Singing Potatoes
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Thursday, 29 May 2003
Alchemical Wisdom

To cause a dog to cease barking.

Take a Doggs tongue and lay it under your great Toe (within your shooe) and the dog will cease barking as long as you weare the same.

To see by night as by day.

Anoint your eyes with the blood of a bat.

To make a candle that it cannot be blowne out.

Take a quill of Hempe stalke, and fill it full with Brimstone, and make it warme, and fire it and it will never goe forth with blowing.

To know if a sick person shall die or not.

Take gray Nettles while they be green, and put them in the patients urin, and if they remain greene, he shall live : and if they wither, not.

To make wormes to seem to be in meat.

Take Harpe strings : and cut them in small pieces, and cast them but on meat, and they will stirre like wormes.

To put ones hand into any hot seething thing.

Anoynt thy hands with hearb Mercury: and put them in a seething thing, and it will doe thee no harme at all.

To make folk seem black.

Put Oyle Olive into a lamp, and put therein fine powder of ground glasse, and light it, and all those that be about it will seem black as Egyptians.

— From The Booke of Pretty Conceits
printed by James Flesher.

Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
It sounds like a manual from a medieval joke shop. The old "can't blow out the candle" gag.
Posted by Lunchbox on 30 May 2003 08:00
I'd have to agree; along with "to make worms to seem to be in meat", there's an entry on how to make cooked flesh or fish appear to be raw...

(And a couple of entries on how to be sure if a woman is actually a "pure virgin" — one will purportedly make her toss her cookies if she's not, and the other is supposed to make her lose control of her bladder.)

Posted by Godfrey on 30 May 2003 08:11
Is the second one the old, put her hand in water while she's sleeping?
Posted by Ginevra on 30 May 2003 09:12
If I remember correctly, it was to put some substance into ale and give it to her to drink, "and she will pisse if she be not pure."

Posted by Godfrey on 30 May 2003 09:15
I thought beer made everyone have to go wee-wee.
Posted by Ginevra on 30 May 2003 09:56
Aha!

Posted by Godfrey on 30 May 2003 10:02
I also didn't realize that blackface was period.
Posted by Ginevra on 30 May 2003 10:57
Take Harpe strings : and cut them in small pieces, and cast them but on meat, and they will stirre like wormes.

Bwa ha! Yes well met well hailed fine fellow! ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Nothing about Frogges of India-Rubber, eh?
Posted by M o I r A on 1 Jun 2003 23:02
Take thee an air-bladder, and affix to the opening a reede from a Scotch Bag-pipe, poynting inwards, and place it upon someones seat. When they sit down upon't, 'twill cause bystanders to think thy victim is afflicted with wind.

Posted by Godfrey on 1 Jun 2003 23:47
that's the kindest thing I've heard anyone say about bagpipes in a while.
Posted by M o I r A on 4 Jun 2003 00:06