Rensselaer Standard, Volume 1, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 November 1879 — Francis Bacon and His Warts. [ARTICLE]

Francis Bacon and His Warts.

Corn hill Magazine. Francis Bacon supplies a very effective piece of evidence as to the influence of the imagination on external growth which seem to have their origin in deficient vitality of certain parts of the external surface of the body, as warts, wens, and the like. Bacon did not, however, treat the afforded evidence in his own case with the acumen which might have been expected from the inductive philosopher. “I had from my childhood,” he says, “a wart upon one of my fingers; afterward, when I was about 16 years old, being then at Paris, there grew upon both my hands a number of warts—at least one hundred in a month’s spaoe. The English Ambassador’s lady, who was a woman for from superstition,(a statement . which must be taken cam grano), told me one day she could help me away with my warts; whereupon she got a piece of lard with the skin on and rubbed the warts all over with the fat side: and among the rest that wart which 1 had from my childhood; then she nailed the piece of lard with the fat toward the sun, upon a post of her sham her window which was to the south. The suocess Was that within five weeks’ space all the warts were quite away, and that wart which I had so long endured for company. But at the rest I did little marvel, because they came in a short time, and might go away in a short time again; hut the going away of that which had stayed so long doth yet stick me.”