preserved to us. Our prescriptions are the direct descendants of the "bills" which the physicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries scribbled in coffee houses when they met their apothecaries. "Physitians bylles not Patients but Apothecaries know" (Warner, 1612, quoted in "Murray's Dictionary"). It is too much to ask us to imagine that these scribes were in the habit of sketching the symbol of Jupiter at the head of these documents.
Planets and Metals.
There are no historic records of the origin of the association of the seven metals with the seven planets nor of the connection of either with the deities of antiquity.
That Greece transmitted the mythological connection to Rome is clear enough, but it is not so certain whence Greece obtained the idea. Traces of it can be discovered in both Persia and Egypt, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the circle of imagery may have developed from the worship of the sun. Allowing that heavenly body to have been the supreme divinity, or at least the residence of such a being, it would be natural to assign to the moon and the five principal planets apparently in attendance on the earth similar though lower dignities. The tendency to group gods and planets and metals into sevens would be an obvious link between the last two, and the characters of the deities named would naturally be extended to the materials named after them.
Berthelot considers that Babylon and Chaldea were the localities where imagination was first most abundantly applied to the elucidation of science. There and elsewhere in the East the mystic relations of the number
