Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/621

Rh, an exceptionally healthy people, owing to their fondness for outdoor life. This is demonstrated by the rapidity with which they recovered from repeated disasters. Once in a while their capital was invaded by a contagious disorder, then all who could do so left it until the scourge had spent its force, when affairs resumed their natural channel. In fact this was the usual course everywhere until very recently, when the real nature of such diseases was discovered. The ancient Romans were also a singularly hard-headed and practical people; consequently they were almost entirely free from the long list of complaints that are more or less due to the uncontrolled or uncontrollable imagination. Shortly after the Punic wars, but especially under the empire when luxurious habits due to the influx of wealth from the east had debilitated the naturally robust constitutions of the higher classes, nervous disorders, along with many others, were inevitable. Then quacks, charlatans, medicasters, soothsayers, magicians, astrologers and what not found a ready market for their wares. They played upon the credulity of the populace and preyed upon their purses because there was money in both the playing and the preying. No small portion of them probably were shrewd enough to disguise some real medical knowledge under a mass of hocus pocus in order to influence the imaginations of their patients. Well might Ovid say as others had said before him—and since, too—mundus vult decipi (people like to be deluded). Physicians still give to their patients who insist 'on taking something' bread pills, colored water and other equally potent or impotent remedies. It would be manifestly unfair to charge a physician with dishonesty because he practises a harmless ruse upon a patient who can be helped in no other way so easily.

"Dismissing faith in the confused creeds of the heathen world, he reposed the greatest faith in the power of human wisdom. He did not know (perhaps no one in that age distinctly did) the limits which nature imposes on our discoveries. Seeing that the higher we mount in knowledge the more wonders we behold, he imagined that nature not only worked miracles in her ordinary course, but that she might, by the cabala of some master soul, be diverted from that course itself. Thus he pursued science across her appointed boundaries into the land of perplexity and shadow. Prom the truths of astronomy he wandered into astrological fallacy: from the secrets of chemistry he passed into the spectral labyrinth of magic; and he who could be skeptical as to the power of the gods was credulously superstitious as to the power of man." Such are the thoughts that Bulwer-Lytton, in the Last Days of Pompeii, puts into the mind of one of his characters, the Egyptian Arbaces. The reasoning by which such men justified the employment of their superior knowledge and insight to dupe the credulous was half philosophy, half knavery. If a man is the possessor of power