It is well that the treatise was never printed, yet there are passages in it worth preserving.  He speaks of some remedies which have since become more universally known: 

“Among the plants of our soyl, Sir William Temple singles out Five [Six] as being of the greatest virtue and most friendly to health:  and his favorite plants, Sage, Rue, Saffron, Alehoof, Garlick, and Elder.”

“But these Five [Six] plants may admitt of some competitors.  The QUINQUINA—­How celebrated:  Immoderately, Hyperbolically celebrated!”

Of Ipecacuanha, he says,—­“This is now in its reign; the most fashionable vomit.”

“I am not sorry that antimonial emetics begin to be disused.”

He quotes “Mr. Lock” as recommending red poppy-water and abstinence from flesh as often useful in children’s diseases.

One of his “Capsula’s” is devoted to the animalcular origin of diseases, at the end of which he says, speaking of remedies for this supposed source of our distempers: 

“Mercury we know thee:  But we are afraid thou wilt kill us too, if we employ thee to kill them that kill us.

“And yett, for the cleansing of the small Blood Vessels, and making way for the free circulation of the Blood and Lymph—­there is nothing like Mercurial Deobstruents.”

From this we learn that mercury was already in common use, and the subject of the same popular prejudice as in our own time.

His poetical turn shows itself here and there: 

“O Nightingale, with a Thorn at thy Breast; Under the trouble of a Cough, what can be more proper than such thoughts as these?"...

If there is pathos in this, there is bathos in his apostrophe to the millipede, beginning “Poor sowbug!” and eulogizing the healing virtues of that odious little beast; of which he tells us to take “half a pound, putt ’em alive into a quart or two of wine,” with saffron and other drugs, and take two ounces twice a day.

The “Capsula” entitled “Nishmath Chajim” was printed in 1722, at New London, and is in the possession of our own Society.  He means, by these words, something like the Archxus of Van Helmont, of which he discourses in a style wonderfully resembling that of Mr. Jenkinson in the “Vicar of Wakefield.”  “Many of the Ancients thought there was much of a Real History in the Parable, and their Opinion was that there is, DIAPHORA Kata TAS MORPHAS, A Distinction (and so a Resemblance) of men as to their Shapes after Death.”  And so on, with Ireaeus, Tertullian, Thespesius, and “the Ta tone PSEUCONE CROMATA,” in the place of “Sanconiathon, Manetho, Berosus,” and “Anarchon ara kai ateleutaion to pan.”

One other passage deserves notice, as it relates to the single medical suggestion which does honor to Cotton Mather’s memory.  It does not appear that he availed himself of the information which he says, he obtained from his slave, for such I suppose he was.