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INDIAN MATERIA MEDICA.
[Chap. VII.

on all hands to be very voluminous. But the most noticeable feature in connection with this particular branch of Aryan medical science is, that unlike other Aryan sciences it has been up to a certain period a progressive one. Each successive writer, after a patient and careful investigation, appears to have added new drugs to the existing list, and to have thus conferred a lasting benefit on mankind. Some of the writers emphatically assert that all the curative agents mentioned in their treatises have been thoroughly tested and recommended after a long practical experience. Each writer has of course his own method of treating the subject. We have already referred to the classification of Agnivesha and of Sushruta. The latter, in the 39th chapter of his standard work, has arranged the drugs into classes according to their power of curing certain diseases, prescribing from ten to twenty-five remedies for each disease. He strongly recommends that physicians should be able to identify the various remedial agents they have to deal with. They should personally go to the jungles, and with the help of shepherds, graziers, ascetics, travellers, and others familiar with the forests, gather the herbs when they are in flower, taking care to avoid those