same day, before the sinking of the sun, he had accomplished his mission and returned. He had walked one thousand stadia, but he expired as soon as he had accomplished his mission.

The Romans were not less distinguished in this respect than the Greeks. Pliny speaks of certain athletes of his time, who ran in the circus the distance of 160,000 paces;

But

he mentions, also, a young man who ran 75,000. the feats Pliny mentions are all the more astonishing, seeing that when Tiberius proceeded to Germany after his son Drusus, who was dying, he could not arrive at his destination in less than twenty-four hours, though the distance was only 200,000 paces, and the Emperor, as we are justified in supposing, did not travel afoot.

The runners, like all the other athletes, were naked; but there was a kind of race in which the competitors appeared armed, not from head to foot, but at least with helmet and shield. These racers were called hoplitodromoi

-heavy armed runners. Another variety of contest was the torch-race, which was run either on foot or on horseback, and consisted either in bearing the lighted torch throughout the entire race, and coming to the goal without having allowed it to go out, or in handing it lighted to a second runner, who in turn transferred it in the same state to a third, and so on.

Xenophon remarks that athletes who devoted themselves to running were generally remarkable for their great limbs and their narrow shoulders, the opposite being the case with the wrestlers.

The racers of antiquity who purposed competing at the Olympic games, were extremely careful that nothing should interfere with the rapidity of their pace; and with this object they paid special attention to the condition of their spleen, believing that the unhealthy condition of that organ renders the whole body heavy and the breath short. When

any one on these occasions found himself less agile than usual, he attributed his lassitude at once to the bad condition of his spleen. Plautus, in one of his works, brings upon the scene a slothful servant, who accuses his spleen in order to excuse his laziness. "Ah, here is a racer whose limbs fail him!" cries he. "Heaven! I am lost. My spleen is disturbed, and swells up to my chest. I shall

Torch Race. (After Gerhard.)

never breathe again. I shall make but a sorry player upon the flute."

Some athletes, in order to be freed once for all of such a source of anxiety, sought to rid themselves altogether from an organ which caused so much trouble, and called medicine to their aid. Among the nostrums employed for this purpose were certain herbs, to which was attributed, rightly or wrongly, the power of dissolving the spleen. The only result of using these herbs was probably to diminish its size, by expelling humours which had grown in it. Pliny speaks of a plant, equisetum, a decoction of which the runners drank for three consecutive days. and after having been without

H

food for twenty-four hours. There were many other specifics for dispelling the impurities of the spleen, of which Cœlius Aurelianus, and Marcellus the empiric, speak; and the runners did not fail to apply to them.

Surgery offered other means, more efficacious but also more extreme, for the attainment of the athlete's object, viz., the removal of the organ by the knife or by fire. As to the former operation, ancient physicians do not say whether it ever proved successful; but if we may believe history, the removal of the spleen has been accomplished without sacrificing the life of the patient. The celebrated empiric Leonardo Fioravanti is said to have cured a young Greek suffering from tumour of the spleen at Palermo, in 1549, by cutting out the organ, which weighed several pounds.

The application of fire was a less dangerous practice. In the time of Hippocrates it was the custom to apply above the region of the spleen eight or ten dried mushrooms, which were then set on fire, and produced an equal number of sores. Others cauterised the same region with an instrument having three teeth, which were made red hot, and which burned right through the skin. Nevertheless all this does not prove that the ancients affected the actual substance of the spleen, and their writings furnish no information on the subject. But we have evidence which tends to show the probable success of this operation, in a statement by a German physician, Godfrey Moebius, who lived in the seventeenth century. He had seen in the town of Halberstadt a courier in the service of Count Tilly, who attributed his surprising speed solely to the operation which a surgeon had. performed upon him in the region of the spleen. According to this courier's account he was first put to sleep by means of a narcotic, and the operator having made an incision in his

side, then burned the spleen with a red-hot iron.

Moebius

saw the cicatrice which still marked the seat of the wound. Five other individuals had been treated in the same manner, and at the same time as the courier, and only in one case did the operation result in the death of the patient.

It is believed that those who among the Turks adopt the profession of couriers are subjected to the fire rather than the knife treatment. Formerly the Grand Turk always maintained eighty or a hundred runners, who were named peichs (lackeys or footmen), and who were generally natives of Persia. The Persians were to him what the Basques were in France to the Grand Seigneurs before the Revolution-very willing and very swift messengers. The former ran on before their master when he travelled, and capered with wonderful agility without apparently finding it necessary to stop and take breath. To amuse the Sultan still more, as soon as the procession had reached the open country they returned to the side of the Grand Seigneur, and ran backwards before him, bowing their heads with, as the historians of the sixteenth century say, many antics and flourishes. All along the road they continually cried, Allah Deicherin-"God preserve the Sultan in power and in prosperity."

The ancient Turkish couriers always ran with bare feet, which were so hard and destitute of feeling, that they are said to have had themselves shod, like horses, with light iron shoes. To render the resemblance between them and horses more complete, they always carried in their mouths. balls of silver, pierced with holes, and champed these as the quadruped does his bit. Further, their belts and garters were furnished with little bells, which tinkled very agreeably wherever they went. About the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth century, they ceased to