FATHERS OF BIOLOGY. 



more wonderful than the paroxysms of fevers and many 

 other diseases not thought sacred. He exposes the 

 cunning of the impostors who pretend to cure men by 

 purifications and spells; "who give themselves out as 

 being excessively religious, and as knowing more than 

 other people;" and he argues that "whoever is able, 

 by purifications and conjurings, to drive away such an 

 affection, will be able, by other practices, to excite it, 

 and, according to this view, its divine nature is entirely 

 done away with." "Neither, truly," he continues, "do 

 I count it a worthy opinion to hold that the body of 

 a man is polluted by the divinity, the most impure by the 

 most holy ; for, were it defiled, or did it suffer from any 

 other thing, it would be like to be purified and sanctified 

 rather than polluted by the divinity." As an additional 

 argument against the cause being divine, he adduces the 

 fact that this disease is hereditary, like other diseases, and 

 that it attacks persons of a peculiar temperament, namely, 

 the phlegmatic, but not the bilious ; and " yet if it were 

 really more divine than the others," he justly adds, " it 

 ought to befall all alike." 



Again, speaking of a disease common among the 

 Scythians, Hippocrates remarks that the people attri- 

 buted it to a god, but that " to me it appears that such 

 affections are just as much divine as all others are, and 

 that no one disease is either more divine or more human 

 than another, but that all are alike divine, for that each 



