without surprise, we meet with ideas which we flatter ourselves originated in our own times." This remark, uttered in relation to the scientific writings of the Saracens, would apply still better to the more secret Treatises of the ancients. Modern medicine, while it has gained largely in anatomy, physiology, and pathology, and even in therapeutics, has lost immensely by its narrowness of spirit, its rigid materialism, its sectarian dogmatism. One school in its purblindness sternly ignores whatever is developed by other schools; and all unite in ignoring every grand conception of man or nature, developed by Mesmerism, or by American experiments on the brain — every principle which does not conform to a stolid materialism. It would require a convocation of the hostile physicians of the several different schools to bring together what is now known of medical science, and it too often happens that after the best practitioners have vainly exhausted their art upon a patient, a mesmerist or a "healing medium" will effect a cure! The explorers of old medical literature, from the time of Hippocrates to that of Paracelsus and Van Helmont, will find a vast number of well-attested physiological and psychological facts and of measures or medicines for healing the sick which modern physicians superciliously refuse to employ.* Even with respect to surgery, modern practitioners have humbly and publicly confessed the total impossibility of their approximating to anything like the marvellous skill displayed in the art of bandaging by ancient Egyptians. The many hundred yards of ligature enveloping a mummy from its ears down to every separate toe, were studied by the chief surgical operators in Paris, and, notwithstanding that the models were before their eyes, they were unable to accomplish anything like it.
In the Abbott Egyptological collection, in New York City, may be seen numerous evidences of the skill of the ancients in various handicrafts; among others the art of lace-making; and, as it could hardly be expected but that the signs of woman's vanity should go side by side with
* In some respects our modern philosophers, who think they make new discoveries, can be compared to "the very clever, learned, and civil gentleman" whom Hippocrates having met at Samos one day, describes very good-naturedly. "He informed me," the Father of Medicine proceeds to say, "that he had lately discovered an herb never before known in Europe or Asia, and that no disease, however malignant or chronic, could resist its marvellous properties. Wishing to be civil in turn, I permitted myself to be persuaded to accompany him to the conservatory in which he had transplanted the wonderful specific. What I found was one of the commonest plants in Greece, namely, garlic — the plant which above all others has least pretensions to healing virtues." Hippocrates: "De optima prædicandi ratione item judicii operum magni." I.
