of the numerous ingredients of the prescription had real
efficacy.

The practical anatomical knowledge of the physician, there is
every reason to believe, was extremely limited. At first thought
it might seem that the practice of embalming would have led to
the custom of dissecting human bodies, and that the Egyptians, as
a result of this, would have excelled in the knowledge of
anatomy. But the actual results were rather the reverse of this.
Embalming the dead, it must be recalled, was a purely religious
observance. It took place under the superintendence of the
priests, but so great was the reverence for the human body that
the priests themselves were not permitted to make the abdominal
incision which was a necessary preliminary of the process. This
incision, as we are informed by both Herodotus[7] and
Diodorus[8], was made by a special officer, whose status, if we
may believe the explicit statement of Diodorus, was quite
comparable to that of the modern hangman. The paraschistas, as he
was called, having performed his necessary but obnoxious
function, with the aid of a sharp Ethiopian stone, retired
hastily, leaving the remaining processes to the priests. These,
however, confined their observations to the abdominal viscera;
under no consideration did they make other incisions in the body.
It follows, therefore, that their opportunity for anatomical
observations was most limited.

Since even the necessary mutilation inflicted on the corpse was
regarded with such horror, it follows that anything in the way of
dissection for a less sacred purpose was absolutely prohibited.
Probably the same prohibition extended to a large number of
animals, since most of these were held sacred in one part of
Egypt or another. Moreover, there is nothing in what we know of
the Egyptian mind to suggest the probability that any Egyptian
physician would make extensive anatomical observations for the
love of pure knowledge. All Egyptian science is eminently
practical. If we think of the Egyptian as mysterious, it is
because of the superstitious observances that we everywhere
associate with his daily acts; but these, as we have already
tried to make clear, were really based on scientific observations
of a kind, and the attempt at true inferences from these
observations. But whether or not the Egyptian physician desired
anatomical knowledge, the results of his inquiries were certainly
most meagre. The essentials of his system had to do with a series
of vessels, alleged to be twenty-two or twenty-four in number,
which penetrated the head and were distributed in pairs to the
various members of the body, and which were vaguely thought of as
carriers of water, air, excretory fluids, etc. Yet back of this
vagueness, as must not be overlooked, there was an all-essential
recognition of the heart as the central vascular organ. The heart
is called the beginning of all the members. Its vessels, we are
told, "lead to all the members; whether the doctor lays his
finger on the forehead, on the back of the head, on the hands, on
the place of the stomach (?), on the arms, or on the feet,
everywhere he meets with the heart, because its vessels lead to
all the members."[9] This recognition of the pulse must be
credited to the Egyptian physician as a piece of practical
knowledge, in some measure off-setting the vagueness of his
anatomical theories.


ABSTRACT SCIENCE

But, indeed, practical knowledge was, as has been said over and
over, the essential characteristic of Egyptian science. Yet
another illustration of this is furnished us if we turn to the
more abstract departments of thought and inquire what were the
Egyptian attempts in such a field as mathematics. The answer does
not tend greatly to increase our admiration for the Egyptian
mind. We are led to see, indeed, that the Egyptian merchant was
able to perform all the computations necessary to his craft, but
we are forced to conclude that the knowledge of numbers scarcely
extended beyond this, and that even here the methods of reckoning
were tedious and cumbersome. Our knowledge of the subject rests
largely upon the so- called papyrus Rhind,[10] which is a sort of
mythological hand-book of the ancient Egyptians. Analyzing this
document, Professor Erman concludes that the knowledge of the
Egyptians was adequate to all practical requirements. Their
mathematics taught them "how in the exchange of bread for beer
the respective value was to be determined when converted into a
quantity of corn; how to reckon the size of a field; how to
determine how a given quantity of corn would go into a granary of
a certain size," and like every-day problems. Yet they were
obliged to make some of their simple computations in a very
roundabout way. It would appear, for example, that their mental
arithmetic did not enable them to multiply by a number larger
than two, and that they did not reach a clear conception of
complex fractional numbers. They did, indeed, recognize that each
part of an object divided into 10 pieces became 1/10 of that
object; they even grasped the idea of 2/3 this being a conception
easily visualized; but they apparently did not visualize such a
conception as 3/10 except in the crude form of 1/10 plus 1/10
plus 1/10. Their entire idea of division seems defective. They
viewed the subject from the more elementary stand-point of
multiplication. Thus, in order to find out how many times 7 is
contained in 77, an existing example shows that the numbers
representing 1 times 7, 2 times 7, 4 times 7, 8 times 7 were set
down successively and various experimental additions made to find
out which sets of these numbers aggregated 77.

--1 7


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