a reversion to old pagan fetiches. Nothing, on the whole, stood more constantly in the way of any proper development of medical science than these fetich cures, whose efficacy was based on theological reasoning and sanctioned by ecclesiastical policy. It would be expecting too much from human nature to imagine that pontiffs who derived large revenues from the sale of the Agnus Dei, or priests who derived both wealth and honours from cures wrought at shrines under their care, or lay dignitaries who had invested heavily in relics, should favour the development of any science which undermined their interests.(301) (301) See Fort's Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, pp. 211-213; also the Handbooks of Murray and Baedeker for North Germany, and various histories of medicine passim; also Collin de Plancy and scores of others. For the discovery that the relics of St. Rosaria at Palermo are simply the bones of a goat, see Gordon, Life of Buckland, pp. 94-96. For an account of the Agnes Dei, see Rydberg, pp. 62, 63; and for "Conception Billets," pp. 64 and 65. For Leo X's tickets, see Hausser (professor at Heidelberg), Period of Reformation, English translation, p. 17. V. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES. Yet a more serious stumbling-block, hindering the beginnings of modern medicine and surgery, was a theory regarding the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. This theory, like so many others which the Church cherished as peculiarly its own, had really been inherited from the old pagan civilizations. So strong was it in Egypt that the embalmer was regarded as accursed; traces of it appear in Greco-Roman life, and hence it came into the early Church, where it was greatly strengthened by the addition of perhaps the most noble of mystic