Strutt says: “Faint is the light thrown upon the methods pursued by the Druids in preparing their medicines. Some few hints, it is true, we meet with, of their extracting the juice of herbs, their bruising and steeping them in water, infusing them in wine, boiling them and making fumes from them, and the like; it also appears that they were not ignorant of making salves and ointments from vegetables.”[613] In Britain the magical juggles, ceremonies, and rites were carried to a greater excess than in any other Celtic nation. They made a great mystery of their learning, their seminaries were held in groves and forests and the caverns of the earth.[614] Strutt thinks that their alphabet was derived from the Greek merchants, who came frequently to the island. Pliny says that the ancient Britons were much addicted to the arts of divination.[615] Diodorus Siculus describes one of their methods. “They take a man who is to be sacrificed and kill him with one stroke of a sword above the diaphragm; and by observing the posture in which he falls, his different convulsions, and the direction in which the blood flows from his body, they form their predictions, according to certain rules which have been left them by their ancestors.”[616] Strutt says:[617] “The people were the more particularly inclined to make application to them for relief, because they thought that all internal diseases proceeded from the anger of the gods, and therefore none could be so proper to make intercession for them as the priest of those very deities from whom their afflictions came; for this cause also they offered sacrifices when sick; and if dangerously ill, the better to prevail upon the gods to restore them to health, a man was slain and sacrificed upon their altars.” The custom of human sacrifices doubtless afforded the Druids some knowledge of human anatomy. Their surgery was of a simple but useful character, and had to do principally with setting broken bones, reducing dislocations, and healing wounds; all this, of course, combined with magical ceremonies.[618] Pliny refers to the magical practices of the Druids, and states that the Emperor Tiberius put them down, “and all that tribe of wizards and physicians.”[619] He adds that they crossed the ocean and “penetrated to the void recesses of Nature,” as he calls Britannia. There, he tells us, they still cultivated the magic art, and that with fascinations and ceremonials so august that Persia might almost seem to have communicated it direct to Britain. “The worship of the stars, lakes, forests, and rivers, the ceremonials used in cutting the plants Samiolus, Selago, and Mistletoe, and the virtues attributed to the adder’s egg,” are thought by Ajasson to indicate the connection between the superstitions of ancient Britain and those of Persia.[620] MEDICINE OF THE TEUTONS.