[Called by the Greeks “Hermetic Books.”  The Papyrus Ebers is the
   work called by Clemens of Alexandria “the Book of Remedies.”]

which stood fast and unassailable as the laws of the world; he wished to give me peace for quiet work, and I also, he said, might be a chosen spirit, the divinity might perhaps vouchsafe revelations to me too.  I was young at that time, and spent my nights in prayer, but I only wasted away, and my spirit grew darker instead of clearer.  Then I killed in secret—­first a fowl, then rats, then a rabbit, and cut up their hearts, and followed the vessels that lead out of them, and know little more now than I did at first; but I must get to the bottom of the truth, and I must have a human heart.”

“What will that do for you?” asked Pentaur; “you cannot hope to perceive the invisible and the infinite with your human eyes?”

“Do you know my great-grandfather’s treatise?”

“A little,” answered the poet; “he said that wherever he laid his finger, whether on the head, the hands, or the stomach, he everywhere met with the heart, because its vessels go into all the members, and the heart is the meeting point of all these vessels.  Then Nebsecht proceeds to state how these are distributed in the different members, and shows—­is it not so?—­that the various mental states, such as anger, grief, aversion, and also the ordinary use of the word heart, declare entirely for his view.”

“That is it.  We have already discussed it, and I believe that he is right, so far as the blood is concerned, and the animal sensations.  But the pure and luminous intelligence in us—­that has another seat,” and the physician struck his broad but low forehead with his hand.  “I have observed heads by the hundred down at the place of execution, and I have also removed the top of the skulls of living animals.  But now let me write, before we are disturbed.”

[Human brains are prescribed for a malady of the eyes in the Ebers papyrus.  Herophilus, one of the first scholars of the Alexandrine Museum, studied not only the bodies of executed criminals, but made his experiments also on living malefactors.  He maintained that the four cavities of the human brain are the seat of the soul.]

The physician took the reed, moistened it with black color prepared from burnt papyrus, and in elegant hieratic characters

[At the time of our narrative the Egyptians had two kinds of writing-the hieroglyphic, which was generally used for monumental inscriptions, and in which the letters consisted of conventional representations of various objects, mathematical and arbitrary symbols, and the hieratic, used for writing on papyrus, and in which, with the view of saving time, the written pictures underwent so many alterations and abbreviations that the originals could hardly be recognized.  In the 8th century there was a further abridgment of the hieratic writing, which was called the demotic, or people’s