How seldom I have availed myself of this freedom will be evident from the notes included in each volume.  They seemed to me necessary, partly in order to explain the names and illustrate the circumstances mentioned in the text, and partly to vindicate the writer in the eyes of the learned.  I trust they may not prove discouraging to any, as the text will be found easily readable without reference to the explanations.

   Jena, November 23, 1868. 
               Georg Ebers, Dr.

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH GERMAN EDITION.

Two years and a half after the appearance of the third edition of “An Egyptian Princess,” a fourth was needed.  I returned long since from the journey to the Nile, for which I was preparing while correcting the proof-sheets of the third edition, and on which I can look back with special satisfaction.  During my residence in Egypt, in 1872-73, a lucky accident enabled me to make many new discoveries; among them one treasure of incomparable value, the great hieratic manuscript, which bears my name.  Its publication has just been completed, and it is now in the library of the Leipzig University.

The Papyrus Ebers, the second in size and the best preserved of all the ancient Egyptian manuscripts which have come into our possession, was written in the 16th century B. C., and contains on 110 pages the hermetic book upon the medicines of the ancient Egyptians, known also to the Alexandrine Greeks.  The god Thoth (Hermes) is called “the guide” of physicians, and the various writings and treatises of which the work is composed are revelations from him.  In this venerable scroll diagnoses are made and remedies suggested for the internal and external diseases of most portions of the human body.  With the drugs prescribed are numbers, according to which they are weighed with weights and measured with hollow measures, and accompanying the prescriptions are noted the pious axioms to be repeated by the physician, while compounding and giving them to the patient.  On the second line of the first page of our manuscript, it is stated that it came from Sais.  A large portion of this work is devoted to the visual organs.  On the twentieth line of the fifty-fifth page begins the book on the eyes, which fills eight large pages.  We were formerly compelled to draw from Greek and Roman authors what we knew about the remedies used for diseases of the eye among the ancient Egyptians.  The portion of the Papyrus Ebers just mentioned is now the only Egyptian source from whence we can obtain instruction concerning this important branch of ancient medicine.