TRADITIONAL MEDICINE. 367 



The tradition of such a crew of darkness must have been a Botany 

 Bay and Norfolk Island reeking through all myth and song : the 

 arts and sciences must have smelt like dogs and monkeys from these 

 kennels. Let alone Eden — I do not see where Egypt and Babylon 

 could have come from, if skulking aborigines, and hide-dried canni- 

 bals eating their own heads off, had been our Adams. Long before 

 this, not a baby would have been left to hope, but the human form, 

 like a boat launched with a hole in its bottom, would have foundered 

 on the brink of the year 1. It is according to all analogies, to stick 

 to the paradise of Genesis, which gives a divine and redundant youth 

 to man where he so wanted it, that otherwise no human race could 

 have grown up. And if we know not how to reconcile every petty 

 circumstance to this piece of God's common sense, let us know that 

 it is only because our winter cannot comprehend the spring in which 

 His creations blossom : and let us wait until the second human spring 

 enables us better to commune with the first. We can easily receive 

 any science, without letting it meddle with the divine proprieties. 



As then it is so much easier to fall than to rise, we have first to 

 chronicle the descent of medicine from old times, when the race, like 

 a woman's heart, had feeling and insight full, and when also the 

 schools of healing originated, in the persons of those who in the well- 

 distributed humanity had greater gifts in this kind than their fellows. 

 These were the gods, from which medicine was said to be descended, 

 and whose powers might well appear to be miraculous to their suc- 

 cessors, who had lost the insight upon which the tutum, citum and 

 jucundum of healing depends. 



But we do not profess to sketch the history of this interesting 

 subject; it is sufficient to know, that there are two great classes of 

 healers, namely, 1. The medical schools, and their disciples ; and, 

 2. The people itself as a depositary of mere traditive medicine. 

 With respect to the schools, they also contain two elements; in the 

 first place, their own traditional lore, the history of medicine gradu- 

 ally purifying itself towards modern science ; and in the second, the 

 cumulative experience and induction of that science itself. As for 

 the first of these elements, it has grown weaker and weaker with each 

 generation, so that one might say that each age of doctors never had 

 a grandfather ; the family likeness vanishes more and more out of 



