“The curatives employed were ointments, drinks, plasters, fumigations and clysters, and the drugs employed were taken from vegetables, minerals, and animals.
“Those for each draught were mixed together, pounded, boiled, and strained through linen.
“The doctors belonged to the sacred class, and were only permitted to practice their own particular branch.
“These were oculists, dentists, those who confined their practice to diseases of the head, and those again who only attended to internal diseases; they were paid from the public treasury, and were compelled, before being permitted to practice, to study the precepts laid down by their predecessors.”
Homer, in the Odyssey, describes Egypt “as a country whose fertile soil produces an infinity of drugs, some salutary and some pernicious, where each physician possesses knowledge above all other men.”
The mixing of various drugs and minerals must have produced effects which could not be lost on such observant men as the doctors must, from their training, have been, and it would be absurd to suppose that some, at least, of the simpler chemical decompositions and combinations were not known to them.
The manufacture of glass would seem to have been very ancient amongst the Egyptians, and the insufficiency of the old fable, of its discovery by the fusing of blocks of stone in the fire is quite clear; besides, Egyptian glass has been found which contains potash, and nothing is more probable than that the nitrate of potash, found so plentifully in the soil of India, was imported for this manufacture.
Precious stones or amulets with Sanscrit inscriptions have repeatedly been found in tombs, which must date back to at least B.C. 1400.
In tracing back the history of Chemistry, we constantly find reference to Hermes, Trismegistus, who would seem to be the god Thoth, or Taaut of the Egyptians. The famous inscription of the Emerald table ascribes to him the possession of three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. I have been much struck with the resemblance of this god Taaut with the Menu of the Hindoos, who also was credited with saving from destruction by the flood the three Vedas, which were supposed to contain all that was required for man’s direction here below.
There would appear to have been also other Hermes, but if we look at the condition of things which obtained in Egypt when the Pyramids of Memphis are supposed to have been erected, within 300 years of the supposed date of the deluge, and that the Beni Hassan tombs, about 300 years later, depict the manners and customs of what we cannot help admitting, was a highly civilized nation, we must be struck with the fact that the distance of time between the deluge and the building of these pyramids and tombs is so short, that it might be represented by a comparison of our own date with those of Queen Elizabeth and Henry the Third.