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Snake Stones and Bezoars: Kaempfer

Alluding to the ill-success attending the experiment performed by Ambroise Pare, in order to test effectively the supposed virtues of the substance as an antidote for poisons, Engelbert Kaempfer remarks that Pare's bezoar may have been of inferior quality, and, moreover, bezoars could not be successfully used to counteract mineral poisons, but were only useful when vegetable poisons had been taken. This opinion was probably due to the fact that the bezoar itself is largely or in the main a vegetable substance. That the interior layers of a specimen should be inferior in quality to the external layers was not for Kaempfer a proof of its spurious character, but might easily be accounted for by a change of pasturage in the case of the creature in whose body the concretion had formed.