For a long period the early inhabitants of Rome were practically without physicians. During severe epidemics they had recourse to oracles, to the health deities of the Greeks, and to their native gods. As early as the fifth century B. C., during a pestilence, a temple was erected to Apollo as Healer. The worship of Aesculapius was introduced into Rome in the year 291 B. C. Livy relates that the god of medicine in the guise of a serpent was transported from Epidaurus, in Greece, to the Isle of the Tiber where a temple was built in his honor. The Romans, like the Greeks, were accustomed to leave votive offerings, or donaria, in their temples. Such gifts included surgical instruments, pharmaceutical appliances, painted tablets representing miraculous cures, and great numbers of images of various parts of the human frame shaped in metal, stone or terra-cotta. Among the remains of Roman anatomical art is the marble figure which was unearthed in the villa of Antonius Musa, the favorite physician of the Emperor Augustus. It is a human torso; the front of the chest and abdomen has been removed so as to expose the viscera. The heart is placed vertically in the middle of the thorax, thus corresponding to the position of this organ as described by Galen who made his dissections on apes. It is a human thorax with simian contents. The figure is supposed to have been constructed for the purposes of a teacher of anatomy. [Illustration: ALEXANDER THE GREAT] It was in the famous Alexandrian University that human anatomy was first studied systematically and legally. Alexander the Great, after the fall of Tyre (332 B. C.) and the siege of Gaza, ordered his fleet to sail up the Nile as far as Memphis while he proceeded overland with the army. It was probably on this march, while viewing the pyramids and other marvelous works of the ancient Egyptians, that he conceived the grand idea of founding a city upon the banks of the Nile, which should be a model of architectural beauty, a centre of intellectual life and a lasting monument of his own greatness and magnificence. The foundation of Alexandria was laid by the warrior whose name it bears; but the credit of instituting the Library belongs to one of his lieutenants, Ptolemy Soter. [Illustration: PTOLEMY SOTER]