whose portals wander priests in ample mantles, to guard them from the entrance of the uncalled. On either side appear mighty crags and groups of lofty trees, whose foliage is penetrated by the powerful rays of the noonday sun, while the foreground greets us in undimmed brilliancy and instinct with life. To the distant sky with its cloudy forms we may compare the mythical era of medicine, with its storied gods and demigods of punishment and of healing. To the background, the cognate priestly era, with its sacerdotal physicians and theurgic medicine, and its works hallowed by faith. The middle ground may be likened to the union of terrestial and celestial philosophy with medicine, the philosophic period; and finally the clear foreground, to the scientific epoch, with its practical principles and ideas. These various periods of development with different nations extend over distinct and long eras. Some of these periods with certain people have never been abandoned; others have not been traversed, and still others never attained. All, however, encroach on each other more or less, and the last two particularly are practically distinguished from each other only by adopting as the basis of such a distinction the tendency to abstract philosophical reasoning or to reasoning based upon the observation of the senses. The predominance of the one or the other of these intellectual tendencies then affixes its stamp to the whole period, though a complete separation of the two has never existed.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDICAL SCIENCE

is best traced in some one people, and most easily among the Greeks, inasmuch as a number of their works, following each other in regular succession from the earliest to the later periods of development, have been preserved to us. Thus in the earliest writings we can perceive that the first medical services were of a surgical character, and that these had already attained a certain degree of perfection at a period when scarcely any traces of internal medicine were to be found. That the latter-undoubtedly anticipated by ophthalmology-was also preceded by a knowledge of midwifery, which, indeed, until a late day was generally regarded as belonging to surgery, seems apparent from the early appearance of midwives — and obstetrical goddesses, a species of divinity now, alas, extinct and frequently substituted by individuals of the masculine gender. What we now call internal medicine first developed, at all events, after the mythical or heroic period, and probably not until the end of the philosophic period of Greek medicine. Medical services too in those days were not divided into separate departments, but the various branches were first separated from the original and long pre-existing trunk of general medicine some centuries before the commencement of our era-in the Alexandrian periodto be once more subdivided during the age of the Roman Empire, an age in which the Greeks were almost the sole representatives of medical science. In the course of later ages (particularly in the beginning of the 16th century) this subdivision, in proportion to the increasing material of the

science and the greater number of physicians, became still more marked. Indeed at the present day the numerous special departments represent a kind of German Bund', within which the unity of medical science and the appreciation of that unity appear and live almost entirely in those medical circles composed of what we call practising physicians, while the great potentates in this medical confederation must, for the most part, be contented to cultivate and to understand their special states, be they larger or smaller, but are often not required to investigate in any way the departments of others.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEDICAL PROFESSION,

as the practical evidence of the tendency of medical science, naturally took about the same course as the latter itself. For a long period there were general physicians only; then they divided themselves into some few departments; but as the medical profession became overcrowded and began to decline there have always appeared specialists, frequently an infinite

number of them.

PROGRESS OF MEDICAL CULTURE IN THE VARIOUS GEOGRAPHICAL DIVISIONS OF THE EARTH.

This followed such a course that, as early as the beginning of the second millennium B. C., northern Africa and eastern Asia possessed an independent medical literature (corresponding to the development of the period), and the countries between the limits mentioned, e. g. Palestine, Phoenicia, Babylonia, Syria, Persia, as well as China and Japan, were also at a very early date in the enjoyment of a medical literature, though all did not, like the countries first mentioned, possess a purely professional literature. After these, Europe, the youngest member of the old world, was the first to enter upon a medical culture of its own. It, however, in contrast to the others, continued a permanent and wider development. Within the countries of Europe, however, medicine followed the general direction of all culture, tending from the south-east toward the west. In the socalled New World were found only traces of a mythical, theurgic, utterly gross and empirical medicine, whose nutrient vessels, tied, alas, by the whites, were prevented from supporting a further development. The civilzed America and Australia of the present day were (and are still) in great part educated, in both medicine and all other departments of science, by Europe and her sons, though they are now beginning in many respects a development of their own.

While in the earliest ages the Arian stock had attained a tolerably high, and the Mongolian a less elevated, grade of medical knowledge, subsequently the latter race, disappeared utterly from the ranks of progressive medical science-the Japanese, however, seem desirous recently of resuming their lost position-and at the present day the Arians alone, in their various branches, are the sole representatives of such scientific progress.