THE PLANT AS HEALER 141 
quinine became for the time the great export. The 
use of morphia, in the last resource, for the relief of 
human pain renders the poppy a plant of price, while 
through all ages mankind has looked to plants for the 
alleviation of suffering. 
It is a matter of great interest and of no little import- 
ance to ascertain the means whereby man has become 
acquainted with the existence and properties of drugs. 
Many are the strange legends of miraculous and semi- 
divine instruction. We cannot doubt that from all 
time knowledge has been built up as the result of experi- 
ence gained through the exercise of that ‘ divine” 
curiosity which results in the knowledge of good and 
evil, of life and death. 
Like all knowledge it gave power, and hence was 
not lightly parted from, so that we find the subject from 
earliest times deliberately surrounded with that mystery 
which has not wholly departed from it. The combina- 
tion of the healing art with priestcraft in ancient Eygpt 
and other countries is, therefore, not surprising, and 
Hermes, the companion of Osiris and Isis, is credited 
with the production of a vast series of medical works. 
This legend was repudiated later by Galen in the second 
century. 
Among the Greeks the fame of AEsculapius was tradi- 
tional, and the names of his daughters, Hygeia and 
Panacea, stand for Prevention and Alleviation to the 
present day. He perished, like many others, through 
too great a manifestation of power. 
Eight hundred years later (466 B.c.) we come to Hippo- 
crates, the first authentic written source of medical lore, 
with some four hundred “‘ simples,”’ or herbs, of healing 
