Erasistratus cultivated surgery as well as the other branches of medicine. He was a bold operator, as may be inferred from the fact that, in cases of scirrhus or other variety of tumor of the liver, he did not hesitate to incise the skin and overlying integuments, and then, after the peritoneal cavity had been opened, to apply directly to the seat of the disease such medicaments as seemed to him appropriate. On the other hand, he did not approve of _paracentesis abdominis_ in cases of dropsical effusion, as a means of evacuating the fluid accumulated in the peritoneal cavity. It appears that the disciples and successors of Herophilus and Erasistratus soon abandoned the exact methods which these two great masters had inaugurated and which, in a comparatively short time, had produced such admirable results, and then they fell back into the less arduous, the easy-going ways of speculation. Only a very few had sufficient strength of character to walk in the older pathway, and among the number were some who left Alexandria and established schools in the other cities--as, for example, Zeuxis, who organized a new centre of medical teaching at Laodicea, in the interior of Asia Minor, and Hikesios, who founded another school at Smyrna, on the seacoast of Lydia. It is not strange, therefore, that before many years had elapsed the two original schools at Alexandria died a natural death. As Pliny aptly writes, “It was so much more comfortable to sit on the benches of the schools and have learning poured into your ears than to wander daily through the desert outside in search of other nourishing plants.” As a further result of this deadness of the schools at Alexandria (that is, of the sect of the Dogmatics) the more serious-minded physicians espoused with eagerness the side of the Empirics--a sect which developed about this time, but which did not, it must be confessed, hold out much hope of solving the physiological and pathological problems of the day, but which nevertheless satisfied in some measure their needs as practitioners.