daily, such things impressed careful men, who noted what had best helped the sick, then began to prescribe them.  In this way medicine had its rise from the experience of the recovery of some, of the death of others, distinguishing the hurtful from the salutary things” (Book I).  The association of ideas was suggestive—­the plant eyebright was used for centuries in diseases of the eye because a black speck in the flower suggested the pupil of the eye.  The old herbals are full of similar illustrations upon which, indeed, the so-called doctrine of signatures depends.  Observation came, and with it an ever widening experience.  No society so primitive without some evidence of the existence of a healing art, which grew with its growth, and became part of the fabric of its organization.

With primitive medicine, as such, I cannot deal, but I must refer to the oldest existing evidence of a very extraordinary practice, that of trephining.  Neolithic skulls with disks of bone removed have been found in nearly all parts of the world.  Many careful studies have been made of this procedure, particularly by the great anatomist and surgeon, Paul Broca, and M. Lucas-Championniere has covered the subject in a monograph.(2) Broca suggests that the trephining was done by scratching or scraping, but, as Lucas-Championniere holds, it was also done by a series of perforations made in a circle with flint instruments, and a round piece of skull in this way removed; traces of these drill-holes have been found.  The operation was done for epilepsy, infantile convulsions, headache, and various cerebral diseases believed to be caused by confined demons, to whom the hole gave a ready method of escape.

     (2) Lucas-Championniere:  Trepanation neolithique, Paris,
     1912.

The practice is still extant.  Lucas-Championniere saw a Kabyle thoubib who told him that it was quite common among his tribe; he was the son of a family of trephiners, and had undergone the operation four times, his father twelve times; he had three brothers also experts; he did not consider it a dangerous operation.  He did it most frequently for pain in the head, and occasionally for fracture.

The operation was sometimes performed upon animals.  Shepherds trephined sheep for the staggers.  We may say that the modern decompression operation, so much in vogue, is the oldest known surgical procedure.

EGYPTIAN MEDICINE

Out of the ocean of oblivion, man emerges in history in a highly civilized state on the banks of the Nile, some sixty centuries ago.  After millenniums of a gradual upward progress, which can be traced in the records of the stone age, civilization springs forth Minerva-like, complete, and highly developed, in the Nile Valley.  In this sheltered, fertile spot, neolithic man first raised himself above his kindred races of the Mediterranean basin, and it is suggested that by the accidental discovery of copper