nce he would not
attempt to visualize them. Democritus, on the other hand, refused
to recognize this barrier. Where he could not know, he still did not
hesitate to guess. Just as he conceived his atom of a definite form with
a definite structure, even so he conceived that the atmosphere about him
was full of invisible spirits; he accepted the current superstitions of
his time. Like the average Greeks of his day, he even believed in such
omens as those furnished by inspecting the entrails of a fowl. These
chance bits of biography are weather-vanes of the mind of Democritus.
They tend to substantiate our conviction that Democritus must rank
below Anaxagoras as a devotee of pure science. But, after all, such
comparisons and estimates as this are utterly futile. The essential fact
for us is that here, in the fifth century before our era, we find put
forward the most penetrating guess as to the constitution of matter that
the history of ancient thought has to present to us. In one direction,
the avenue of progress is barred; there will be no farther step that way
till we come down the centuries to the time of Dalton.

HIPPOCRATES AND GREEK MEDICINE

These studies of the constitution of matter have carried us to the
limits of the field of scientific imagination in antiquity; let us now
turn sharply and consider a department of science in which theory joins
hands with practicality. Let us witness the beginnings of scientific
therapeutics.

Medicine among the early Greeks, before the time of Hippocrates, was
a crude mixture of religion, necromancy, and mysticism. Temples were
erected to the god of medicine, aesculapius, and sick persons made their
way, or were carried, to these temples, where they sought to gain the
favor of the god by suitable offerings, and learn the way to regain
their health through remedies or methods revealed to them in dreams by
the god. When the patient had been thus cured, he placed a tablet in the
temple describing his sickness, and telling by what method the god had
cured him. He again made suitable offerings at the temple, which were
sometimes in the form of gold or silver representations of the diseased
organ--a gold or silver model of a heart, hand, foot, etc.

Nevertheless, despite this belief in the supernatural, many drugs
and healing lotions were employed, and the Greek physicians possessed
considerable skill in dressing wounds and bandaging. But they did not
depend upon these surgical d