PROLEGOMENON. 47 



health and ecstasy, or soundness and the enjoyment thereof, 

 and no other. Thus, a book dedicated to the God of medi- 

 cine was necessary to a full expression of the attitudes 

 of the Mountain to man, also as definitive of the position of 

 the healing man, the truly honest, science-abiding, reason- 

 directed Physician, using a II things to achieve his ends, nature, 

 arty all substances, all forces, all matter, all spirit, ponderable 

 elements, imponderable agents. 



It occurred as pertinent in the present apparently dis- 

 astrous aspect of the medical world, split, as it seems 

 to outside observers, into warring factions or squabbling 

 schools, into orthodox and heterodox, regular and quack, to 

 say, once for all, that there is but one school, one regular pro- 

 fession, one orthodox church of science, and that is the old, 

 which is also the new, embracing and surrounding all other 

 pretences, ignoring all other affectations of knowledge, to wit : 

 the regular scientific knowledge of man, commencing with the 

 anatomy of the human body, which must be the " future 

 grammar of every school which gives real instruction to 

 mankind." Embracing also all existences surrounding it 

 in the shape of the influences of the earth and its furniture, 

 material and dynamic agencies, in short, all the related 

 natural sciences, which, of course, comprise those elements 

 of knowledge that have been grouped, from time imme- 

 morial, under the head of Medical Science and practice as 

 advocated by the ancient brotherhood, appropriately called 

 the Regular Profession. 



The story of the Doctor, or representative healing man, 

 and his connection with the Mountain, would naturally 

 arrange itself in the form and substance of the chapter 

 " ^Esculapius." 



Then there are fables of the primitive vigor of man, of 

 the terrible strength of Samson and Hercules, of human 

 lives almost indestructible, stretching into long hundreds 

 of years, as in the proximate immortality of the body of 

 Methuselah and the wellnigh invulnerability of the form 

 of Achilles, all of which would typify a splendor and per- 



