Who shall say, in reading such passages, that the New Philosophy of Bacon, which reads now like old common-sense, was not sadly wanted, if the learned physician, while feeling his patient’s pulse, could see only with the eyes of Galen? In the fourteenth century we see the physician busied with his astrology, and laboriously fixing the day when Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, did battle with the sun over the great Indian Ocean; in the sixteenth we find him, with quite dialectic mind, absorbed in the study of his classical authorities; at the present time we may truly say that there are no inquiries conducted with a more philosophical spirit, or with greater zeal and energy, than those which relate to the human frame, its functions and its diseases. The extreme complexity of the subject renders our progress slow. And yet progress can hardly be said to have been slow. Let any one take up that admirable little manual on The Nervous System, by Dr Herbert Mayo, and compare it with any work a hundred years old: it is a new science; and that not only from the new facts which a Robert Bell and a Marshall Hall, and other distinguished men in France and Germany, have added to our knowledge, but from the fine spirit of philosophical inquiry which presides over the whole. We have not only left astrology behind, we have not only left behind the undue reverence to classical authority, but we have thrown aside that dislike and depreciation of physiology which the metaphysician had done his part to encourage, and have entered, as with a fresh eye and a beating heart, upon the study of the wonders of the human frame.
THE SONG OF METRODORUS.
Παντοίην βιότοιο τάμοις τρίβον. εἰν ἀγορῇ μέυ
κύδεα καὶ πινυταὶ πρήξιες. ἐυ δὲ δόμοις
ἄμπανμ’. ἐν δ’ἀγροῖς Φύσιος χάρις. ἐν δὲ ζαλάσση
κέρδος. ἐπὶ ξείνης, ἢν μὲν ἔχης τι, κλέος.
ν δ’ ἀπορὴς, μόνος οἶδας. ἔχεις γάμον; οἶκος ἄριστος
ἔσσεται. οὐ γαμέεις; ζης ἔτ’ ἐλαφρότερον.
τέκνα πόζος. ἄφροντις ἄπαμς βίος. αἱ νεότητες
ῥωμαλέαι. πολιαὶ δ’ ἔμπαλιν εὐσεβέες.