Natural product to modern discovery of their active ingredients and eventually to the development of new drugs. A large number of currently prescribed drugs have been either directly derived from or inspired by natural products. A few representative examples are listed below. Some of the oldest natural product based drugs are analgesics. The bark of the willow tree has been known from antiquity to have pain relieving properties. This is due to presence of the natural product salicin which in turn may be hydrolyzed into salicylic acid. A synthetic derivative acetylsalicylic acid better known as aspirin is a widely used pain reliever.
Lune of Hippocrates circle. He proved that the lune bounded by the arcs labeled "E" and "F" in the figure has the same area as triangle "ABO". This afforded some hope of solving the circle-squaring problem, since the lune is bounded only by arcs of circles. Heath concludes that, in proving his result, Hippocrates was also the first to prove that the area of a circle is proportional to the square of its diameter. Hippocrates' book on geometry in which this result appears, "Elements", has been lost, but may have formed the model for Euclid's "Elements". Hippocrates' proof was preserved through the "History