As we are still in the age of fable, it may not be out of place to notice with what tenacity the human mind clings to those delusions which fear engenders, and weak hopes sustain: with all our boasted enlightenment, the _marvellous_ and the _incredible_ have more worshippers than the _real_ and the _true_. Let us not wonder then, that the pure monotheism enunciated in the Holy Scriptures had so little charm for the sensuous and imaginative Greeks. Socrates, who, by the simple force of reason and philosophy had reached the very portals of the temple in which was enshrined the idea of the unity of God, in his _last hour_ “sacrifices a cock to Esculapius.” The reputed offspring of an impure deity, History is unhappily more abundant in records of human folly and superstition, than in examples of purity of thought and action—simplicity is everywhere despised—facts are distorted or made subservient to sensations; for example:—It is not enough to tell us that Chiron was skilled in physic, but to suit the depraved appetites of the vulgar he is a _centaur_, and Esculapius a _god_. It is therefore with something like relief that the name of Hippocrates comes before us, for in him we have a _reality_, and in his works a remarkable record of the condition of medical science in the fifth century before Christ. He was born at Cos, a small island off the coast of Caria, not in Greece proper, in the first year of the 80th Olympiad. Hippocrates was descended from Esculapius by his father’s side, and from Hercules by his mother’s, and was the son of Heraclides, a physician of the family of the Asclepiadæ, who furnish us with the very earliest instance of a body of philosophers devoting themselves to the healing art; for, although Pythagoras, who lived immediately before Hippocrates, and Democritus, who was his contemporary, were both learned physicians, yet, whatever fame they acquired, was ascribed to their powers as mental philosophers and rhetoricians. It has been urged by way of apology for the mystery in which the philosophers shrouded their wisdom, that “science, like modesty, should cover itself with a veil to increase the charms of the treasure it conceals;” and this principle has been, throughout all ages, more generally acted upon than avowed. The character of Hippocrates is at once a study for the physician and the moralist; the former will appreciate the astonishing evidences which his works afford, of a deep acquaintance with the whole subject of medicine, and his admiration will be increased by the remembrance that all the principles laid down by this great and good man, were the results of his own experience.