principal libraries of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, France, and England, in search of manuscripts of Greek, Roman, and Oriental writers on medicine, is now engaged in publishing his ‘Analecta Medica.’

“The work contains several interesting papers on the subject of physical science among the Indians and Arabians, and communicates several introductory notices and illustrations from native Eastern writers. Dietz proves that the late Greek physicians were acquainted with the medical works of the Hindus, and availed themselves of their medicaments; but he more particularly shows that the Arabians were familiar with them, and extolled the healing art, as practised by the Indians, quite as much as that in use among the Greeks.

“It appears from Ibn Osaibe’s testimony (from whose biographical work Dietz has given a long abstract on the lives of Indian physicians), that a variety of treatises on medical science were translated from the Sanscrit into Persian and Arabic, particularly the more important compilations of Charaka and Susruta, which are still held in estimation in India; and that Manka and Saleh—the former of whom translated a special treatise on poisons into Persian—even held appointments as body-physicians at the Court of Harun-al-Raschid.”

As the age of the medical works of Charaka and Susruta is incontestably much more ancient than that of any other work on the subject (except the Ayur Veda)—as we shall see when we come to consider the science of the Hindoos—this in itself would be sufficient to show that the Arabians were certainly not the originators of either medical or chemical science.

We should not forget that it is only to their own works and their translations, chiefly by the Greeks, we owe our knowledge of the state of Arabian science, and that it is only in rare cases that we have given a list of works consulted, so that we can gather the sources from which their knowledge was derived. It would scarcely be imagined, from reading the works of Roger Bacon, or of Newton, that they had derived some, at least, of their knowledge from Arabian sources; and yet such is known to have been the case with them both.

Let us now glance backwards from the Arabians to the Greeks.

It is supposed that the first translations from the Greek authors were made for the Caliphs about 745 A.D., and were first translated into Syriac, and then into Arabic. The works of Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Galen, and Dioscorides are known to have been translated under the reign of Al-Mansour.

Granting for the moment that the first knowledge of the sciences was obtained by the Arabians from the Greeks, we are at once face to face with the question. From whence did the Greeks obtain their knowledge? To any careful reader it will be clear that Grecian science and philosophy, like Grecian theology, was not of native birth. It is comparatively well known that the Greeks were indebted to the Egyptians for much of their theology as well as science. The great truths which really underlay the mysterious religious rites of Egypt seem to have been altogether lost when the Greeks wove their complicated system of theology; and we read that the Egyptian priests looked on the Greeks as children who failed to understand the great mysteries involved in their religious rites, disguised as they were in symbolic form. But, besides their indebtedness to Egypt, we will find that they also owed much to Persia, and through it again to Indian sources of knowledge.

There was constant communication between the Grecian and Persian nations. We learn that it was not uncommon for Grecian generals to take service under the Persian Satraps, tempted by the liberal recompence with which their services were rewarded. About the year 356 B.C. this system of Greeks accepting service under Persian Satraps nearly caused the outbreak of war between Greece and Persia—Chares, a Grecian commander, having assisted with his fleet and men, Artabanus, the Satrap of Propontis, who was then in revolt against the Persian king. But before this, during the great plague which desolated Athens in 430 B.C., and which also extended to Persia, Hippocrates was invited to go to the Persian Court; and it is on record that Ctesias was for seventeen years physician at the Persian Court about 400 B.C., during which period he wrote his history of Persia, and an account of India, which Professor Wilson, in a paper read to the Ashmolean Society of Oxford, has shown to contain notices of the natural productions of the country, “which, although often extravagant and absurd, are, nevertheless, founded on truth.”

There were, too, Grecian soldiers employed as paid auxiliaries, and a colony of Greeks who had been taken prisoners of war was founded within a day’s journey of Susa.

The great expedition to Persia, and the graphic description of the retreat of the “ten thousand” Greeks, given by Xenophon in his Anabasis, must have been well known to Alexander the Great when he set out on his career of conquest. He overthrew the Persian empire in 331 B.C., having destroyed Tyre and subdued Egypt in the previous year and carried his triumphant progress to the banks of the Indus, and there he “held intercourse with the learned sages of India.” On Alexander’s death Seleucus succeeded to the throne of Persia in 307 B.C., and not long after he forced his way beyond the Indus, and ultimately as far as the sacred river Ganges. He formed an alliance with the Indian king Sandrocottus (otherwise known as Chandra-gupta), which was maintained for many years, and it is said, also, that he gave his daughter in marriage to the Indian king, and aided him with Grecian auxiliaries in his wars.

He sent an expedition by sea, under the command of Patrocles his admiral, who visited the western shores of India, and a little later he despatched an embassy under Megasthenes and Onesicrates, the former of whom resided for some years at the “great city” of Palibothra (supposed to be Patna).

Not long after Megasthenes was at Palibothra, Ptolemy Philadelphus sent an expedition overland through Persia to India, and later Ptolemy Euergetes, who lived between 145-116 B.C., sent a fleet under Eudoxius on a voyage of discovery to the western shores of India, piloted, as is said, by an Indian sailor who had been shipwrecked, and who had been found in a boat on the Red Sea. Eudoxius reached India safely, and returned to Egypt with a cargo of spices and precious stones.

The proof of very ancient communication between Greece and India is quite clear, both by way of Persia and Egypt, and we find that the Greeks, who were in the habit of calling all other nations barbarians, speak constantly with respect of the gymnosophists—called “Sapientes Indi” by Pliny. We read also of the Greek philosophers constantly travelling eastward in search of knowledge, and on their return setting up new schools of thought. Thales, it is affirmed, travelled in Egypt and Asia during the sixth century B.C., and it is said of him that he returned to Miletus, and transported that vast stock of learning which he had acquired into his own country.

He is generally considered as the first of the Greek philosophers. Strabo says of him that he was the first of the Grecian philosophers who made inquiry into natural causes and the