Having referred to the “Papyrus-Ebers,” it may be well to say a few words about it. It was discovered a few years ago by the learned and versatile Egyptologist, Herr Ebers, and is the best preserved of all the ancient Egyptian manuscripts extant. It was written at Sais during the eighteenth dynasty; that is, in the sixteenth century before our era. It consists of 110 pages. In it we have the hermetic medical work of the ancient Egyptians, with the contents of which the Alexandrian Greeks were familiar. The god Thoth is called in it “the Guide” of physicians, and the composition of it is attributed to him. This venerable document treats of many internal and external diseases of most parts of the body. Special attention is given to the visual organs. Drugs belonging to all the kingdoms of nature are used, and with those prescribed are numbers according to which they are weighed with weights and measured with hollow vessels. Accompanying the prescriptions are noted the pious axioms to be repeated by the physician while compounding and giving them to the patient. The German government has published the work in _fac-simile_, a copy of which I have examined. There is a copy of it, I think, in the Astor Library, New York. Medicine certainly consisted of more than charms and the like, at a very early period, in Egypt. Indeed, in the remains of Manetho’s history of the country, it is said of the successor of Menes, the first king of the first dynasty, which dates back to about 4000 years before our era: “Athothis, his son, reigned 57 years; he built the palaces at Memphis, and left the anatomical books, for he was a physician.”[320] The custom of embalming the dead necessarily led to at least a rough knowledge of the anatomy of the body. SESOSTRIS, or SESORTOSIS, the second king of the third dynasty, sometimes gets credit for being “the actual founder of medicine.”[321] Manetho says of him: “He is called Asclepius by the Egyptians, for his medical knowledge.”[322]