of pharmacy must have attained. There were gargles, salves, snuffs,
inhalations, suppositories, fumigations, enemata, poultices and
plasters; and they knew the use of opium, hemlock, the copper salts,
squills and castor oil. Surgery was not very highly developed, but
the knife and actual cautery were freely used. Ophthalmic surgery was
practiced by specialists, and there are many prescriptions in the papyri
for ophthalmia.

One department of Egyptian medicine reached a high stage of development,
vis., hygiene. Cleanliness of the dwellings, of the cities and of the
person was regulated by law, and the priests set a splendid example in
their frequent ablutions, shaving of the entire body, and the spotless
cleanliness of their clothing. As Diodorus remarks, so evenly ordered
was their whole manner of life that it was as if arranged by a learned
physician rather than by a lawgiver.

Two world-wide modes of practice found their earliest illustration in
ancient Egypt. Magic, the first of these, represented the attitude of
primitive man to nature, and really was his religion. He had no idea
of immutable laws, but regarded the world about him as changeable and
fickle like himself, and "to make life go as he wished, he must be able
to please and propitiate or to coerce these forces outside himself."(8)

(8) L. Thorndike: The Place of Magic in the Intellectual
History of Europe, New York, 1905, p. 29.

The point of interest to us is that in the Pyramid Texts--"the oldest
chapter in human thinking preserved to us, the remotest reach in the
intellectual history of man which we are now able to discern"(9)--one of
their six-fold contents relates to the practice of magic. A deep belief