The discovery of the practice of purging as a remedy was attributed to Melampus. But we know that the Egyptians made use of purgative and emetic medicines. There were many purgatives in use in the time of Hippocrates, as hellebore, elaterium, colocynth, and scammony. All these medicines could not have been discovered at once, as Le Clerc points out; mankind, therefore, must have gradually acquired their use. When persons were overloaded in the stomach and constipated, nothing was more natural than that they should seek relief by removing the mechanical causes of their distress. Some one had taken some herb which had caused him to vomit or to be purged, and had experienced the benefit of the evacuation; he told his friends, and they perhaps had been aided by similar means. Or again, some illness had been alleviated by the supervention of diarrhœa, and art was called in to imitate the beneficial effect of nature’s cure. In this way, says Le Clerc, bleeding may reasonably have been discovered: a severe headache is often relieved by bleeding from the nose, what more natural than that the process of relief should be imitated by opening a vein? Pliny, indeed, in his usual manner, introduces a fable to account for the discovery of venesection. He says[344] that the hippopotamus having become too fat and unwieldy through over-eating, bled himself with a sharp-pointed reed, and when he had drawn sufficient blood, closed the wound with clay. Men have imitated the operation, says Pliny. This is matched by the story of the ibis with her long bill being the inventor of the clyster. Most of the medical beast stories are probably on a level with these. _Hygeia_, the wife of _Æsculapius_, and her children, bore names which show the same poetic fancy as that which constituted Apollo the author of medicine. _Æsculapius_ is the air. _Hygeia_ is health; _Ægle_ is brightness or splendour, because the air is illumined and purified by the sun. _Iaso_ is recovery, _Panacea_ the universal medicine, _Roma_ is strength. The ancients everywhere believed that the healing art was taught to mankind by the gods. “The art of medicine,” says Cicero, “has been consecrated by the invention of the immortal gods.”[345] Hippocrates[346] attributed the art of medicine to the Supreme Being. As the Greeks believed that the arts in general were invented by the gods, it was a natural belief that the knowledge of medicine should have been taught by the heavenly powers. The mysteries of life, disease, and death were peculiarly the province of supernatural beings, and man has ever attributed to such powers all those things which he could not comprehend. THE TEMPLES OF ÆSCULAPIUS.