II

THE FORM AND CONSTRUCTION OF CERTAIN HIPPOCRATIC WORKS

Many books in the Hippocratic Collection are not strictly “books” at all; they consist of separate pieces written continuously without any internal bond of union. Already, in Volume I, we have discussed the curious features presented by Epidemics I and III,¹ and by Airs Waters Places.² The aphoristic works, being at best compilations, exhibit a looseness of texture which makes additions and interpolations not only easy to insert but also difficult to detect. Nature of Man and Regimen in Health appear as one work in our manuscripts, and the whole has been variously divided by commentators from Galen onwards. Humours has scarcely any texture at all, and the disjointed fragments of which it is composed can in not a few places be traced to other works in the Corpus.

The scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of Nature of Man—Humours, probably because of its hopeless obscurity, has been very much neglected—seem to make, perhaps unconsciously, a more than doubtful assumption. They suppose the present form of the book to be due to a compiler,

¹ Vol. I. pp. 141, 142.   ² Vol. I. p. 66.