The age immediately prior to this unsettled condition of thought is the really mythopoeic age; in which the creative faculties of the society know no other employment, and the mass of the soceity no other mental demand. The perfect expression of such a period, in its full peculiarity and grandeur, is to be found in the Iliad and Odyssey, poems of which we cannot determine the exact date, but which seem both to have existed prior to the first Olympiad, 776 B.C., our earliest trustworthy mark of Grecian time. For some time after that event, the mythopceic tendencies continued in vigor (Arktinus, Leschês, Eumêlus, and seemingly most of the Hesiodic poems, fall within or shortly after the first century of recorded Olympiads); but from and after this first century, we may trace the operation of causes which gradually enfeebled and narrowed them, altering the point of view from which the mythes were looked at. What these causes were, it will be necessary briefly to intimate.
with the memorable doctrine laid down in the treatise, De Aere, Locis et Aquis (c. 22. p. 78, ed. Littré), and cited hereafter, in this chapter. Nor does Galen seem to have regarded it as harmonizing with the general views of Hippocrates. In the excellent Prolegomena of Mr. Littré to his edition of Hippocrates (t. i. p. 76) will be found an inedited scholium, wherein the opinion of Baccheius and other physicians is given, that the affections of the plague were to be looked upon as divine, inasmuch as the disease came from God; and also the opinion of Xenophôn, the friend of Praxagoras, that the "genus of days of crisis" in fever was divine;" For (said Xenophôn) just as the Dioskuri, being gods, appear to the mariner in the storm and bring him salvation, so also do the days of crisis, when they arrive, in fever." Galen, in commenting upon this doctrine of Xenophôn, says that the author "has expressed his own individual feeling, but has no way set forth the opinion of Hippocratês:"(
Greek characters) (Galen, Opp. t. T. p. 120, ed. Basil).
The comparison of the Dioskuri appealed to by Xenophon is a precise reproduction of their function as described in the Homeric Hymn (Hymn xxxiii. 10): his personification of the "days of crisis" introduces the old religious agency to fill up a gap in his medical science.
I annex an illustration from the Hindoo vein of thought : "It is a rule with the Hindoos to bury, and not to burn, the bodies of those who die of the small-pox: for (say they) the small pox is not only caused by the goddess Davey, but is, in fact, Davey herself; and to burn the body of a person affected with this disease, is, in reality, neither more nor less than to burn the goddess." (Slceman, Kambles and Recollections, etc vol. i. ch. xxv. p. 221.)
