ere." He believed
that the laws by which the universe is governed are in accordance with
the doctrines of mathematics. The same opinion was shared by Pythagoras,
the great founder of the science, whose main formula was that _number_
is the essence or first principle of all things. No thinkers ever
surpassed the Greeks in originality and profundity; and mathematics,
being highly prized by them, were carried to the greatest perfection
their method would allow. They did not understand algebra, by the
application of which to geometry modern mathematicians have climbed to
greater heights than the ancients; but then it is all the more
remarkable that without the aid of algebraic analysis they were able to
solve such difficult problems as occupied the minds of Archimedes and
Apollonius. No positive science can boast of such rapid development as
geometry for two or three hundred years before Christ, and never was the
intellect of man more severely tasked than by the ancient
mathematicians.

No empirical science can be carried to perfection by any one nation or
in any particular epoch; it can only expand with the progressive
developments of the human race itself. Nevertheless, in that science
which for three thousand years has been held in the greatest honor, and
which is one of the three great liberal professions of our modern times,
the ancients, especially the Greeks, made considerable advance. The
science of medicine, having in view the amelioration of human misery and
the prolongation of life itself, was very early cultivated. It was,
indeed, in old times another word for _physics_,--the science of
Nature,--and the _physician_ was the observer and expounder of physics.
The physician was supposed to be acquainted with the secrets of
Nature,--that is, the knowledge of drugs, of poisons, of antidotes to
them, and the way to administer them. He was also supposed to know the
process of preserving the body after death. Thus Joseph, seventeen
hundred years before the birth of Christ, commanded his physician to
embalm the body of his father; and the process of embalming was probably
known to the Egyptians before the period when history begins. Helen, of
Trojan fame, put into wine a drug that "frees man from grief and anger,
and causes oblivion of all ills." Solomon was a great botanist,--a realm
with which the science of medicine is indissolubly connected. The origin
of Hindu medicine is lost in remote antiquity. The Ayur Veda, wri