amused at such things as his gibe at the solemn nonsense of Roman soothsaying : “the roguery Of old aruspicy and augury, That out of garbages of cattle Presaged the events of truce or battle; i Garrison: Bone Called “Lus.” From flights of birds, or chickens pecking Success of greatest attempts would reckon,” his impish mockery at Paracelsus, spiritualist Kelly, and Cornelius Agrippa : “Bombastus kept a devil’s bird Shut in the pommel of his sword, That taught him all the cunning pranks Of past and future mountebanks. Kelly did all his feats upon That devil’s looking glass, a stone ; - Where playing with him at bo-peep, He solved all problems ne’er so deep. Agrippa kept a Stygian pug I’ the garb and habit of a dog, That was his tutor, and the cur Read to th’ occult philosopher, And taught him subtly to maintain All other sciences are vain,” or the arch way in which Hudibras assures the Lady that his capacity for keeping a secret is equal to that of the author of De secretis mulierum: “But if you doubt I should reveal What you intrust me under seal. I’ll prove myself as close and virtuous As your own secretary Albertus.” 1 he first medical reference of consequence that we encounter in Hudibras is the familiar passage about the ialiacotian operation (plastic reforma- tion of the nose) : “So learned Taliacotius from The brawny part of porter’s bum, Cut supplemental noses, which Would last as long as parent breech; But when the date of Nock was out Off . dropped the sympathetic snout”— Garrison: Bone Called “Luz” which speaks for itself. We may note, in passing, the current belief in a sympathetic relation between parts of bodies separated in space, as in Sir Kenelm Digby’s scorpion oil (opotherapy) and weapon salve (psychotherapy): “A scorpion's oil is said To cure the wounds the vermin made; And weapons dressed with salve restore And heal the hurts they gave before" ; not to mention the “Strange hermetic powder That wounds nine miles point blank would solder, By skilful chemist with great cost Extracted from a rotten post." Let us pass from these to the witty portrait of the empiric Ralph who went in for “judicial astrol- ogy” — “A deep occult philosopher. As learned as the wild Irish are, Or Sir "Agrippa, for profound And solid lying much renowned: He Anthroposophus and Flood And Jacob Behmen understood: Knew many an amulet and charm That would do neither good nor harm. He understood the speech of birds As well as they themselves do words : Could tell what subtlest parrots mean That speak and think contrary clean : What member ’tis of whom they talk When they cry Rope! and Walk, knave, zvalk! Garrison: Bone Called “Luz.” Find in the physiognomies O’ the planets all men’s destinies : Like them that took the Doctor’s bill, And swallowed it instead o’ the pill. They’ll feel the pulses of the stars To find out agues, coughs, catarrhs; And tell what crisis does divine The rot in sheep or mange in swine.” As a companion piece or pendant to this portrait there is another which has something of the homely, countrybred flavor of Jenner’s Signs of Rain — the sketch of Sidrophel, the Rosicrucian and . veterina- rian : “To whom all people, far and near, On deep importances repair ; When brass or pewter hap to stray, And linen slinks out of the way ; When geese and pullen are seduced, And sows and suckling pigs are chowsed ; When cattle feel indisposition And need th’ opinion of physician ; When murrain reigns in hogs or sheep, And chicken languish of the pip ; When yeast and outward means do fail, And have no power to work on ale, When butter does refuse to come, And love proves cross and humorsome: To him with questions and with urine, They for discovery flock, or curing.” Sidrophel, it seems, had his own peculiar psycho- therapy that could “Cure warts and corns with application Of medicines to th’ imagination ; Fright agues into dogs and scare With rhymes the toothache and catarrh.” PPjWPWBjWWiPBSM Garrison: Bone Called “Luz.” Then he knew how to “Kill pigs and geese with powdered glass, And make it for enchantment pass ; With cow itch meazle like a leper, And choke with fumes of Guinea pepper ; Make lechers and their punks with dewtry [ Datura- stramonium !] Commit fantastical advowtry." A contemporary of the Hooks and Leeuwen- hoeks, he was an expert in parasitology, knowing “How many different specieses Of maggots breed in rotten cheeses ; And which are next of kin to those Engendered in a chandler's nose; Or those not seen but understood, That live in vinegar or wood," And he was a forerunner of the vegetable patholo- gist, having “Several new found remedies Of curing wounds and scabs in trees, Your arts of fluxing them for claps And purging their infected saps ; Recovering chancres, crystallines And nodes and blotches in the rinds." Last but not least he knew the secret of the ho- munculus : “What medicine ’twas that Paracelsus Could make a man with as he tells us." It will be gathered from such excerpts as these that Butler entertained about the same opinion of the medical profession as he did of the clergy or the luminaries of the law. His writings are, in fact, replete with le mol qu’ on dit des medecins, and al- 15 Garrison: Done Called “Luz.” though, in one place he says, in paraphrase of Homer, “A skillful leech is better far Than half a hundred men of war,” yet he refers elsewhere to “A learned physician and manslayer,” and his sketch of Talgol doubtless embodies his real view : '‘Nor engine nor device polemic, Disease nor doctor epidemic, Though stored with deletery medicines, Which whosoever took is dead since, E’er sent so vast a colony To both the underworlds as he.” Butler was, in fact, the typical scoffer, and by dint of continual raillery, came at last to see everything in a whimsical or sardonic light, especially those en- thusiasms, religious, scientific, or other, which the Germans call Schwdrmerei — “A convert’s but a fly that turns about After his head’s pulled off to find it out.” Thus, to indicate that attention to sanitary mat- ters may sometimes lead to high worldly place, he instances the example of the Emperor Vespasian, “Who from a scavenger did come To be a mighty prince in Rome.” And Semiramis is held to be of interest as a pio- neer of castration and ovariotomy : “This first a woman did invent In envy of man’s ornament, Semiramis of Babylon Who first of all cut men o’ the stone r Garrison: Bone Called “ Lus ” To mar their beards and lay foundation Of sow geldering operation.” It is in the Remains in Verse and Prose, pub- lished long after his death, in 1759, that we find a different Butler from the whimsical, incredulous mocker who was the author of Hudibras. Here age and the sour experience of hope deferred have wrought upon him to the extent that his view of life, if only pessimistic, is at least deeper, graver, and not without a curious interest of its own. The novelist Flaubert, one of his critics tells us, “wished us to see the external world flowing like water be- fore our eyes as Brahma sees it,” and this philo- sophical equipoise or indifferentism, to which so many modern writers have pantingly aspired, Butler seems to have attained without any apparent effort, indeed perhaps in spite of his better self. If he ever had any capacity for moral indignation or other human emotion, he had completely lost it and ultimately Tame to live in that region which the German philosopher holds out as a goal of effort, “on the other side of good and evil.” In the- Miy- cellaneous Thoughts his most serious and important poems, the forms of good and evil pass before his eyes like figures on an arras, having no moral, but only an artistic or satiric interest, 2 and his verses on Women, Love, Fate, Justice, and so forth, have the familiar pessimistic ring of your seventeenth century Schopenhauer. 2 0f this tendency one instance may suffice, where, sounding the brazen note of Nietzsche’s “immoralist,” he ridicules Ulysses as an oaf in his relation to what Kipling has called “the most ancient profession in the world.” “To be out of countenance and, like an ass. Not pledge the Lady Circe one beer glass; Unmannerly refuse her treat and wine, For fear of being turned into a swine; When one of our heroic adventurers now Would drink her down and turn her to a sow.” 17 Garrison: Bone Called “Luz.” Among the poems of scientific interest in the Re- mains is The Elephant in the Moon, a satire on the Royal Society, which, if dull and lengthy, is at least well aimed at one of the principal faults of the sev- enteenth century men — the omne ignotum pro mi- racnlo: “Learned men who greedily pursue Things that are rather wonderful than true, And, in their nicest speculations, choose To make their own discoveries strange news, And natural history rather a gazette Of rarities, stupendous and far set : Believe no truths are worthy to be known That are not strongly vast and overgrown/’ Another characteristic foible of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the quest for - a universal remedy, is well hit off in Butler’s lines referring to a certain French quack who, going beyond Para- celsus, ^ “set up physic And called his receipt a general specific.” This type of quack, not far to seek to-day, had evidently a larger contract on his hands than La Place, who sought a “world-formula” to express mathematically how anything or everything hap- pens. Butler’s Prose Remains consist mainly of a gal- lery of “Characters,” following the mechanical lines laid down by Theophrastus and La Bruyere, and having the same fault as their portraitures — the tendency to delineate diagrammatic types rather than flesh and blood human beings. Of these, the Astrologer and Hermetic Philosopher are largely prose transcripts of the passages already quoted from Hudibias. A few lines from the "Medicine Garrison: Bone Called “ Lus ” Taker may be of interest, as a vigorous sketch of the malade imaginaire, who needs judicious psycho- therapy rather than exhibition of quack medicines. “His disease is only in his judgment, which makes him believe a doctor can fetch it out of his stomach or his belly ; and fright those worms out of his guts that are bred in his brain . . . He is no sooner well, but any story or lie of a new famous doctor, or strange cure, puts him into a relapse and he falls sick of a medicine instead of a disease, and catches physic like him that fell into a looseness at the sight of a purge. He never knows when he is well nor sick, but is always tampering with his health till he has spoiled it, like a foolish musician that breaks his strings with striving to put them in tune. ,, To this we are tempted to add a few palpa- ble hits from the character of the Mountebank or strolling vendor of quack medicines — on the whole the liveliest of Butler’s medical satires in prose: “He is a pedlar of medicines, a petty chapman of cures, and tinker empirical to the body of man. He strolls about to market and fairs ; where he mounts on the top of his shop, that is his bank, and pub- lishes his medicines as universal as himself ; for everything is for all diseases, as himself is of all places, that is to say, of none. His business is to shew tricks and impudence ; as for the cure of dis- eases it concerns those that have them, not him, far- ther than to get their money. . . . He baits his patient’s body with his medicines, as a rat-catcher does a room, and either poisons the disease or him. As soon as he has got all the money and spent all the credit the rabble could spare him, he then re- moves to fresh quarters, where he is less known and better trusted. ... He administers physic with a farce, and gives his patients a preparative of dancing on the rope, to stir the humors and prepare 19 Garrison: Bone Called “Luz.” them for evacuation. . . . The first thing he vents is his own praise, and then his medicines wrapt up in several papers and lies. . . . He casts the nativity of urinals, and tries disease, like a witch, by water. . . . He pretends to universal medicines, that is such, as, when all men are sick together, will cure them all, but till then no one in particular.” Our excerpts from the Prose Remains may close with a paragraph from the satire “On Dr. Charlton’s Feeling a Dog’s Pulse at Gresham College,” one of Butler s many slaps at the scientific or experimental tendencies of seventeenth century medicine, which was incidentally “a satirical sneering imitation” of the literary style of the then secretary of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle. “It is wonderful,” says our satirist, “to behold this exquisite and solert Doctor, whose province lies in the cabinet of fair ladies, and whose daily employments are to solicit the tender arteries of their ivory wrists, that he, I say, should nevertheless condescend to animadvert the languish- ing diastole of an expiring mongrel.” The studious neglect which Butler suffered at the hands of the king and the nobles of the court — Clarendon, Dorset, Buckingham — became a sort of scandalum magnatum after his death, although it was doubtless exaggerated. Some say that he was well taken care of, others that he lived and died an obscure literary hack. He himself boasts how Charles II. was so infatuated with his poem that “He never eat nor drank nor slept But H udibras still near him kept ; Never would go to church or so, But Hudibras must with him go.” But our poet-jester lived to learn what a Barme- cide’s feast mere literary fame and royal notice of \ 20 Garrison : Bone Called “Luz.” the cap and bells may be if unaccompanied by any material emolument — “For this good king it seems was told By some that with him were too bold — If e'er you hope to gain your ends. Caress your foes and trust your friends.'’ On the other hand, Aubrey tells us that, for an of- fice seeker, Butler was uppish and hard to please. “He might have had preferments at first, but would not accept any but very good, and so got none.” Then he had, from childhood up, the sneering fault finding tendency which is the drawback of the sa- tirical temperament ; and men were not apt to cul- tivate the society of one who might at any moment turn the shafts of his sarcasm against them. Of all this much is in dispute, although the truth is doubt- less summed up in Samuel Wesley's well known lines in Westminster Abbey: “While Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive, No generous patron would a dinner give; See him when starved to death and turned to dust, Presented with a monumental bust: The poet's fate is here in emblem shown, He asked for bread and he received a stone.” Strange that the keenest satirist of his age should have fooled himself by chancing all upon the favor of the most frivolous and deceitful of royal patrons. Yet if Butler expected the king to be grateful for Hudibras he was blind to the crux of the whole matter — the truth about himself. Gratitude is proverbially a burden, and people do not commonly love those who do things' for them, but only those whom they instinctively do things for. Butler had many commendable traits of forthright, honesty, and downright truthfulness, but we can read the story 21 Garrison : Bone Called “Luz.” of his life in the hard face we see in his portraits- — high nose, large keen sighted eyes, well hung chin, smug satiric mouth — a strong sardonic “morning- after” face, flushed with the glow of robust health, yet with just those traits of snobbery and self seek- ing that can make or mar a certain ignoble type of character. 22 I'll* 3 30 , azvab /f/o