Another circumstance in the life of Hippocrates, for the truth of which Soranus, Suidas, and a host of ancient authorities concur in vouching, namely, that he refused a formal invitation to pay a professional visit to the court of Persia, is rejected with disdain by almost all the modern scholars who have touched upon this subject. But was it an uncommon thing for the king of Persia to manœuvre in this way with Grecian talent in order to attract it to his court? So far is the contrary known to be the case that, as every person who is familiar with the early history of Greece must be well aware, the manner in which “the Great King” rendered himself most formidable to the Grecian Republics after the humiliating defeats which the military forces of Persia had sustained at Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa, was by intriguing with all those distinguished persons in Greece who would render themselves accessible to his bribes and flatteries, and thus endeavoring to detach them from the cause of their country. Of this we have notable examples in the case of two illustrious individuals, who were nearly contemporary with Hippocrates--I mean Pausanias and Themistocles. Moreover, it is well known that Grecian physicians at all times were in high repute at the court of Babylon;[35] witness Ctesias, the contemporary and kinsman of Hippocrates,[36] who was court physician to the king of Persia, and was employed in that capacity in the most serious emergencies.[37] What more natural, then, or more likely to happen, than that the king of Persia, when he saw his country overrun by the plague,[38] should seek advice from a neighboring people, whose superiority to his own subjects in all the arts of war and peace he and his predecessors had learned from sad experience? I readily admit that the letters in the Hippocratic Collection which relate to this story can scarcely be received as genuine; but does this prove that the event upon which they are made to turn is also devoid of truth? I can see no probability in this supposition; for whether we regard these documents as willful forgeries, executed with the fraudulent intention of palming them on the literary world as genuine productions, or whether we look upon them as mere exercises made on given subjects by the Sophists or Scholiasts to display their ability in sustaining an assumed character, it would have been preposterous to make them relate to stories of which every person of that age must have been able to detect the falsehood. Were any person at the present day, from whatever motive, desirous of palming upon the public certain letters said to have been written by the celebrated John Hunter, he would surely not be so imprudent as to endeavor to pass off as genuine a correspondence purporting to have taken place between him and the king of France, as every one at all acquainted with professional biography, would at once perceive that the authenticity of the