Taken all together the conditions in the physician’s world were in anything but a promising state toward the end of the fifteenth century; but the dawn of better times, of modern medicine, was near at hand, and already signs of its approach were beginning to be recognizable in different parts of Western Europe. CHAPTER XXV BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ALLIED SCIENCES--PHARMACY, CHEMISTRY AND BALNEOTHERAPEUTICS During the excavations carried on at the site of Pompeii, there were discovered three houses which bore every appearance of having been occupied by apothecaries. Among the objects found in these buildings were: A bronze box equipped with the apparatus required for mixing ointments; a few surgical instruments; several glass receptacles which had evidently at some earlier period contained fluid or semi-fluid pharmaceutical preparations, but which, at the time when the excavations were made, presented merely a deposit of some solid but easily friable substance at the bottom of the vessel; and quite a variety of drugs in the form of pills, tablets, powders, etc. At first, the impression prevailed that these must have been the houses of apothecaries, but subsequently the discovery, in each instance, of the house sign representing a snake with a pine cone in its mouth (the symbol of Aesculapius) satisfied the authorities that these particular buildings had belonged to physicians. Indeed, as a matter of fact, no good reasons have thus far been found for believing that apothecaries, in the modern acceptation of the term, existed in even the largest cities of Greece and Italy until a much later date. _Pharmacy in Its Infancy._--All through the Hippocratic period and during the years when Alexandria was at the height of its prosperity as the great centre of medical activity, it was customary for the physicians to prepare their own drugs. The same is true of the best physicians belonging to the Augustan period; they were not willing to put their trust in the drugs which had been prepared in the shops where such things were usually sold.