s must
not be overlooked, there was an all-essential recognition of the heart
as the central vascular organ. The heart is called the beginning of all
the members. Its vessels, we are told, "lead to all the members; whether
the doctor lays his finger on the forehead, on the back of the head, on
the hands, on the place of the stomach (?), on the arms, or on the feet,
everywhere he meets with the heart, because its vessels lead to all
the members."(9) This recognition of the pulse must be credited to the
Egyptian physician as a piece of practical knowledge, in some measure
off-setting the vagueness of his anatomical theories.

ABSTRACT SCIENCE

But, indeed, practical knowledge was, as has been said over and
over, the essential characteristic of Egyptian science. Yet another
illustration of this is furnished us if we turn to the more abstract
departments of thought and inquire what were the Egyptian attempts
in such a field as mathematics. The answer does not tend greatly to
increase our admiration for the Egyptian mind. We are led to see,
indeed, that the Egyptian merchant was able to perform all the
computations necessary to his craft, but we are forced to conclude that
the knowledge of numbers scarcely extended beyond this, and that even
here the methods of reckoning were tedious and cumbersome. Our knowledge
of the subject rests largely upon the so-called papyrus Rhind,(10) which
is a sort of mythological hand-book of the ancient Egyptians. Analyzing
this document, Professor Erman concludes that the knowledge of the
Egyptians was adequate to all practical requirements. Their mathematics
taught them "how in the exchange of bread for beer the respective value
was to be determined when converted into a quantity of corn; how to
reckon the size of a field; how to determine how a given quantity of
corn would go into a granary of a certain size," and like every-day
problems. Yet they were obliged to make some of their simple
computations in a very roundabout way. It would appear, for example,
that their mental arithmetic did not enable them to multiply by a number
larger than two, and that they did not reach a clear conception of
complex fractional numbers. They did, indeed, recognize that each part
of an object divided into 10 pieces became 1/10 of that object; they
even grasped the idea of 2/3 this being a conception easily visualized;
but they apparently did not visualize such a conception as 3/10 except
in the crude fo