IN a medical manuscript of the Paris BibliothEque Nationale (Ms. lat. 9332) that was written at about 800, probably somewhere in the Loire Valley, there is a curious one-page treatise that has escaped the attention of historians, paleographers, mediaevalists, medical historians, and folk lorists.1 This neglect is understandable when one notes that the treatise is very brief and that it was inserted on a blank page toward the end of book i of Dioscorides' Materia Medica. The Epistula Vulturis comprises seventeen medical and magical recipes compounded from portions of vulture and other substances. About half of the recipes (numbers 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, and 16) bear such a close resemblance to passages in the Natural History of the first-century Roman, Pliny the Elder, that obviously they were derived from bis work. The wording of most of them, however, is closer to that of a sixth-century work by Sextus Placitus Papyriensis which was itself derived largely from Pliny. Therefore it seems certain that the material in question came originally from Pliny, but through the medium of Sextus' Book of Medicine from Animals, Cattle, Beasts, and Birds.2 Of the nine other recipes, one (number 11) is traceable to Sextus only; none of the rest appears in any of the extant Roman handbooks, and they were doubtless derived from the unwritten folk medicine and magic of the period. It is noteworthy that most of them are magical rather than medical in character (viz., numbers 3, 4, 10, 14, 15, 17). Interestingly enough, additional recipes of a similarly magical character appear in later manuscript versions of the Epistula. An eleventh-century version in a manuscript at Bonn (Universititsbibliothek 218, fol. 83) has four additional magical recipes; and a fifteenth-century version in a manuscript of Italian origin now at Montpellier (Ecole Medecine 277, fol. 81) has fourteen additional recipes, practically all of which are magical in character. The fact that the treatise is found in at least four other manuscripts ranging from the ninth to the twelfth century and from Switzerland, France, and England3 would seem to indicate that vulture lore was widely prevalent during the centuries after Charlemagne. The Latin text (Paris B. N., 9332, fol. 251v) reads as follows:4