Neoplatonism had its influence on medicine. Plotinus (A.D. 205-270), its great father, said, when dying, “I am striving to bring the God which is in us into harmony with the God which is in the Universe.” The early Christians began to tell the world that the God within the soul of man and the God which is in the Universe are one and the same being, of absolute righteousness, power and love. Plotinus preached a gospel to the philosophic world; the first Christians preached theirs to every creature. Neoplatonism taught the world that spirit was meant to rule matter: it was not enough that the early Christian exhibited to mankind man transformed as the result of his intimate relationship to the Divine, the philosophic world demanded wonders, something above nature, as a proof of the Divine character of the revelation; then, as Kingsley explains,[512] we begin to enter “the fairy land of ecstasy, clairvoyance, insensibility to pain, cures produced by the effect of what we now call mesmerism. They are all there, these modern puzzles, in those old books of the long bygone seekers for wisdom.” Thus mankind, for ever wandering in a circle, began by these ecstasies and cures to retrace its steps towards the ancient priestcraft. These wonders were nothing to the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Jewish sorcerers; they had traded in them for ages. ANTYLLUS (_circ._ 300 A.D.) is mentioned by Oribasius, and is said by Häser to have been one of the greatest of the world’s surgeons; for aneurism he tied the artery above and below the sac, and evacuated its contents; for cataract, and for the cure of stammering, he invented appropriate treatment; and he employed something very much like tenotomy for contractures. He is the earliest writer whose directions are extant for performing the operation of tracheotomy. He must have been a man of great talent and originality. He practised the removal of glandular swellings of the neck and ligatured vessels before dividing them, giving directions for avoiding the carotid artery and the jugular vein. It is a striking proof of the high state which surgery had reached at this period that bones were resected with freedom; the long bones, the lower jaw, and the upper jaw were dealt with in a manner generally considered to be brilliant examples of modern surgery.