BOOK XXVI. VI. 9-vn. 12 



name they had never heard before. What are \ve to 

 say that this means, wJiat wrath of the gods ? Were 

 the recognised kinds of human disease, more than 

 three hundred, too few, that they must be increased 

 by new ones also to add to man's fears ? No fewer 

 either are the troubles which man brings upon him- 

 self by his own agency. These remedies that I Theoid 

 record were those used by the ancients, Nature in a medicine. 

 way making medicine herself, and their vogue was a 

 long one. Certainly the works of Hippocrates, who 

 was the first to put together, and that \vith great 

 distinction, rules for medical practice, we find full of 

 references to herbs, equally so the works of Diocles of 

 Carystus, who comes next after Hippocrates in time 

 and reputation, hkewise those of Praxagoras and 

 Chrysippus, and then comes Erasistratus of Ceos " ; 

 while Herophilus indeed, although the founder of 

 an over-subtle sect,* <(we know) recommended 

 before all others this method of treatment." But 

 httle by httle experience, the most efficient teacher 

 of all things, and in particular of medicine, de- 

 generated into words and mere talk. For it was 

 more pleasant to sit in a lecture-room engaged in 

 Hstening, than to go out into the wilds and search 

 for the various plants at their proper season of the 

 year. 



VH. However, the ancient system of medicine 

 remained unshaken, and claimed as its own con- 

 siderable remains of its once acknowledged sphere, 

 until, in the time of Pompeius Magnus, one 

 Asclepiades, a professor of rhetoric, who found his Asciepiadc 

 gains in that profession too small, but had a brain 



" These physicians floiirished after Hippocrates, the last 

 two at Alexandria in the early part of the third century b.c. 



273 



