48 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 54 



with whom the anointing of the body with scented oil was a com- 

 mon practice, might successfully use oil instead of gloves while 

 gathering particularly acrid herbs and roots. Also when one is 

 informed that the ancient drug gatherer never proceeded to dig 

 certain roots but with breath laden with an odor as intolerable 

 as that engendered by garlic and alcoholic drink, there is still no 

 reason to charge that to superstition; any more than the surveyor 

 or handicraftsman, whose work for the day is in the midst of a 

 steaming and unwholesome marsh or fen, makes free use of to- 

 bacco smoke as, by the physician's counsel, tending in some degree 

 toward immunity from malarial influence. With us who believe 

 so much in the efficacy of malodorous disinfectants as bringing 

 immunity from infectious and malarial disease it should seem 

 natural to attribute similar precautions to Greeks of 4000 years ago, 

 especially when assured, as we may assure ourselves, that even at 

 that remote period one of the rhizotomi propounded the theory, 

 now in our day revived, that myriads of germs, minute, invisible, 

 permeate every atmosphere. 



Such partial apology for some of the so-called ritual observances 

 of the rhizotomi is no digression. The historians have usually re- 

 ferred to them as in large part a body of superstitious fakers. 

 Such, to a degree, many of them may have become in the long 

 course of centuries during which their profession flourished. Super- 

 stitious observance is often enough the end of that which in the 

 beginning was a reasonable and sensible measure of precaution; 

 and it is not a legitimate office of history to exaggerate the differ- 

 ences subsisting between an earlier and a later age or race. The 

 age^^of superstition even as regards medicine and pharmacy, though 

 passing it may be, is not yet quite past. If the scholarly Sprengel 

 cites the ceremonies of the rhizotomi with impatience, it is because 

 he is influenced — as many another passage in his work makes it 

 evident — by an almost morbid abhorrence of everything that to him 

 has the appearance of a superstition. If anything appeared to 

 be an empty ceremony, he could not tolerate the thought of it long 

 enough to examine into the possibility of its having had an origin 

 that was scientific and utilitarian. 



If the rhizotomi were mostly illiterate men and quacks, still 

 there were exceptions. Here and there among them there seems to 

 have been a man of letters; and a few investigated plants more or 

 less scientifically, and wrote books. The names of several such 

 have been handed down through history, together with some of the 

 more original and remarkable of their sayings. Thrasyas Mantin- 



