Putting aside the purely metaphysical teachings of the _Kabala_, if one would devote himself but to physical occultism, to the so-called branch of therapeutics, the results might benefit some of our modern sciences; such as chemistry and medicine. Says Professor Draper: “Sometimes, {20} not without surprise, we meet with ideas _which we flatter ourselves originated in our own times_.” This remark, uttered in relation to the scientific writings of the Saracens, would apply still better to the more secret _Treatises_ of the ancients. Modern medicine, while it has gained largely in anatomy, physiology, and pathology, and even in therapeutics, has lost immensely by its narrowness of spirit, its rigid materialism, its sectarian dogmatism. One school in its purblindness sternly ignores whatever is developed by other schools; and all unite in ignoring every grand conception of man or nature, developed by Mesmerism, or by American experiments on the brain—every principle which does not conform to a stolid materialism. It would require a convocation of the hostile physicians of the several different schools to bring together what is now known of medical science, and it too often happens that after the best practitioners have vainly exhausted their art upon a patient, a mesmerist or a “healing medium” will effect a cure! The explorers of old medical literature, from the time of Hippocrates to that of Paracelsus and Van Helmont, will find a vast number of well-attested physiological and psychological facts and of measures or medicines for healing the sick which modern physicians superciliously refuse to employ.[79] Even with respect to surgery, modern practitioners have humbly and publicly confessed the total impossibility of their approximating to anything like the marvellous skill displayed in the art of bandaging by ancient Egyptians. The many hundred yards of ligature enveloping a mummy from its ears down to every separate toe, were studied by the chief surgical operators in Paris, and, notwithstanding that the models were before their eyes, they were unable to accomplish anything like it. In the Abbott Egyptological collection, in New York City, may be seen numerous evidences of the skill of the ancients in various handicrafts; among others the art of lace-making; and, as it could hardly be expected but that the signs of woman’s vanity should go side by side {21} with those of man’s strength, there are also specimens of artificial hair, and gold ornaments of different kinds. The New York _Tribune_, reviewing the contents of the _Ebers Papyrus_, says:—“Verily, there is no new thing under the sun.... Chapters 65, 66, 79, and 89 show that hair-invigorators, hair dyes, pain-killers, and flea-powders were desiderata 3,400 years ago.”