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 familiar with the operation, for he says (1. c. see. 33): "We judge the wind-pipe has been opened from the air rushing through it with a whizzing noise and from the voice having been lost." In closing the wound he freshened the edges of the transverse incision and sewed the skin, but not the cartilage, the latter not being divided.

He follows Hippocrates in his treatment of fractures of the nose, (1. c. sec. 91). We miss all invocations, incantations, and amulets from the throat pharmacopoeia of Aegineta, and he does not lay much emphasis on the Chaldean prescriptions, though they are mentioned with approval, stercoraceous drugs and the swallow prescription being advised.

THE ARABIANS.

In pursuance of the plan of this book we must now devote an unusual amount of space to the rapid enumeration of the political events which shifted the leadership in science and medicine from the Greeks to the Arabians, events which are connecting links in the progress of civilization.

Greek physicians existed at Constantinople as long as the Christian religion flourished there, but while their works are of interest to the student of the phenomena presented by a dying civilization, they are of less interest to the historian of the progress of medical knowledge. Guizot, speaking of Roman Gaul in the last days of the Empire, asserted that "The Library at Constantinople had a librarian and seven scribes constantly occupied, four for Greek and three for Latin ; they copied the new works which appeared or the ancient ones which were degenerating. It is probable that the same institution existed at Trèves, and in the larger cities of Gaul." Notwithstanding periods of vigor exhibited by the Eastern Empire, notwithstanding, as Freeman declares, many of the Emperors were great conquerors and rulers who beat back their enemies on every side, and made conquests in their turn, although the last Constantine died a death worthy of the first, hopelessly battling for his empire in the breach of the city wall, notwithstanding all these things, learning did not send forth any new shoots, and Gibbon sums the matter up thus: "They read, they praised, they compiled, but their languid souls seemed alike incapable of thought and action." Finally, their political existence sank to the level of their civilization. The walls of Constantinople protected its feeble inhabitants, except for its conquest by the crusaders, for more than a thousand years after its impregnable situation had