THE PHYSICIANS AS DISCOVERERS. 255 



humors," as Dioscorides and Galen averred, the world 

 was none the better for the attention bestowed upon it by 

 these fathers in medicine. It was when the physicians 

 ceased to deal with it, however, as physicians, and began 

 to deal with it as physicists, that real advances began. It 

 was the leaven of the inductive method of Hippocrates 

 which worked for good in them Hippocrates, who had 

 asserted demoniac possession to be u no wise more divine, 

 no wise more infernal, than any other disease," and the 

 sturdy common sense of whose precepts had refused to be 

 destroyed by the magic of the Persians, or the dreams of 

 the Asclepiades, or the numbers of Pythagoras, or the 

 atoms of Democritus, and which even asserted itself free 

 of the entangling meshes of the Aristotelian Matter and 

 Form. 



The priests of Samothrace sold magnet rings to cure 

 rheumatism and gout. A thousand years later the fact 

 was so far forgotten that when Aetius, in the fifth century, 

 compiled all the medical knowledge of his predecessors, 

 and announced that " those who are afflicted with gout in 

 their hands or feet or with convulsions are relieved by 

 holding a magnet in their hands," the discovery was re- 

 garded as wholly new, despite the writer's cautious prefix 

 of "they say" to his asseverations. How the magnet in 

 the hands 'of the arch impostor Paracelsus became the 

 foundation of speculations as wild and as fantastic as ever 

 man conceived, has already been told, and some reference 

 has been made to the vagaries of Raymond Lully con- 

 cerning it. The knowledge of the embryo science did 

 not advance because of the visionary theories of these 

 people, but despite of them just as it grew in the works 

 of Cardan and Porta, where the statements of great dis- 

 coveries in it are jostled by the descriptions of alleged 

 phenomena as false and as absurd as anything which the 

 veriest charlatan could devise. 



Nevertheless it is to be remembered, that there was hardly 

 a medical writer of any eminence, from the time of Ori- 



