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.

All this scarcely seems to have a place in the preface of a historical
romance, and yet it is worthy of mention here; for there is something
almost "providential" in the fact that it was reserved for the author
of "An Egyptian Princess" to bestow the gift of this manuscript upon the
scientific world. Among the characters in the novel the reader will meet
an o