716 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
pursuits have many common lines of thought and history. On many sides and in 
many ways they gUde into or overlap each other. 
They emerge from the obscurity of civilizations long since extinct and* they 
come into historic light with formulated systems, theories and principles, betok- 
ening research and discovery among people whose cities, temples and homes lie 
buried back and beyond authentic narrative or even reasonable conjecture. 
The physicians of Homer were the sons of Esculapius, the fabled founder 
of the healing art, and the glimpses we catch of the knowledge of those dim eras, 
upon which, as yet, no light shines outside of that which flashes from the Iliad or 
Odyssey, show us advances in the line of organized medical knowledge far beyond 
the crude ideas of savage or barbarous tribes. 
If it is probable that SchUemann has uncovered the site of the Ilium of ancient 
story, yet to what was sung by "the blind old bard of Scio's rocky isle," he has 
added nothing that throws into clearer effulgence the polity and wisdom of that 
distant day. 
How settled and advanced were the laws and pursuits, the worship and 
learning of the nations that peopled the shores of the Archipelago in pre-historic 
times we still learn from those pages, whose pure refined diction indicate to us 
that back of Homer were ages of culture and civilization. 
The side glances we there obtain of medicine reveal, to use the language of 
Dr. Payne, that "It already has a history." It was even then "a distinct and 
organized profession," and possessed a knowledge which must have come from 
long antecedent experience and observation. The antiquity of the profession^ 
doubtless exceeds that of any other. Its mutation and progress have been as 
marked as any. Who ever looks through the twentieth book of Pliny's Natural 
History, wherein he declares the medical properties of plants and the proper 
mode of extracting these virtues and particularly describes the diseases the de- 
coction will cure, will easily see where the patent pill and lotion venders of to- 
day obtain so much knowledge. Some of these prescriptions read like an adver- 
tisement in a nineteenth century newspaper. 
For the benefit of some men in great distress and whose " sands of life have 
almost run out," I give what the author says about the value of an herb he calls 
Porret. " The blades thereof stamped and laid to with honey healeth all sores 
and ulcers whatsoever, the biting of any venomous beast, the sting also of ser- 
pents are cured therewith." He commends it for deafness, "whistlings and 
crashing noises in the head." It will cure "headache, for which purpose," he 
says, " also it is good to poure into the eare when one goeth to bed and lieth to 
sleep two spoonfuls of the said juice and one of bonie." This medicine destroys 
pain in the back, hemorrhage of the lungs and consumption. Dropsy and 
jaundice flee from it and a " cataplasm of it cures green wounds." The author 
concludes, " finally it scoureth the pipes and cleareth the voice." 
As Pliny gives the history of half a hundred other valuable plants equally 
rich in healing properties, it is a wonder anybody in his day ever thought of 
death. Through the flowing centuries the theories of medicine progressed with 
