water they will use drastic cathartics, if from a predominance of solids of the earth they will try to render the system more plastic by the use of fluids.
Their medicines are chiefly derived from the vegetable kingdom mainly indigenous to the country, but a small portion is imported from China by the Chinese doctors. Sometimes they employ articles that belong to the animal kingdom, such as tiger and other bones, teeth, sea-shells, fish and snake skins, urine, eyes of birds, cats and cattle, snake's bile and other such stuff; also saltpeter, borax, blue-stone, lead, antimony, salts, mercury, etc.; they also use aloes and gamboge, and of late years quinine has become very popular with them as a tonic. In Bangkok modern medicines are extensively used, especially pills. In the interior the old method still prevails and the native practitioner doses the unfortunate, who may be in his power, with the vilest of decoctions, as there is not a weed or shrub that grows that they do not put to some use. An American physician, who was conversant with their practice, assured me that in one of their prescriptions they had one hundred and seventy-five ingredients, to be taken in three doses, and they are sure enough doses, as the common way of paying a doctor is by the potful thirty to sixty cents per pot, each holding from two quarts to one gallon, and a dose is as much as a man can swallow at one time, frequently a quart. They also make pills, some of them of huge dimension, so large that they have to be cut up and softened in a cocoanut shell of water, then taken in a fluid state. Fifty years ago tonics were unknown until introduced by the western physicians, the native doctors accounting it a sin to use a drop of ardent spirits; but this
