Who discovered our Medicines?—Anthropology can assist us to answer the Question.—The Priest and the Medicine-man originally one.—Disease the Work of Magic.—Origin of our Ideas of the Soul and Future Life.—Disease-demons. Cardinal Newman, in his sermon on “The World’s Benefactors,” asks, “Who was the first cultivator of corn? Who first tamed and domesticated the animals whose strength we use, and whom we make our food? Or who first discovered the medicinal herbs, which from the earliest times have been our resource against disease? If it was mortal man who thus looked through the vegetable and animal worlds, and discriminated between the useful and the worthless, his name is unknown to the millions whom he has thus benefited. “It is notorious that those who first suggest the most happy inventions and open a way to the secret stores of nature; those who weary themselves in the search after truth; strike out momentous principles of action; painfully force upon their contemporaries the adoption of beneficial measures; or, again, are the original cause of the chief events in national history,—are commonly supplanted, as regards celebrity and reward, by inferior men. Their works are not called after them, nor the arts and systems which they have given the world. Their schools are usurped by strangers, and their maxims of wisdom circulate among the children of their people, forming perhaps a nation’s character, but not embalming in their own immortality the names of their original authors.”