It has often been remarked that the outstanding trait of the untrained mind is credulity. The rationalization of man's views of the world has been a very slow process and it is still very far from a completed process. It has commonly been thought to have begun with the Greeks, but its origin must be sought in the Orient in a period long before Greek civilization had arisen. The Edwin Smith Medical Papyrus, acquired in 1906 by the. New York Historical Society, discloses the inductive process of scientific investigation already in operation in the Seventeenth Century before Christ. For example this document contains the earliest occurrence of the word" brain" anywhere appearing in surviving records of the past. The word is unknown in Old Testament Hebrew, in Babylonian, Assyrian, or any of the ancient languages ofWestern Asia. The organ itself there-fore, was evidently discovered and the recognition of its various functions was begun for the first time by these physicians of early Egypt in the thousand years preceding the Seventeenth Century B. C. The obser--vations recorded in the Edwin Smith Medical Papyrus show that its author had already observed that control of the members and limbs of the body was localized in different sides of the brain; and the recognition of localization of functions in the brain, mostly the work of modern surgeons within a generation or two, had already begun in theSeventeenth Century B. C., at a time whenall Europe still lay in savagery or barbarism. I hold in my hand part of an original transit instrument, made as stated by the inscription upon it, by no less a king than Tutenkhamon, in the Fourteenth Century BC It did not come from the tomb of Tutenkhamon, but was apparently made by him for the tomb of his (or his wife's) greatgrandfather, Thutmose IV (Fifteenth Century B. C.). This and another such piece now at Berlin, are the oldestscientific instruments of any kind now known to besurviving. It was used for. determining meridian time, especially at night, in order that the observer might then set his water