No empirical science can be carried to perfection by any one nation or in any particular epoch; it can only expand with the progressive developments of the human race itself. Nevertheless, in that science which for three thousand years has been held in the greatest honor, and which is one of the three great liberal professions of our modern times, the ancients, especially the Greeks, made considerable advance. The science of medicine, having in view the amelioration of human misery and the prolongation of life itself, was very early cultivated. It was, indeed, in old times another word for _physics_,--the science of Nature,--and the _physician_ was the observer and expounder of physics. The physician was supposed to be acquainted with the secrets of Nature,--that is, the knowledge of drugs, of poisons, of antidotes to them, and the way to administer them. He was also supposed to know the process of preserving the body after death. Thus Joseph, seventeen hundred years before the birth of Christ, commanded his physician to embalm the body of his father; and the process of embalming was probably known to the Egyptians before the period when history begins. Helen, of Trojan fame, put into wine a drug that "frees man from grief and anger, and causes oblivion of all ills." Solomon was a great botanist,--a realm with which the science of medicine is indissolubly connected. The origin of Hindu medicine is lost in remote antiquity. The Ayur Veda, written nine hundred years before Hippocrates was born, sums up the knowledge of previous periods relating to obstetric surgery, to general pathology, to the treatment of insanity, to infantile diseases, to toxicology, to personal hygiene, and to diseases of the generative functions.