Page:The Hunterian oration, for the year 1819.djvu/14

10 in this respect also, well displayed the results of different dispositions or powers of mind, by the following simile. "The empirics,” says he, “like ants, only lay by stores and use them; the rationalists, like spiders, spin webs out of themselves; but the bee takes a middle course, collecting her matter from the flowers of the field and garden, and digesting, and elaborating it by her native powers.”

It was shortly after the establishment of the Alexandrian school, that, as Celsus informs us, the practice of medicine was first separated into three parts, and each part consigned to a different person, one of whom was supposed to cure diseases by compounds of drugs and other substances; another by regimen and plans of diet; and the third by manual operations and instruments. This partition seems to have been both an effect and a cause of that confusion between the object of medicine, and the means of accomplishing it, which has obtained more or less ever since that period. The bulk of medical knowledge, was, however, at that time too diminutive, to permit