Introductory Lecture. 
289 
grain of silex on the other, our wonder is directed away from 
the peculiar folly of the ancients, to the general weakness and 
fallibility of the human intellect. 
Abounding as the ancient Materia Medica did in superflui- 
ties, it was greatly deficient in remedies of real importance. 
Many of our most valuable vegetable medicines had not been 
discovered; very few from the mineral kingdom were used 
internally, and the whole circle of chemicals, now among the 
most efficient employed, was quite unknown. Pharmacy, or 
the art of preparing medicines for use, was not less imper- 
fect, embracing only a few simple and uncertain processes 
directed to the preparation of external remedies, or of those 
compounds the chief recommendation of which was in the 
vast number of their ingredients. 
But crude and imperfect as was the knowledge of Materia 
Medica possessed by the ancients, it was certainly preferable 
to that savage ignorance of this, as of all other sciences, which 
spread over Europe after the subversion of the Western Em- 
pire. For many ages, almost the whole continent remained 
submerged in a deluge of barbarism, with only here and there 
floating fragments of civilization, or isolated ruins rising out 
of the darkness to show what had before existed. The Ara- 
bians, who conquered the Asiatic and African provinces of 
the Eastern Empire, and established upon its ruins the throne 
of the caliphs, as they were originally less barbarous than the 
hordes of Germany and Scandinavia, were better prepared 
to adopt the learning, science, and arts of the conquered peo- 
ple. The writings of the Greeks were zealously studied, and 
their facts and opinions appropriated with an avidity little 
short of that which had led to the usurpation of their domi- 
nions. Bagdad became the seat as well of science as of Em- 
pire in the East. Medicine was cultivated with peculiar care; 
and the fame of not a few Arabian writers still endures, who 
treated with various merit upon the subjects of Materia Me- 
dica and Pharmacy. But with the merits of Grecian medi- 
cine, its errors, follies, and absurdities were also adopted; 
and to the present time, in some Mahomedan countries of the 
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