*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 63591 ***

Transcriber’s Notes:

  Underscores “_” before and after a word or phrase indicate _italics_
    in the original text.
  Carat symbol “^” designates a superscript.
  Small capitals have been converted to SOLID capitals.
  Illustrations have been moved so they do not break up paragraphs.
  Typographical errors have been silently corrected.




                      CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY
                            OF SCIENCE

              GENERAL EDITOR CHARLES SINGER


                                 I
                           GREEK BIOLOGY
                                 &
                          GREEK MEDICINE

                                BY
                          CHARLES SINGER

                              OXFORD
                      At the CLARENDON PRESS
                               1922

                      Oxford University Press

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       Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY

                              2540.1
                        PRINTED IN ENGLAND.




PREFACE


This little book is an attempt to compress into a few pages an account
of the general evolution of Greek biological and medical knowledge. The
section on _Aristotle_ appears here for the first time. The remaining
sections are reprinted from articles contributed to a volume _The
Legacy of Greece_ edited by Mr. R. W. Livingstone, the only changes
being the correction of a few errors and the addition of some further
references to the literature.

In quoting from the great Aristotelian biological treatises, the
_History of Animals_, the _Parts of Animals_, and the _Generation of
Animals_, I have usually availed myself of the text of the Oxford
translation edited by Mr. W. D. Ross. For the _De anima_ I have used
the version of Mr. R. D. Hicks.

I have to thank my friends Mr. R. W. Livingstone, Dr. E. T. Withington,
and Mr. J. D. Beazley for a number of suggestions. To my colleague
Professor Arthur Platt I have to record my gratitude not only for
much help in the writing of these chapters but also for his kindness
and patience in reading and rereading the work both in manuscript and
proof. I am specially indebted, moreover, to the notes appended to his
translation of the _Generation of Animals_.

                                                         C. S.

    UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.
              _March 1922._




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                               GREEK BIOLOGY
    FIGURE                                                          PAGE

      1. Lioness and young, from an Ionian vase of the
            sixth century B. C.                                        7

      2. A, Jaw bones of lion; B, head of
            lioness from Caere vase                                    7

      3. Paintings of fish on plates: Italo-Greek work of
            the fourth century B. C.                                   8

      4. Head and talons of the Sea-eagle,
            _Haliaëtus albicilla_: A, from an Ionic
            vase of the sixth century B. C.; B,
            drawn from the object                                      9

      5. Minoan gold cup, sixteenth century B. C.            _facing_ 12

      6. Horse’s head, from Parthenon. 440 B. C.                ”     12

      7. Aristotle. From Herculaneum; probably work of fourth
         century B. C.                                          ”     18

      7 _a_. The Order of Living Things according to Aristotle        30

      7 _b_. The Four Elements and the Four Qualities                 39

      8. Theophrastus. From Villa Albani;
            copy (second century A. D.?) of earlier work     _facing_ 60

    9, 10. Fifth century drawings from Juliana Anicia MS.,
            copied from originals of the first century
            B. C. (?): 9, Σογκός τρυφερός = _Crepis paludosa_,
            Moen.; 10, Γεράνιον = _Erodium malachoides_, L.      ”    64

       11. Illustrating Galen’s physiological teaching                67

                              GREEK MEDICINE

      1. Hippocrates. British Museum, second or
            third century B. C.                              _facing_ 90

      2. Asclepius. British Museum, fourth century B. C.         ”    90

      3, 4. From MS. of Apollonius of Kitium, of ninth century
            (copied from a pre-Christian original): 3, reducing
            dislocated shoulder; 4, reducing dislocated jaw      ”   104

      5. A Greek clinic of about 400 B. C.: from a vase-painting     106

      6. A kylix, from the Berlin Museum, of about 490 B. C.         107

      7. Athenian funerary monument. British Museum,
            second century A. D.                            _facing_ 114

      8. Votive tablet, representing cupping and bleeding
         instruments, from Temple of Asclepius at Athens        ”    120




GREEK BIOLOGY


§ 1. _Before Aristotle_

What is science? It is a question that cannot be answered easily, nor
perhaps answered at all. None of the definitions seem to cover the
field exactly; they are either too wide or too narrow. But we can
see science in its growth and we can say that being a process it can
exist only as growth. Where does the science of biology begin? Again
we cannot say, but we can watch its evolution and its progress. Among
the Greeks the accurate observation of living forms, which is at least
one of the essentials of biological science, goes back very far. The
word _Biology_, used in our sense, would, it is true, have been an
impossibility among them, for _bios_ refers to the life of man and
could not be applied, except in a strained or metaphorical sense, to
that of other living things.[1] But the _ideas_ we associate with the
word are clearly developed in Greek philosophy and the foundations of
biology are of great antiquity.

[1] The word _Biology_ was introduced by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus
(1776-1837) in his _Biologie oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur_,
6 vols., Göttingen, 1802-22, and was adopted by J.-B. de Lamarck
(1744-1829) in his _Hydrogéologie_, Paris, 1802. It is probable that
the first English use of the word in its modern sense is by Sir William
Lawrence (1783-1867) in his work _On the Physiology, Zoology, and
Natural History of Man_, London, 1819; there are earlier English uses
of the word, however, contrasted with _biography_.

The Greek people had many roots, racial, cultural, and spiritual, and
from them all they inherited various powers and qualities and derived
various ideas and traditions. The most suggestive source for our
purpose is that of the Minoan race whom they dispossessed and whose
lands they occupied. That highly gifted people exhibited in all stages
of its development a marvellous power of graphically representing
animal forms, of which the famous Cretan friezes, Vaphio cups (Fig.
5), and Mycenean lions provide well-known examples. It is difficult
not to believe that the Minoan element, entering into the mosaic of
peoples that we call the Greeks, was in part at least responsible for
the like graphic power developed in the Hellenic world, though little
contact has yet been demonstrated between Minoan and archaic Greek Art.

For the earliest biological achievements of Greek peoples we have
to rely largely on information gleaned from artistic remains. It
is true that we have a few fragments of the works of both Ionian
and Italo-Sicilian philosophers, and in them we read of theoretical
speculation as to the nature of life and of the soul, and we can thus
form some idea of the first attempts of such workers as Alcmaeon
of Croton (_c._ 500 B. C.) to lay bare the structure of animals by
dissection.[2] The pharmacopœia also of some of the earliest works
of the Hippocratic collection betrays considerable knowledge of both
native and foreign plants.[3] Moreover, scattered through the pages of
Herodotus and other early writers is a good deal of casual information
concerning animals and plants, though such material is second-hand and
gives us little information concerning the habit of exact observation
that is the necessary basis of science.

[2] The remains of Alcmaeon are given in H. Diels’ _Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker_, Berlin, 1903, p. 103. Alcmaeon is considered in the
companion chapter on _Greek Medicine_.

[3] Especially the περὶ γυναικείης φύσιος, _On the nature of woman_,
and the περὶ γυναικείων, _On (the diseases of) women_.

[Illustration: FIG. 1. Lioness and young from an Ionian vase of the
sixth century B. C. found at Caere in Southern Etruria (Louvre, Salle
E, No. 298), from _Le Dessin des Animaux en Grèce d’après les vases
peints_, by J. Morin, Paris (Renouard), 1911. The animal is drawing
itself up to attack its hunters. The scanty mane, the form of the
paws, the udders, and the dentition are all heavily though accurately
represented.]

[Illustration: FIG. 2. A, Jaw bones of lion; B, head of lioness from
Caere vase (Fig. 1), after Morin. Note the careful way in which the
artist has distinguished the molar from the cutting teeth.]

Something more is, however, revealed by early Greek Art. We are in
possession of a series of vases of the seventh and sixth centuries
before the Christian era showing a closeness of observation of animal
forms that tells of a people awake to the study of nature. We have thus
portrayed for us a number of animals—plants seldom or never appear—and
among the best rendered are wild creatures; we see antelopes quietly
feeding or startled at a sound, birds flying or picking worms from
the ground, fallow deer forcing their way through thickets, browsing
peacefully, or galloping away, boars facing the hounds and dogs chasing
hares, wild cattle forming their defensive circle, hawks seizing
their prey. Many of these exhibit minutely accurate observation. The
very direction of the hairs on the animals’ coats has sometimes been
closely studied, and often the muscles are well rendered. In some
cases even the dentition has been found accurately portrayed, as in a
sixth century representation on an Ionian vase of a lioness—an animal
then very rare on the Eastern Mediterranean littoral, though still well
known in Babylonia, Syria, and Asia Minor. The details of the work show
that the artist must have examined the animal in captivity (Figs. 1 and
2).

[Illustration: FIG. 3. Paintings of fish on plates. Italo-Greek work of
the fourth century B. C. From Morin.

A. Sargus vulgaris.]

[Illustration: B. Crenilabrus mediterraneus.

C. Uranoscopus scaber?]

Animal paintings of this order are found scattered over the Greek world
with special centres or schools in such places as Cyprus, Boeotia,
or Chalcis. The very name for a painter in Greek, _zoographos_,
recalls the attention paid to living forms. By the fifth century,
in representing them as in other departments of Art, the supremacy
of Attica had asserted itself, and there are many beautiful Attic
vase-paintings of animals to place by the side of the magnificent
horses’ heads of the Parthenon (Fig. 6). In Attica, too, was early
developed a characteristic and closely accurate type of representation
of marine forms, and this attained a wider vogue in Southern Italy in
the fourth century. From the latter period a number of dishes and vases
have come down to us bearing a large variety of fish forms, portrayed
with an exactness that is interesting in view of the attention to
marine creatures in the surviving literature of Aristotelian origin
(Fig. 3).

These artistic products are more than a mere reflex of the daily life
of the people. The habits and positions of animals are observed by the
hunter, as are the forms and colours of fish by the fisherman; but
the methods of huntsman and fisher do not account for the accurate
portrayal of a lion’s dentition, the correct numbering of a fish’s
scales or the close study of the lie of the feathers on the head, and
the pads on the feet, of a bird of prey (Fig. 4). With observations
such as these we are in the presence of something worthy of the name
_Biology_. Though but little literature on that topic earlier than
the writings of Aristotle has come down to us, yet both the character
of his writings and such paintings and pictures as these, suggest the
existence of a strong interest and a wide literature, biological in the
modern sense, antecedent to the fourth century.

[Illustration: FIG. 4. Head and talons of the Sea-eagle, _Haliaëtus
albicilla_:

A, From an Ionic vase of the sixth century B. C.

B, Drawn from the object.

From Morin.]

Greek science, however, exhibits throughout its history a peculiar
characteristic differentiating it from the modern scientific standpoint.
Most of the work of the Greek scientist was done in relation to
man. Nature interested him mainly in relation to himself. The Greek
scientific and philosophic world was an anthropocentric world, and
this comes out in the overwhelming mass of medical as distinct from
biological writings that have come down to us. Such, too, is the
sentiment expressed by the poets in their descriptions of the animal
creation:

    Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man:

       *       *       *       *       *

    The light-witted birds of the air, the beasts of the weald and
          the wood
    He traps with his woven snare, and the brood of the briny flood.
    Master of cunning he: the savage bull, and the hart
    Who roams the mountain free, are tamed by his infinite art.
    And the shaggy rough-maned steed is broken to bear the bit.

                       Sophocles, _Antigone_, verses 342 ff.
                                       (Translation of F. Storr.)

It is thus not surprising that our first systematic treatment of
animals is in a practical medical work, the περὶ διαίτης, _On regimen_,
of the Hippocratic Collection. This very peculiar treatise dates from
the later part of the fifth century. It is strongly under the influence
of Heracleitus (_c._ 540-475) and contains many points of view which
reappear in later philosophy. All animals, according to it, are formed
of fire and water, nothing is born and nothing dies, but there is a
perpetual and eternal revolution of things, so that change itself
is the only reality. Man’s nature is but a parallel to that of the
universal nature, and the arts of man are but an imitation or reflex
of the natural arts or, again, of the bodily functions. The soul, a
mixture of water and fire, consumes itself in infancy and old age, and
increases during adult life. Here, too, we meet with that singular
doctrine, not without bearing on the course of later biological
thought, that in the foetus all parts are formed simultaneously. On
the proportion of fire and water in the body all depends, sex, temper,
temperament, intellect. Such speculative ideas separate this book from
the sober method of the more typical Hippocratic medical works with
which indeed it has little in common.

After having discussed these theoretical matters the work turns to its
own practical concerns, and in the course of setting out the natures
of foods gives in effect a rough classification of animals. These are
set forth in groups, and from among the larger groups only the reptiles
and insects are missing. The list has been described, perhaps hardly
with justification, as the _Coan classificatory system_. We have here,
indeed, no _system_ in the sense in which that word is now applied to
the animal kingdom, but we have yet some sort of definite arrangement
of animals according to their supposed natures. The passage opens with
mammals, which are divided into domesticated and wild, the latter being
mentioned in order according to size, next follow the land-birds,
then the water-fowl, and then the fishes. These fish are divided into
(1) the haunters of the shore, (2) the free-swimming forms, (3) the
cartilaginous fishes or Selachii, which are not so named but are placed
together, (4) the mud-loving forms, and (5) the fresh-water fish.
Finally come invertebrates arranged in some sort of order according to
their structure. The characteristic feature of the ‘classification’ is
the separation of the fish from the remaining vertebrates and of the
invertebrates from both. Of the fifty animals named no less than twenty
are fish, about a fifth of the number studied by Aristotle, but we must
remember that here only edible species are mentioned. The existence of
the work shows at least that in the fifth century there was already a
close and accurate study of animal forms, a study that may justly be
called scientific. The predominance of fish and their classification
in greater detail than the other groups is not an unexpected feature.
The Mediterranean is especially rich in these forms, the Greeks were a
maritime people, and Greek literature is full of imagery drawn from the
fisher’s craft. From Minoan to Byzantine times the variety, beauty, and
colour of fish made a deep impression on Greek minds as reflected in
their art.

Much more important however for subsequent biological development, than
such observations on the nature and habits of animals, is the service
that the Hippocratic physicians rendered to Anatomy and to Physiology,
departments in which the structure of man and of the domesticated
animals stands apart from that of the rest of the animal kingdom. It
is with the nature and constitution of man that most of the surviving
early biological writings are concerned, and in these departments are
unmistakable tendencies towards systematic arrangement of the material.
Thus we have division and description of the body in sevens from the
periphery to the centre and from the vertex to the sole of the foot,[4]
or a division into four regions or zones.[5] The teaching concerning
the four elements and four humours too became of great importance
and some of it was later adopted by Aristotle. We also meet numerous
mechanical explanations of bodily structures, comparisons between
anatomical conditions encountered in related animals, experiments
on living creatures,[6] systematic incubation of hen’s eggs for the
study of their development, parallels drawn between the development of
plants and of human and animal embryos, theories of generation, among
which is that which was afterwards called ‘pangenesis’—discussion of
the survival of the stronger over the weaker—almost our survival of
the fittest—and a theory of inheritance of acquired characters.[7] All
these things show not only extensive knowledge but also an attempt
to apply such knowledge to human needs. When we consider how even in
later centuries biology was linked with medicine, and how powerful and
fundamental was the influence of the Hippocratic writings, not only
on their immediate successors in antiquity, but also on the Middle
Ages and right into the nineteenth century, we shall recognize the
significance of these developments.

[4] περὶ ἑβδομάδων. The Greek text is lost. We have, however, an early
and barbarous Latin translation, and there has recently been printed
an Arabic commentary. G. Bergsträsser, _Pseudogaleni in Hippocratis de
septimanis commentarium ab Hunaino Q. F. arabice versum_, Leipzig, 1914.

[5] περὶ νούσων δ’.

[6] περὶ καρδίης.

[7] Especially in the περὶ γονῆς.

[Illustration: Fig. 5. MINOAN GOLD CUP. SIXTEENTH CENTURY B. C.]

[Illustration: Fig. 6. HORSE’S HEAD. FROM PARTHENON. 440 B. C.]

Such was the character of biological thought within the fifth century,
and a generation inspired by this movement produced some noteworthy
works in the period which immediately followed. In the treatise περὶ
τροφῆς, _On nourishment_, which may perhaps be dated about 400 B. C.,
we learn of the pulse for the first time in Greek medical literature,
and read of a physiological system which lasted until the time of
Harvey, with the arteries arising from the heart and the veins from the
liver. Of about the same date is a work περὶ καρδίης, _On the heart_,
which describes the ventricles as well as the great vessels and their
valves, and compares the heart of animals with that of man.

A little later, perhaps 390 B. C., is the treatise περὶ σαρκῶν, _On
muscles_, which contains much more than its title suggests. It has
the old system of sevens and, inspired perhaps by the philosophy of
Heracleitus (_c._ 540-475), describes the heart as sending air, fire,
and movement to the different parts of the body through the vessels
which are themselves constantly in movement. The infant in its mother’s
womb is believed to draw in air and fire through its mouth and to eat
_in utero_. The action of air on the blood is compared to its action
on fire. In contrast to some of the other Hippocratic treatises the
central nervous system is in the background; much attention, however,
is given to the special senses. The brain resounds during audition. The
olfactory nerves are hollow, lead to the brain, and convey volatile
substances to it which cause it to secrete mucus. The eyes also have
been examined, and their coats and humours roughly described; an
allusion, the first in literature, is perhaps made to the crystalline
lens, and the eyes of animals are compared with those of man. There is
evidence not only of dissection but of experiment, and in efforts to
compare the resistance of various tissues to such processes as boiling,
we may see the small beginning of chemical physiology.

An abler work than any of these, but exhibiting less power of
observation is a treatise, περὶ γονῆς, _On generation_, that may
perhaps be dated about 380 B. C.[8] It exhibits a writer of much
philosophic power, very anxious for physiological explanations, but
hampered by ignorance of physics. He has, in fact, the weaknesses and
in a minor degree the strength of his successor Aristotle, of whose
great work on generation he gives us a foretaste. He sets forth in
considerable detail a doctrine of pangenesis, not wholly unlike that of
Darwin. In order to explain the phenomena of inheritance he supposes
that vessels reach the seed, carrying with them samples from all parts
of the body. He believes that channels pass from all the organs to the
brain and then to the spinal marrow (or to the marrow direct), thence
to the kidneys and on to the genital organs; he believes, too, that
he knows the actual location of one such channel, for he observes,
wrongly, that incision behind the ears, by interrupting the passage,
leads to impotence. As an outcome of this theory he is prepared to
accept inheritance of acquired characters. The embryo develops and
breathes by material transmitted from the mother through the umbilical
cord. We encounter here also a very detailed description of a specimen
of exfoliated _membrana mucosa uteri_ which our author mistakes for an
embryo, but his remarks at least exhibit the most eager curiosity.[9]

[8] The three works περὶ γονῆς, περὶ φὐσιος παιδίον, περὶ νούσων δ’,
_On generation_, _on the nature of the embryo_, _on diseases, book IV_,
form really one treatise on generation.

[9] περὶ φὐσιος παιδίον, _On the nature of the embryo_, § 13. The same
experience is described in the περὶ σαρκῶν, _On the muscles_.

The author of this work on generation is thus a ‘biologist’ in the
modern sense, and among the passages exhibiting him in this light is
his comparison of the human embryo with the chick. ‘The embryo is in a
membrane in the centre of which is the navel through which it draws and
gives its breath, and the membranes arise from the umbilical cord....
The structure of the child you will find from first to last as I have
already described.... If you wish, try this experiment: take twenty
or more eggs and let them be incubated by two or more hens. Then each
day from the second to that of hatching remove an egg, break it, and
examine it. You will find exactly as I say, for the nature of the bird
can be likened to that of man. The membranes [you will see] proceed
from the umbilical cord, and all that I have said on the subject of
the infant you will find in a bird’s egg, and one who has made these
observations will be surprised to find an umbilical cord in a bird’s
egg.’[10]

[10] περὶ φὐσιος παιδίον, _On the nature of the embryo_, § 29.

The same interest that he exhibits for the development of man and
animals he shows also for plants.

      ‘A seed laid in the ground fills itself with the
    juices there contained, for the soil contains in itself
    juices of every nature for the nourishment of plants.
    Thus filled with juice the seed is distended and
    swells, and thereby the power (= faculty ἡ δὗύναμις)
    diffused in the seed is compressed by living principle
    (pneuma) and juice, and bursting the seed becomes the
    first leaves. But a time comes when these leaves can no
    longer get nourished from the juices in the seed. Then
    the seed and the leaves erupt, for urged by the leaves
    the seed sends down that part of its power which is yet
    concentrated within it and so the roots are produced as
    an extension of the leaves. When at last the plant is
    well rooted below and is drawing its nutriment from the
    earth, then the whole grain disappears, being absorbed,
    save for the husk, which is the most solid part;
    and even that, decomposing in the earth, ultimately
    becomes invisible. In time some of the leaves put
    forth branches. The plant being thus produced by
    humidity from the seed is still soft and moist. Growing
    actively both above and below, it cannot as yet bear
    fruit, for it has not the quality of force and reserve
    (δύναμις ὶσχυρὴ καὶ πιαρἀ) from which a seed can be
    precipitated. But when, with time, the plant becomes
    firmer and better rooted, it develops veins as passages
    both upwards and downwards, and it draws from the soil
    not only water but more abundantly also substances that
    are denser and fatter. Warmed, too, by the sun, these
    act as a ferment to the extremities and give rise to
    fruit after its kind. The fruit thus develops much from
    little, for every plant draws from the earth a power
    more abundant than that with which it started, and
    the fermentation takes place not at one place but at
    many.’[11]

[11] περὶ φὐσιος παιδίον, _On the nature of the embryo_, § 22.

Nor does our author hesitate to draw an analogy between the plant and
the mammalian embryo. ‘In the same way the infant lives within its
mother’s womb and in a state corresponding to the health of the mother
... and you will find a complete similitude between the products of the
soil and the products of the womb.’

The early Greek literature is so scantily provided with illustrations
drawn from botanical study, that it is worth considering the remarkable
comparison of generation of plants from cuttings with that from seeds
in the same work.

      ‘As regards plants generated from cuttings ... that
    part of a branch where it was cut from a tree is
    placed in the earth and there rootlets are sent out.
    This is how it happens: The part of the plant within
    the soil draws up juices, swells, and develops a
    _pneuma_ (πνεῦμα ἴσχει), but not so the part without.
    The pneuma and the juice concentrate the power of the
    plant below so that it becomes denser. Then the lower
    end erupts and gives forth tender roots. Then the
    plant, taking from below, draws juices from the roots
    and transmits them to the part above the soil which
    thus also swells and develops pneuma; thus the power
    from being diffused in the plant becomes concentrated
    and budding, gives forth leaves.... Cuttings, then,
    differ from seeds. With a seed the leaves are borne
    first, then the roots are sent down; with a cutting
    the roots form first and then the leaves.’[12]

[12] _Ibid_. § 23.

But with these works of the early part of the fourth century the
first stage of Greek biology reaches its finest development. Later
Hippocratic treatises which deal with physiological topics are on a
lower plane, and we must seek some external cause for the failure. Nor
have we far to seek. This period saw the rise of a movement that had
the most profound influence on every department of thought. We see
the advent into the Greek world of a great intellectual movement as a
result of which the department of philosophy that dealt with nature
receded before Ethics. Of that intellectual revolution—perhaps the
greatest the world has seen—Athens was the site and Socrates (470-399)
the protagonist. With the movement itself and its characteristic fruit
we are not concerned. But the great successor and pupil of its founder
gives us in the _Timaeus_ a picture of the depth to which natural
science can be degraded in the effort to give a specific teleological
meaning to all parts of the visible Universe. The book and the picture
which it draws, dark and repulsive to the mind trained in modern
scientific method, enthralled the imagination of a large part of
mankind for wellnigh two thousand years. Organic nature appears in this
work of Plato (427-347) as the degeneration of man whom the Creator has
made most perfect. The school that held this view ultimately decayed as
a result of its failure to advance positive knowledge. As the centuries
went by its views became further and further divorced from phenomena,
and the bizarre developments of later Neoplatonism stand to this day as
a warning against any system which shall neglect the investigation of
nature. But in its decay Platonism dragged science down and destroyed
by neglect nearly all earlier biological material. Mathematics, not
being a phenomenal study, suited better the Neoplatonic mood and
continued to advance, carrying astronomy with it for a while—astronomy
that affected the life of man and that soon became the handmaid of
astrology; medicine, too, that determined the conditions of man’s life,
was also cherished, though often mistakenly, but pure science was
doomed.

But though the ethical view of nature overwhelmed science in the end,
the advent of the mighty figure of Aristotle (384-322) stayed the tide
for a time. Yet the writer on Greek Biology remains at a disadvantage
in contrast with the Historian of Greek Mathematics, of Greek
Astronomy, or of Greek Medicine, in the scantiness of the materials
for presenting an account of the development of his studies before
Aristotle. The huge form of that magnificent naturalist completely
overshadows Greek as it does much of later Biology.


§ 2. _Aristotle_

With Aristotle we come in sight of the first clearly defined
personality in the course of the development of Greek biological
thought—for the attribution of the authorship of the earlier
Hippocratic writings is more than doubtful, while the personality of
the great man by whose name they are called cannot be provided with
those clear outlines that historical treatment demands.

Aristotle was born in 384 B. C. at Stagira, a Greek colony in the
Chalcidice a few miles from the northern limit of the present monastic
settlement of Mount Athos. His father, Nicomachus, was physician to
Amyntas III of Macedonia and a member of the guild or family of the
Asclepiadae. From Nicomachus he may have inherited his taste for
biological investigation and acquired some of his methods. At seventeen
Aristotle became a pupil of Plato at Athens. After Plato’s death in 347
Aristotle crossed the Aegean to reside at the court of Hermias, despot
of Atarneus in Mysia, whose niece, Pythias, he married. It is not
improbable that the first draft of Aristotle’s biological works and the
mass of his own observations were made during his stay in this region,
for in his biological writings much attention is concentrated on the
natural history of the Island of Lesbos, or Mytilene, that lies close
opposite to Atarneus. Investigation has shown that in the _History of
Animals_ there are frequent references to places on the northern and
eastern littoral of the Aegean, and especially to localities in the
Island of Lesbos; on the other hand places in Greece proper are but
seldom mentioned.[13] Thus his biological investigations, in outline
at least, are probably the earliest of his extant works and preceded
the philosophical writings which almost certainly date from his second
sojourn in Athens.

[13] See a valuable note by D’Arcy W. Thompson prefixed to his
translation of the _Historia Animalium_, Oxford, 1910.

[Illustration: Fig. 7. ARISTOTLE

From HERCULANEUM

Probably work of fourth century B. C.]

In 342 B. C., at the request of Philip of Macedon, Aristotle became
tutor to Philip’s son, Alexander. He remained in Macedonia for seven
years and about 336, when Alexander departed for the invasion of Asia,
returned to Athens where he taught at the Lyceum and established his
famous school afterwards called the Peripatetic. Most of his works
were produced during this the closing period of his life between 335
and 323 B. C. After Alexander’s death in 323 and the break up of his
empire, Aristotle, who was regarded as friendly to the Macedonian
power, was placed in a difficult position. Regarded with enmity by the
anti-Macedonian party, he withdrew from Athens and died soon after in
322 B. C. at Chalcis in Euboea at about sixty-two years of age.

The scientific works to which Aristotle’s name is attached may be
divided into three groups, physical, biological, and psychological. In
size they vary from such a large treatise as the _History of Animals_
to the tiny tracts which go to make up the _Parva naturalia_. So far as
the scientific writings can be distinguished as separate works they may
be set forth as follows:

     _Physics._

       φυσικὴ ἀκρόασις          _Physics._
       περὶ γενέσεως καὶ φθορᾱς _On coming into being and passing away._
       περὶ οὐρανοῡ.            _On the heavens._
       μετεωρολογικά.           _Meteorology._
       [περὶ κόσμου.            _On the universe._]
       [μηχανικά.               _Mechanics._]
       [περὶ ἀτόμων γραμμῶν.    _On indivisible lines._]
       [ἀνέμων θέσεις καὶ προσηγορίαι. _Positions and descriptions
                                           of winds._]
     _Biology in the restricted sense._

    (a) _Natural History_.
       περὶ τὰ ζῳα ἱστορίαι.  _Inquiry about animals = Historia animalium._
       περὶ ζῴων μορίων.      _On parts of animals._
       περὶ ζῴων γενέσεως.    _On generation of animals._
       [περὶ φυτῶν.           _On plants._]

    (b) _Physiology._
       περὶ ζῴων πορείας.       _On progressive motion of animals._
       περὶ μακροβιότητος καὶ βραχυβιότητος. _On length and shortness
                                                 of life._
       περὶ ἀναπνοῆς.           _On respiration._
       περὶ νεότητος καὶ γήρως. _On youth and age._
       [περὶ ζῴων κινήσεως.     _On motion of animals._]
       [φυσιογνωμονικά.         _On physiognomy._]
       [περὶ πνεύματος.         _On innate spirit._]

     _Psychology and Philosophy with biological bearing._

       περὶ ψυχῆς.                    _On soul._
       περὶ αἰσθήσεως καὶ αἰσθητῶν.   _On sense and objects of sense._
       περὶ ζωῆς καὶ θανάτου.         _On life and death._
       περὶ μνήμης καὶ ἀναμνήσεως.    _On memory and reminiscence._
       περὶ ὓπνου καὶ ἐγρηγόρσεως.    _On sleep and waking._
       περὶ ἐνυπνίων.                 _On dreams._
       [προβλήματα.                   _Problems._]
       [περὶ χρωμάτων.                _On colours._]
       [περὶ ἀκουστῶν.                _On sounds._]
       [περὶ τῆς καθ’ ὔπνον μαντικῆς. _On prophecy in sleep._]

Of these works some, the names of which are placed here in brackets,
are clearly spurious in that they were neither written by Aristotle nor
are they in any form approaching that in which they were cast by him.
Yet all are of very considerable antiquity and contain fragments of
his tradition in a state of greater or less corruption. In addition to
works here enumerated there are many others which are spurious in a yet
further sense in that they are merely fathered on Aristotle and contain
no trace of his spirit or method. Such, for example, is the famous
mediaeval work of oriental origin known as the _Epistle of Aristotle to
Alexander_.

In a general way it may be stated that the _physical_ works, with
which we are not here directly concerned, while they show ingenuity,
learning, and philosophical power, yet betray very little direct and
original observation. They have exerted enormous influence in the
past and for at least two thousand years provided the usual physical
conceptions of the civilized world both East and West. After the
Galilean revolution in physics, however, they became less regarded and
they are not now highly esteemed by men of science. The _biological_
works of Aristotle, on the other hand, excited comparatively little
interest during the Middle Ages, but from the sixteenth century on
they have been very closely studied by naturalists. From the beginning
of the nineteenth century, and especially as a result of the work of
Cuvier, Richard Owen, and Johannes Müller, Aristotle’s reputation as a
naturalist has risen steadily, and he is now universally admitted to
have been one of the very greatest investigators of living nature.

The philosophical bases of Aristotle’s biology are mainly to be found
in the treatise _On soul_ and in that _On the generation of animals_.
His actual observations are contained in this latter work—which is in
many ways his finest scientific production—in the great collection on
the _History of animals_, and in the remarkable treatise _On parts of
animals_. Certain of his deductions concerning the nature and mechanism
of life can be found in his two works which deal with the movements of
animals (one of which is very doubtfully genuine) and in his tracts
_On respiration_, _On sleep_, &c. The treatise _On plants_ and the
_Problems_ in their present form are late and spurious, but they are
based on works of members of his school. They were, however, perhaps
originally prepared at the other end of the Greek world in Magna
Graecia.

Aristotle was a most voluminous author and his biological writings
form but a small fraction of those to which his name is attached.
Yet these biological works contain a prodigious number of first-hand
observations and it has always been difficult to understand how one
investigator could collect all these facts, however rapid his work
and skilful his methods. The explanations that have reached us from
antiquity are, indeed, picturesque, but they are neither credible in
themselves nor are they consistent with each other. Thus Pliny writing
about A. D. 77 says ‘Alexander the Great, fired by desire to learn of
the natures of animals, entrusted the prosecution of this design to
Aristotle.... For this end he placed at his disposal some thousands of
men in every part of Asia and Greece, and among them hunters, fowlers,
fishers, park-keepers, herds-men, bee-wards, as well as keepers of
fish-ponds and aviaries in order that no creature might escape his
notice. Through the information thus collected he was able to compose
some fifty volumes.’[14] Athenaeus, who lived in the early part of the
third century A. D., assures us that ‘Aristotle the Stagirite received
eight hundred talents [i.e. equal to about £200,000 of our money]
from Alexander as his contribution towards perfecting his _History
of Animals_’.[15] Aelian, on the other hand, who lived at a period a
little anterior to Athenaeus, tells us that it was ‘Philip of Macedon
who so esteemed learning that he supplied Aristotle with ample funds’
adding that he similarly honoured both Plato and Theophrastus.[16]

[14] Pliny, _Naturalis historia_, viii. 17.

[15] Athenaeus, _Deipnosophistae_, ix. 58.

[16] Aelian, _Variae historiae_, iv. 19.

Now in all Aristotle’s works there is not a single sentence in praise
of Alexander and there is some evidence that the two had become
estranged. In support of this we may quote Plutarch (_c._ A. D. 100)
who gives a detailed description of a conspiracy in 327 B. C. against
Alexander by Callisthenes, a pupil of Aristotle who appears to have
kept up a correspondence with his master.[17] Alexander himself wrote
of Callisthenes, according to Plutarch: ‘I will punish this sophist,
together with those who sent him to me and those who harbour in their
cities men who conspire against my life’ and Plutarch adds that
Alexander ‘directly reveals in these words a hostility to Aristotle in
whose house Callisthenes ... had been reared, being a son of Hero who
was a niece of Aristotle’.[18] Yet the Alexandrian conquests, bringing
Greece into closer contact with a wider world and extending Greek
knowledge of the Orient, must have had their influence in stimulating
interest in rare and curious creatures and in a general extension of
natural knowledge. That the interest in these topics extended beyond
the circle of the Peripatetics is shown by the fact that Speusippus,
the pupil of Plato and his successor as leader of his school, occupied
himself with natural history and wrote works on biological topics and
especially on fish.

[17] The statement of the relation of Callisthenes to Aristotle rests
on the somewhat unsatisfactory evidence of Simplicius (sixth century)
who states that Callisthenes sent Aristotle certain astronomical
observations from Babylon. Simplicius, _Commentarii_ (Karsten), p. 226.

[18] Plutarch, _Alexander_, lv.

Nevertheless, remarkable as is Aristotle’s acquaintance with animal
forms, investigation shows that he is reliable only when treating of
creatures native to the Aegean basin. As soon as he gets outside that
area his statements are almost always founded on hearsay or even on
fable.[19] Whatever assistance Aristotle may have received in the
preparation of his biological works came, therefore, probably from no
such picturesque and distant source as the gossip of Pliny or Aelian
would suggest. We can conjecture that he received aid from the powerful
relatives of his wife at Atarneus and in Lesbos, and we may most
reasonably suppose that after his return to Athens much help would have
been given him by his pupils within the Lyceum. To them may probably
be ascribed many passages in the biological writings; for it seems
hardly possible that Aristotle himself would have had time for detailed
biological research after he had settled as a teacher in Athens. Of the
work of these members of his school a fine monument has survived in
two complete botanical treatises and fragments of others on zoological
and psychological subjects by Theophrastus of Eresus, his pupil and
successor in the leadership of the Lyceum and perhaps his literary
legatee.

[19] The subject is well discussed by W. Ogle in the introduction to
his _Aristotle on the Parts of Animals_, London, 1882.

When we turn to the Aristotelian biological works themselves we
naturally inquire first into the question of genuineness, and here a
difficulty arises in that all his extant works have come down to us
in a state that is not comparable to those of any other great writer.
Among the ancients admiration was expressed for Aristotle’s eloquence
and literary powers, but, in the material that we have here to
consider, very little trace of these qualities can be detected by even
the most lenient judge. The arrangement of the subject-matter is far
from perfect even if we allow for the gaps and disturbances caused by
their passage through many hands. Moreover, there is much repetition
and often irrelevant digression, while the language is usually plain
to baldness and very frequently obscure. We find sometimes the
lightening touch of humour, but the style hardly ever rises to beauty.
Furthermore, even in matters of fact, while many observations exhibit
wonderful insight and, forestalling modern discovery, betray a most
searching and careful application of scientific methods, yet elsewhere
we find errors that are childish and could have been avoided by the
merest tyro.

This curious state of the Aristotelian writings has given rise to much
discussion among scholars and to explain it there has been developed
what is known as the ‘notebook theory’. It is supposed that the
bases of the material that we possess were notebooks put together by
Aristotle himself for his own use, probably while lecturing. These
passed, it is believed, into the hands of certain of his pupils and
were perhaps in places incomprehensible as they stood. Such pupils,
after the master’s death, filled out the notebooks either from the
memory of his teaching or from their own knowledge—or ignorance. Thus
modified, however, they were still not prepared for publication, even
in the limited sense in which works may be said to have been published
in those days, but they formed again the fuller bases of notes for
lectures delivered by his successors. In this form they have finally
survived to our time, suffering, however, from certain further losses
and displacements on a larger scale. Some of the ‘Aristotelian’ works
are undoubtedly more deeply spurious, but the works that are regarded
as ‘genuine’ do not seem to have been seriously tampered with, except
by mere scribal or bookbinders’ blunders, at any date later than a
generation or two following Aristotle’s own time. These notebooks as
they stand are in fact probably in much the state in which we should
find them were we able to retrieve a copy dating from the first or
second century B. C.[20]

[20] The problem of genuineness is discussed in detail by R. Shute, _On
the history of the process by which the Aristotelian writings arrived
at their present form_, Oxford, 1888.

In the opening chapter of one of his great biological works Aristotle
sets forth in detail his motives for the study of living things. The
passage is in itself noteworthy as one of the few instances in which he
rises to real eloquence.

‘Of things constituted by nature some are ungenerated, imperishable,
and eternal, while others are subject to generation and decay. The
former are excellent beyond compare and divine, but less accessible
to knowledge. The evidence that might throw light on them, and on the
problems which we long to solve respecting them, is furnished but
scantily by sensation; whereas respecting perishable plants and animals
we have abundant information, living as we do in their midst, and ample
data may be collected concerning all their various kinds, if only we
are willing to take sufficient pains. Both departments, however, have
their special charm. The scanty conceptions to which we can attain of
celestial things give us, from their excellence, more pleasure than all
our knowledge of the world in which we live; just as a half glimpse
of persons we love is more delightful than a leisurely view of other
things, whatever their number and dimensions. On the other hand, in
certitude and in completeness our knowledge of terrestrial things has
the advantage. Moreover, their greater nearness and affinity to us
balances somewhat the loftier interest of the heavenly things that
are the objects of the higher philosophy.... For if some [creatures]
have no graces to charm the sense, yet even these, by disclosing to
intellectual perception the artistic spirit that designed them, give
immense pleasure to all who can trace links of causation, and are
inclined to philosophy. We therefore must not recoil with childish
aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of
nature is marvellous. It is told of Heraclitus that when strangers
found him warming himself at the kitchen fire and hesitated to go in,
he bade them enter since even in the kitchen divinities were present.
So should we venture on the study of every kind of animal without
distaste, for each and all will reveal to us something natural and
something beautiful.[21] Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of
everything to an end are to be found in Nature’s works in the highest
degree, and the resultant end of her generations and combinations is a
form of the beautiful.

‘If any person thinks the examination of the rest of the animal kingdom
an unworthy task, he must hold in like disesteem the study of man.
For no one can look at the primordia of the human frame—blood, flesh,
bones, vessels, and the like—without much repugnance. Moreover, when
any one of the parts or structures, be it which it may, is under
discussion, it must not be supposed that it is its material composition
to which attention is being directed or which is the object of the
discussion, but the relation of such part to the total form....

‘As every instrument and every bodily member subserves some partial
end, that is to say, some special action, so the whole body must be
destined to minister to some plenary sphere of action. Thus the saw is
made for sawing, since sawing is a function, and not sawing for the
saw. Similarly, the body too must somehow or other be made for the
soul, and each part of it for some subordinate function to which it is
adapted.’[22]

[21] I have somewhat abbreviated this and the previous sentence.

[22] _De partibus animalium_, i. 5; 644ᵇ 21.

Aristotle is, in the fullest sense a ‘vitalist’. He believes that the
presence of a certain peculiar principle of a non-material character
is essential for the exhibition of any of the phenomena of life. This
principle we may call _soul_, translating his word ψυχή. Living things,
like all else in nature, have, according to Aristotle, an end or
object. ‘Everything that Nature makes,’ he says, ‘is means to an end.
For just as human creations are the products of art, so living objects
are manifestly the products of an analogous cause or principle.... And
that the heaven, if it had an origin, was evolved and is maintained
by such a cause, there is, therefore, even more reason to believe,
than that mortal animals so originated. For order and definiteness are
much more manifest in the celestial bodies than in our own frame.’[23]
It was a misinterpretation of this view that especially endeared him
to the mediaeval Church and made it possible to absorb Aristotelian
philosophy into Christian theology. It must be remembered that the
cause or principle that leads to the development of living things is in
Aristotle’s view, not external but _internal_.

While putting his own view Aristotle does not fail to tell us of the
standpoint of his opponents. ‘Why, however, it must be asked, should
we look on the operations of Nature as dictated by a final cause, and
intended to realize some desirable end? Why may they not be merely the
results of necessity, just as the rain falls of necessity, and not
that the corn may grow? For though the rain makes the corn grow, it no
more occurs in order to cause that growth, than a shower which spoils
the farmer’s crop at harvest-time occurs in order to do that mischief.
Now, why may not this, which is true of the rain, be true also of the
parts of the body? Why, for instance, may not the teeth grow to be such
as they are merely of necessity, and the fitness of the front ones
with their sharp edge for the comminution of the food, and of the hind
ones with their flat surface for its mastication, be no more than an
accidental coincidence, and not the cause that has determined their
development?’[24]

[23] _De partibus animalium_, i. 1; 641ᵇ 12.

[24] _Physics_, ii. 8, 3; 198ᵇ 6. This passage is considerably
abbreviated and slightly paraphrased.

The answers to these questions form a considerable part of Aristotle’s
philosophy where we are unable to follow him. For the limited field of
biology, however, the question is on somewhat narrower lines. ‘What,’
he asks, ‘are the forces by which the hand or the body was fashioned
into shape? The wood carver will perhaps say, by the axe or the
auger.... But it is not enough for him to say that by the stroke of his
tool this part was formed into a concavity, that into a flat surface;
but he must state the reasons why he struck his blow in such a way as
to effect this and what his final object was ... [similarly] the true
method [of biological science] is to state what the definite characters
are that distinguish the animal as a whole; to explain what it is both
in substance and in form, and to deal after the same fashion with its
several organs.... If now this something, that constitutes the form of
the living being, be the soul, or part of the soul, or something that,
without the soul, cannot exist, (as would seem to be the case, seeing
at any rate that when the soul departs, what is left is no longer a
living animal, and that none of the parts remain what they were before,
excepting in mere configuration, like the animals that in the fable
are turned into stone;) ... then it will come within the province of
the natural philosopher to inform himself concerning the soul, and to
treat of it, either in its entirety, or, at any rate, of that part of
it which constitutes the essential character of an animal; and it will
be his duty to say what this soul or this part of a soul is.’[25] Thus
in the Aristotelian writings the discussion of the nature and orders of
‘soul’ is almost inseparable from the subjects now included under the
term Biology.

[25] _De partibus animalium_, i. 1; 641ᵅ 7.

There can be no doubt that through much of the Aristotelian writings
runs a belief in a _kinetic_ as distinct from a static view of
existence. It cannot be claimed that he regarded the different kinds of
living things as actually passing one into another, but there can be no
doubt that he fully realized that the different kinds can be arranged
in a series in which the gradations are easy. His scheme would be
something like that represented on p. 30 (Fig. 7 a).

‘Nature,’ he says, ‘proceeds little by little from things lifeless to
animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact
line of demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form
should lie. Thus, next after lifeless things in the upward scale comes
the plant, and of plants one will differ from another as to its amount
of apparent vitality; and, in a word, the whole _genus_ of plants,
whilst it is devoid of life as compared with an animal, is endowed
with life as compared with other corporeal entities. Indeed, there is
observed in plants a continuous scale of ascent towards the animal. So,
in the sea, there are certain objects concerning which one would be at
a loss to determine whether they be animal or vegetable.’[26]

[26] _Historia animalium_, viii. 1; 588ᵇ 4.

[Illustration: Fig. 7a. The Order of Living Things according to
Aristotle.]

‘A sponge, in these respects completely resembles a plant, in that ...
it is attached to a rock, and that when separated from this it dies.
Slightly different from the sponges are the so-called Holothurias ...
as also sundry other sea-animals that resemble them. For these are free
and unattached, yet they have no feeling, and their life is simply
that of a plant separated from the ground. For even among land-plants
there are some that are independent of the soil—or even entirely free.
Such, for example, is the plant which is found on Parnassus, and which
some call the Epipetrum [probably _Sempervivum tectorum_, the common
houseleek]. This you may hang up on a peg and it will yet live for a
considerable time. Sometimes it is a matter of doubt whether a given
organism should be classed with plants or with animals. The Tethya,
for instance, and the like, so far resemble plants as that they never
live free and unattached, but, on the other hand, inasmuch as they have
a certain flesh-like substance, they must be supposed to possess some
degree of sensibility.’[27]

‘The Acalephae or Sea-nettles, ... lie outside the recognized groups.
Their constitution, like that of the Tethya, approximates them on the
one side to plants, on the other side to animals. For seeing that some
of them can detach themselves and can fasten on their food, and that
they are sensible of objects which come in contact with them, they must
be considered to have an animal nature.... On the other hand, they
are closely allied to plants, firstly by the imperfection of their
structures, secondly by their being able to attach themselves to the
rocks, which they do with great rapidity, and lastly by their having no
visible residuum notwithstanding that they possess a mouth.’[28]

Thus ‘Nature passes from lifeless objects to animals in such unbroken
sequence, interposing between them beings which live and yet are not
animals, that scarcely any difference seems to exist between two
neighbouring groups owing to their close proximity.’[29]

[27] _De partibus animalium_, iv. 5; 681ᵅ 15.

[28] _De partibus animalium_, iv. 5; 681ᵅ 36.

[29] _De partibus animalium_, iv. 5; 681ᵅ 10.

Some approach to evolutionary doctrine is also foreshadowed by
Aristotle in his theories of the development of the individual. This is
obscured, however, by his peculiar view of the nature of procreation.
On this topic his general conclusion is that the material substance
of the embryo is contributed by the female, but that this is mere
passive formable material, almost as though it were the soil in which
the embryo grows. The male by giving the principle of life, the soul,
contributes the essential generative agency. But this _soul_ is not
material and it is, therefore, not theoretically necessary for anything
material to pass from male to female. The material which does in fact
so pass with the seed of the male is an accident, not an essential, for
the essential contribution of the male is not matter but _form_ and
_principle_. The female provides the _material_, the male the _soul_,
the _form_, the _principle_, that which makes life. Aristotle was thus
prepared to accept instances of fertilization without material contact.

‘The female does not contribute semen to generation but does contribute
something ... for there must needs be that which generates and that
from which it generates.... If, then, the male stands for the effective
and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it
follows that what the female would contribute to the semen of the male
would not be semen but material for the semen to work upon....

‘How is it that the male contributes to generation, and how is it
that the semen from the male is the cause of the offspring? Does [the
semen] exist in the body of the embryo as a part of it from the first,
mingling with the material which comes from the female? Or does the
semen contribute nothing to the material body of the embryo but only to
the power and movement in it?... The latter alternative appears to be
the right one both _a priori_ and in view of the facts.’[30]

[30] _De generatione animalium_, i. 21; 729ᵅ 21.

This discussion leads to the question of the natural process of
generation itself. It is a topic that we have seen discussed by an
earlier writer who had set forth a sort of doctrine of pangenesis (see
p. 14). His view Aristotle declines to share. ‘We must’, he says, ‘say
the opposite of what the ancients said. For whereas they said that
semen is that which _comes from all_ the body, we shall say that it
is that whose nature is to _go to all_ of it, and what they thought a
waste-product seems rather to be a secretion.’ According to Aristotle
semen is derived from the same nutritive material in the blood vessels
that is distributed to the rest of the body. The semen, however, is
strained or secreted off from this nutritive material—as being its most
essential and representative portion—before the distribution actually
takes place.[31] But why, it may be asked, if the semen does not come
from the various parts of the body, is it yet able to reproduce those
various parts? The answer, on the Aristotelian view, seems to be that
the semen contains special and peculiar fractions of the nutritive
fluid which have been so modified and adapted that, if not secreted
off as semen, they would be distributed to the different parts of the
body to nourish each of these various parts. These substances have
been elaborated by the _soul_ or vital principle in a manner that is
specifically suited for each organ, hand, liver, face, heart, &c., and
from each of these specific substances a specific essence is separated
off into the semen corresponding to hand, liver, face, heart, &c., of
the offspring.

The next question that arises is the mechanism by which the offspring
come to resemble their parents. The mechanism in the case of inheritance
from the father is comprehensible when we consider the origin and
nature of the semen, but the inheritance from the mother requires
further explanation. The view of Aristotle is based upon the nature
of the catamenia and their disappearance during gestation. ‘The
catamenia’, in his view, ‘are a secretion as the semen is.’[32] The
female contributes the material by which the embryo grows and she does
this through the catamenia which are suspended during gestation for
this very purpose. The matter is thus summed up by Aristotle.

[31] _De generations animalium_, i. 18; 725ᵅ 22.

[32] _De generatione animalium_, i. 19; 727ᵅ 31.

‘The male does not emit semen at all in some animals, and where he
does, this is no part of the resulting embryo; just so no material part
comes from the carpenter to the material, i.e. to the wood in which he
works, nor does any part of the carpenter’s art exist within what he
makes, but the shape and the form are imparted from him to the material
by means of the motion he sets up. It is his hands that move his tools,
his tools that move the material; it is his knowledge of his art, and
his _soul_, in which is the form, that move his hands or any other
part of him with a motion of some definite kind, a motion varying with
the varying nature of the object made. In like manner, in the male of
those animals which emit semen, Nature uses the semen as a tool and as
possessing motion in actuality, just as tools are used in the products
of any art, for in them lies in a certain sense the motion of the
art.’[33]

‘For the same reason the development of the embryo takes place in the
female; neither the male himself nor the female emits semen into the
female, but the female receives within herself the share contributed
by both, because in the female is the material from which is made
the resulting product. Not only must the mass of material from which
the embryo is in the first instance formed exist there, but further
material must constantly be added so that the embryo may increase
in size. Therefore the birth must take place in the female. For the
carpenter must keep in close connexion with his timber and the potter
with his clay, and generally all workmanship and the ultimate movement
imparted to matter must be connected with the material concerned, as,
for instance, architecture is _in_ the buildings it makes.’[34]

[33] _De generatione animalium_, i. 22; 730ᵇ 10.

[34] _De generatione animalium_, i. 22; 730ᵅ 34.

The problem of the nature of generation is one in which Aristotle never
ceased to take an interest, and among the methods by which he sought to
solve it was embryological investigation. In his ideas on the methods
of reproduction we must seek also the main bases of such classification
of animals as he exhibits. His most important embryological researches
were made upon the chick. He asserts that the first signs of
development are noticeable on the third day, the heart being visible
as a palpitating blood-spot whence, as it develops, two meandering
blood vessels extend to the surrounding tunics.

‘Generation from the egg’, he says, ‘proceeds in an identical manner
with all birds.... With the common hen after three days and nights
there is the first indication of the embryo.... The heart appears like
a speck of blood in the white of the egg. This point beats and moves as
though endowed with life, and from it two vessels with blood in them
trend in a convoluted course ... and a membrane carrying bloody fibres
now envelops the yolk, leading off from the vessels.’[35]

Aristotle lays considerable stress on the early appearance of the heart
in the embryo. Corresponding to the general gradational view that he
had formed of Nature, he held that the most primitive and fundamentally
important organs make their appearance before the others. Among the
organs all give place to the heart, which he considered ‘the first to
live and the last to die’.[36]

A little later he observed that the body had become distinguishable,
and was at first very small and white.

[35] _Historia animalium_, vi. 3; 561ᵅ 4.

[36] _Cor primum movens ultimum moriens._ This famous sentence is the
sense though not the phrasing of _De generatione animalium_, ii. 1 and
4.

‘The head is clearly distinguished and in it the eyes, swollen out to
a great extent.... At the outset the under portion of the body appears
insignificant in comparison with the upper portion....

‘When an egg is ten days old the chick and all its parts are distinctly
visible. The head still is larger than the rest of the body and the
eyes larger than the head. At this time also the larger internal
organs are visible, as also the stomach and the arrangement of the
viscera; and the vessels that seem to proceed from the heart are now
close to the navel. From the navel there stretch a pair of vessels,
one [vitelline vein] towards the membrane that envelops the yolk,
and the other [allantoic vein] towards that membrane which envelops
collectively the membrane wherein the chick lies, the membrane of the
yolk and the intervening liquid.... About the twentieth day, if you
open the egg and touch the chick, it moves inside and chirps; and it is
already coming to be covered with down when, after the twentieth day,
the chick begins to break the shell.’[37]

[37] _Historia animalium_, vi. 3; 561ᵅ 18.

Aristotle recognized a distinction in the mode of development of
mammals from that of all other viviparous creatures. Having divided the
apparently viviparous animals into two groups, one of which is truly
and internally and the other only externally viviparous, he pointed
out that in the mammalia, the group regarded by him as internally
viviparous, the foetus is connected until birth with the wall of
the mother’s womb by the navel-string. These animals, in his view,
produce their young without the intervention of an ovum, the embryo
being ‘living from the first’. Such non-mammals, on the other hand, as
are viviparous are so in the external sense only, that is, the young
which he considered to arise in this group from ova may indeed develop
within the mother’s womb and be born alive, but they go through their
development without organic connexion with the mother’s body, so that
her womb acts but as a nursery or incubator for her eggs. It was indeed
a sort of accident among the ovipara whether in any particular species
the ovum went through its development inside or outside the mother’s
body. ‘Some of the ovipara’, he says, ‘produce the egg in a perfect,
others in an imperfect state, but it is perfected outside the body as
has been stated of fish.’[38]

Yet though Aristotle regarded fish as an oviparous group, he knew
also of kinds of fish that were externally viviparous. It is most
interesting to observe, moreover, that he was acquainted with one
particular instance among fish in which matters were less simple and
in which the development bore an analogy to that of the mammalia, his
true internal vivipara. ‘Some animals’, he says, ‘are viviparous,
others oviparous, others vermiparous. Some are viviparous, such as man,
the horse, the seal and all other animals that are hair-coated, and,
of marine animals, the Cetaceans, as the dolphin, _and the so-called
Selachia_.’[39]

Aristotle tells us elsewhere that a species of these Selachia which
he calls _galeos_—a name still used for the dog-fish by Greek
fishermen—‘has its eggs in betwixt the [two horns of the] womb; these
eggs shift into each of the two horns of the womb and descend, and the
young develop with the navel-string attached to the womb, so that,
as the egg-substance gets used up, the embryo is sustained to all
appearances just as in quadrupeds. The navel-string is ... attached
as it were by a sucker, and also to the centre of the embryo in the
place where the liver is situated.... Each embryo, as in the case of
quadrupeds, is provided with a chorion and separate membranes.’[40]

[38] _De generatione animalium_, iii. 9; 758ᵅ 37.

[39] _Historia animalium_, i. 5; 489ᵅ 35.

[40] _Historia animalium_, vi. 10; 565ᵇ 2.

The remarkable anatomical relationship of the embryo of _Galeus_
(_Mustelus_) _laevis_ to its mother’s womb was little noticed by
naturalists until the whole matter was taken up by Johannes Müller
about 1840.[41] That great observer demonstrated the complete accuracy
of Aristotle’s description and the justice of his comparison to and
contrast with the mammalian mode of development.[42] The work of
Johannes Müller at once had the effect of drawing the attention of
naturalists to the importance and value of the Aristotelian biological
observations.

[41] The history of this discovery is given by Charles Singer, _Studies
in the History and Method of Science_, vol. ii, Oxford, 1921, pp. 32 ff.

[42] Johannes Müller, _Ueber den glatten Hai des Aristoteles_, Berlin,
1842.

Aristotle attempts to explain the viviparous character of the
Selachians. His explanation has perhaps little meaning for the modern
biologist, just as many of our scientific explanations will seem
meaningless to our successors. But such explanations are often worth
consideration not only as stages in the historical development of
scientific thought, but also as illustrating the fact that while the
ultimate object of science is a _description_ of nature, the immediate
motive of the best scientific work is usually an _explanation_ of
nature. Yet it is usually the descriptive, not the explanatory element
that bears the test of time.

‘Birds and scaly reptiles’, says Aristotle, ‘because of their heat
produce a perfect egg, but because of their dryness it is only an
egg. The cartilaginous fishes have less heat than these but more
moisture, so that they are intermediate, for they are both oviparous
and viviparous within themselves, the former because they are cold, the
latter because of their moisture; for moisture is vivifying, whereas
dryness is farthest removed from what has life. Since they have neither
feathers nor scales such as either reptiles or other fishes have, all
of which are signs rather of a dry and earthy nature, the egg they
produce is soft; for the earthy matter does not come to the surface in
their eggs any more than in themselves. That is why they lay eggs in
themselves, for if the egg were laid externally it would be destroyed,
having no protection.’[43]

[43] _De generatione animalium_, ii. 1; 733ᵅ 6.

This explanation is based on Aristotle’s fundamental doctrine of the
opposite _qualities_, heat, cold, wetness, and dryness, that are found
combined in pairs in the four _elements_, earth, air, fire, and water.
The theory was of the utmost importance for the whole subsequent
development of science and was not displaced until quite modern
times. It was not an original conception of Aristotle, for something
resembling it had been set forth long before his time in figurative
language by Empedocles (_c._ 500-_c._ 430 B. C.), as Aristotle himself
tells us.[44] The same view had been foreshadowed by Pythagoras (_c._
580-_c._ 490 B. C.) at an even earlier date and was perhaps of much
greater antiquity. But Aristotle developed the doctrine and was the
main channel for its conveyance to later ages, so that his name will
always be associated with it. Matter in general and living matter in
particular was held by him to be composed of these four essential
so-called _elements_ (στοιχεῑ), each of which is in turn compounded
from two of the primary _qualities_ (δυνάμεις) which Aristotle brought
into relation with the elements. Thus earth was cold and dry, water
cold and wet, air hot and wet, and fire hot and dry (Fig. 7b).

[44] _Metaphysics_, i. 4. _De generatione et corruptione_, ii. 1.

[Illustration: Fig. 7b. The Four Elements and the Four Qualities.]

The theory of the elements and qualities is applicable to all matter
and not specially to living things. The distinction between the
living and not-living is to be sought not so much in its material
constitution, but in the presence or absence of ‘soul’, and his
teaching on that topic is to be found in his great work περὶ ψυχῆς,
_On Soul_. He does not think of matter as organic or inorganic—that
is a distinction of the seventeenth century physiologists—nor does he
think of things as divided into animal, vegetable, and mineral—that is
a distinction of the mediaeval alchemists,—but he thinks of things as
either with soul or without soul (ἔμψυχα or ἄαψυχα).

His belief as to the relationship of this soul to material things is a
difficult and complicated subject which would take us far beyond the
topics included in biological writings to-day, but he tells us that
‘there is a class of existent things which we call substance, including
under that term, firstly, matter, which in itself is not this nor that;
secondly, shape or form, in virtue of which the term this or that is
at once applied; thirdly, the whole made up of matter and form. Matter
is identical with potentiality, form with actuality,’ the soul being,
in living things, that which gives the form or actuality. ‘Of natural
bodies’, he continues, ‘some possess life and some do not: where by
life we mean the power of self-nourishment and of independent growth
and decay’.[45] It should here be noted that in the Aristotelian sense
the ovum is not at first a living thing, for in its earliest stage
and before fertilization it does not possess soul even in its most
elementary form.

[45] _De anima_, ii. 1, ii.

‘The term life is used in various senses, and, if life is present in
but a single one of these senses, we speak of a thing as living. Thus
there is intellect, sensation, motion from place to place and rest, the
motion concerned with nutrition, and, further, [there are the processes
of] decay and growth,’ all various meanings or at least exhibitions
of some form of life. Hence even ‘plants are supposed to have life,
for they have within themselves a faculty and principle whereby they
grow and decay.... They grow and continue to live so long as they are
capable of absorbing nutriment. This form of life can be separated
from the others ... and plants have no other faculty of soul at all,’
but only this lowest vegetative soul. ‘It is then in virtue of this
principle that all living things live, whether animals or plants. But
it is sensation which primarily constitutes the animal. For, provided
they have sensation, even those creatures that are devoid of movement
and do not change their place are called animals.... As the nutritive
faculty may exist without touch or any form of sensation, so also touch
may exist apart from other senses.’[46] Apart from these two lower
forms of soul, the _vegetative_ or nutritive and reproductive and the
_animal_ or sensitive, stands the _rational_ or intellectual soul
peculiar to man, a form of soul with which we shall here hardly concern
ourselves.[47]

[46] _De anima_, ii. 2, ii; 413ᵅ 22.

[47] The question of Aristotle’s meaning in connexion with this topic,
of primary importance for all thought, has a vast literature. An
authoritative work is R. D. Hicks, _Aristotle, De anima_, Cambridge,
1907.

The possession of one or more of the three types of soul, vegetative,
sensitive, and rational, provides in itself a basis for an elementary
form of arrangement of living things in an ascending scale. We
have already seen that Aristotle certainly describes something
resembling a ‘Scala Naturae’ and that such a scheme can easily be
drawn up from passages in his works. It may, however, be doubted
whether his phraseology is capable of extension so as to include a
true _classification_ of animals in any modern sense. It is true
that he repeatedly divides animals into classes, _Sanguineous_ and
_Non-sanguineous_, _Oviparous_ and _Viviparous_, _Terrestrial_
and _Aquatic_, &c., but his divisions are for the most part simply
dichotomic. He certainly defines a few groups of animals as the Lophura
(_Equidae_), the Cete (_Cetacea_), and the Selache (_Elasmobranchiae_
together with the _Lophiidae_) in a way that fairly corresponds
to similar groups in later systems. In most cases, however, his
definitions are not exact enough for modern needs, for the same
animal may fall into more than one of his classes and widely
different animals into the same class. Thus he invents a category
_Carcharodonta_ for animals with sharp interlocking teeth and includes
in it carnivores, reptiles, and fish; again, the horse kind must be
included both among his _Anepallacta_ or animals having flat crowned
teeth as well as among the _Amphodonta_ or animals with front teeth in
both jaws. Such words as these are really terms of _description_, not
of classification in the modern biological sense of that word.

There are, however, scattered through the biological works, certain
terms which are applied to animal groups and organs and are defined in
such a way as to suggest that they might ultimately have been developed
for classificatory purposes. Thus his lowest group is the _species_.
‘The individuals comprised within a single _species_ (εîδος) ... are
the real existences; but inasmuch as these individuals possess one
common specific form, it will suffice to state the universal attributes
of the species, that is, the attributes common to all its individuals,
once and for all.’[48] This is surely not very far removed from the
modern biological conception of a species.

[48] _De partibus animalium_, i. 4; 644ᵅ 22.

‘But as regards the larger groups—such as birds—which comprehend many
species, there may be a question. For on the one hand it may be urged
that as the ultimate species represent the real existences, it will be
well, if practicable, to examine these ultimate species separately,
just as we examine the species Man separately; to examine, that is, not
the whole class Birds collectively, but the Ostrich, the Crane, and the
other indivisible groups or species belonging to the class.

‘On the other hand, this course would involve repeated mention of the
same attribute, as the same attribute is common to many species, and so
far would be somewhat irrational and tedious. Perhaps, then, it will be
best to treat generically the universal attributes of the groups that
have a common nature and contain closely allied subordinate forms,
whether they are groups recognized by a true instinct of mankind,
such as Birds and Fishes, or groups not popularly known by a common
appellation, but withal composed of closely allied subordinate groups;
and only to deal individually with the attributes of a single species,
when such species—man, for instance, and any other such, if such there
be—stands apart from others, and does not constitute with them a larger
natural group.

‘It is generally similarity in the shape of particular organs, or of
the whole body, that has determined the formation of the larger groups.
It is in virtue of such a similarity that Birds, Fishes, Cephalopoda,
and Testacea have been made to form each a separate _genus_ (γένος).
For within the limits of each such _genus_, the parts do not differ
in that they have no nearer resemblance than that of analogy—such as
exists between the bone of man and the spine of fish—but they differ
merely in respect of such corporeal conditions as largeness smallness,
softness hardness, smoothness roughness, and other similar oppositions,
or, in one word, in respect of degree.’[49]

[49] _De partibus animalium_, i. 4; 644ᵅ 27.

The Aristotelian _genus_ thus differs widely from the term as used in
modern biology. In another passage he comes nearer to defining it and
the analogy of parts which extends from genus to genus.

‘Groups that differ only in the degree, and in the more or less of
an identical element that they possess are aggregated together under
a single _genus_; groups whose attributes are not identical but
_analogous_ are separated. For instance, bird differs from bird by
gradation, or by excess and defect; some birds have long feathers,
others short ones, but all are feathered. Bird and Fish are more remote
and only agree in having analogous organs; for what in the bird is
feather, in the fish is scale. Such _analogies_ can scarcely, however,
serve universally as indications for the formation of groups, for
almost all animals present analogies in their corresponding parts.’[50]

Aristotle nowhere gives to his term _genus_ a rigid application that
can be applied throughout the animal kingdom. He uses the word in fact
much as we should use the conveniently flexible term _group_, now
for a larger and less definite, now for a smaller and more definite
collection of species. This varying use of a technical word makes it
impossible to draw up a classification based on his _genera_ or indeed
with any consistent use of the terms which he actually employs.

The difficulty or impossibility of drawing up a satisfactory
classificatory system from the Aristotelian writings has not, however,
deterred numerous naturalists and scholars from making the attempt, and
the subject has in itself a considerable history and literature[51]
extending from the days of Edward Wotton (1492-1555) downward.[52] The
more recent efforts at drawing up an Aristotelian classificatory system
have been based on the methods of reproduction to which he certainly
attached very great importance.[53] Provided that it be remembered
that Aristotle does not himself detail any such system there can be
no harm in constructing one from his works. At worst it will serve as
a _memoria technica_ for the extent and character of his knowledge of
natural history, and at best it may represent a scheme to which he was
tending.

[50] _De partibus animalium_, i. 4; 644ᵅ 16.

[51] The classificatory system of Aristotle and its history are
discussed in great detail by J. B. Meyer, _Aristoteles’ Thierkunde:
ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Zoologie, Physiologie und alten
Philosophie_, Berlin, 1855.

[52] The work by which Wotton is known is his _De differentiis
animalium_, Paris, 1552.

[53] There is a valuable chapter on the subject of the Aristotelian
classificatory system as based on the method of reproduction in W.
Ogle, _Aristotle on the Parts of Animals_, London, 1882.

     _ENAIMA_ (_Sanguineous and either viviparous or oviparous_)
                 = _vertebrates_.

                             { 1. ἅνθρωπος. Man.
                             { 2. κήτη. Cetaceans.
                             { 3. ζῷα τετράποδα ζωοτόκα ὲν αὑτοῖς.
                             {      Viviparous quadrupeds.
                             {    (a) μὴ ἀμφώδοντα. Non-amphodonts
     Viviparous in the       {        = Ruminants with incisor in
     internal sense.         {        lower jaw only and with cloven
                             {        hoofs.
                             {    (b) μώνυχα. Solid-hoofed animals.
                             {         i. λόφουρα. Equidae.
                             {        ii. μώνυχα ἔτερα. Other
                                          solid-hoofed animals.

                             { 4. ὄρνιθες. Birds.
                             {    (a) γαμψώνυχα. Birds of prey with
                             {          talons.
                             {    (b) στεγανόποδες. Swimmers with
                 { With      {          webbed feet.
                 { perfect   {    (c) περιστεροειδῆ. Pigeons, doves, &c.
                 { ovum.     {    (d) ἄποδες. Swifts, martins, &c.
                 {           {    (e) ὄρνιθες ἕτεροι. Other birds.
     Oviparous   {           { 5. ζὌῷα τετράποδα ῷοτόκα. Oviparous
     though      {           {      quadrupeds = Amphibians and most
     sometimes   {           {      reptiles.
    _externally_ {           { 6. ὀφιώδη. Serpents.
     viviparous. {
                 {           { 7. ἰχθύες. Fishes.
                 { With      {    (a) σελάχη. Selachians. Cartilaginous
                 { imperfect {          fishes and, doubtfully, the
                 {           {          fishing-frog.
                 { ovum.     {    (b) ιχθύες ἕτεροι. Other fishes.

     _ANAIMA_ (_Non-sanguineous and either viviparous, vermiparous or
                   budding_) = _Invertebrates_.

     With perfect ovum.      { 8. μαλάκια. Cephalopods.
                             { 9. μαλακόστρακα. Crustaceans.

     With ‘scolex’.           10. ἔντομα. Insects, spiders,
                                          scorpions, &c.
     With generative         }11. ὀστρακόδερμα. Molluscs (except
     slime, buds or          }      Cephalopods), Echinoderms, &c.
     spontaneous generation. }

     With spontaneous        }12. ζωόφυτα. Sponges, Coelenterates,
     generation only.        }      &c.

Some of the elements in this classification are fundamentally
unsatisfactory in that they are based on negative characters. Such
is the group of _Anaima_ which is parallelled by our own equally
convenient and negative though morphologically meaningless equivalent
_Invertebrata_. Others, such as the subdivisions of the viviparous
quadrupeds, can only be forcibly extracted out of Aristotle’s text.
But there are yet others, such as the separation of the cartilaginous
from the bony fishes, that exhibit true genius and betray a knowledge
that can only have been reached by careful investigation. Remarkably
brilliant too is his treatment of Molluscs. There can be no doubt that
he dissected the bodies and carefully watched the habits of octopuses
and squids, _Malacia_ as he calls them. He separates them too far from
the other Molluscs, grouped by him as _Ostracoderma_, but his actual
descriptions of the structure and sexual process of the cephalopods
are exceedingly remarkable, and after being long disregarded or
misunderstood were verified and repeated in the course of the
nineteenth century.[54]

[54] The rediscovery and verification of this and other Aristotelian
observations is detailed by C. Singer, ‘Greek Biology and the Rise of
Modern Biology,’ _Studies in the History and Method of Science_, vol.
ii, Oxford, 1921.

Passing from his general ideas on the nature and division of living
creatures we may turn to some of the most noteworthy of his actual
observations. In the realm of comparative anatomy proper we may
instance that of the stomach of ruminants. He must have dissected
these animals, for he gives a clear and correct account of the four
chambers. ‘Animals’, he says, ‘present diversities in the structure
of their stomachs. Of the viviparous quadrupeds, such of the horned
animals as are not equally furnished with teeth in both jaws are
furnished with four such chambers. These animals are those that are
said to chew the cud. In these animals the oesophagus extends from
the mouth downwards along the lung, from the midriff to the _big
stomach_ [_rumen_, or paunch], and this stomach is rough inside and
semi-partitional. And connected with it near to the entry of the
oesophagus is what is called the _kekryphalos_ [_reticulum_, or
honeycomb bag]; for outside it is like the stomach, but inside it
resembles a netted cap; and the kekryphalos is a good deal smaller
than the _big stomach_.’ The term _kekryphalos_ was applied to the net
that women wore over their hair to keep it in order. ‘Connected with
this kekryphalos,’ he continues, ‘is the _echinos_ [_psalterium_, or
_manyplies_], rough inside and laminated, and of about the same size as
the kekryphalos. Next after this comes what is called the _enystron_
[_abomasum_], larger and longer than the echinos, furnished inside with
numerous folds or ridges, large and smooth. After all this comes the
gut....’[55] ‘All animals that have horns, the sheep for instance, the
ox, the goat, the deer and the like, have these several stomachs....
The several cavities receive the food one from the other in succession:
the first taking the unreduced substances, the second the same when
somewhat reduced, the third when reduction is complete, and the fourth
when the whole has become a smooth pulp....’[56] ‘Such is the stomach
of those quadrupeds that are horned and have an unsymmetrical dentition
(μὴ ἀμφώδοντα); and these animals differ one from another in the shape
and size of the parts, and in the fact of the oesophagus reaching the
stomach central-wise in some cases and sideways in others. Animals that
are furnished equally with teeth in both jaws (ἀμφώδοντα) have one
stomach; as man, the pig, the dog, the bear, the lion, the wolf.’[57]

[55] _Historia animalium_, ii. 17; 507ᵅ 33.

[56] _De partibus animalium_, ii. 17; 507ᵇ 12.

[57] _Historia animalium_, ii. 17; 507ᵇ 12.

A very famous example in the Aristotelian works anticipating modern
biological knowledge is afforded by his reference to the mode of
reproduction of the cephalopods. ‘The Malacia such as the octopus,
the sepia, and the calamary, have sexual intercourse all in the same
way; that is to say, they unite at the mouth by an interlacing of
their tentacles. When, then, the octopus rests its so-called head
against the ground and spreads abroad its tentacles, the other sex
fits into the outspreading of these tentacles, and the two sexes then
bring their suckers into mutual connexion. Some assert that the male
has a kind of penis in one of his tentacles, the one in which are the
largest suckers; and they further assert that the organ is tendinous
in character growing attached right up to the middle of the tentacle,
and that the latter enables it to enter the nostril or funnel of the
female.’[58]

[58] _Historia animalium_, v. 6; 541ᵇ 1. The hectocotylization of the
cephalopod arm which is here recorded as an element in the reproductive
process of these animals is denied in the _De generatione animalium_,
i. 15; 720ᵇ 32, where we read that ‘the insertion of the arm of
the male into the funnel of the female ... is only for the sake of
attachment, and it is not an organ useful for generation, for it is
outside the passage in the male and indeed outside the body of the male
altogether.‘ Yet even here Aristotle knows of the physical relationship
of the arm. See note on this point in the translation of the passage by
A. Platt, Oxford, 1910.

The reproductive processes of the Cephalopods were unknown to modern
naturalists until the middle of the nineteenth century. Before that
time several observers had noted the occasional presence of a peculiar
parasite in the mantle cavity of female cephalopods and had described
its supposed structure without tracing any relationship to the process
of generation. In 1851 it was first shown that this supposed parasite
was the arm of the male animal specially modified for reproductive
purposes and broken off on insertion into the mantle cavity of the
female[59]. The actual process of reproduction does not seem to have
been observed until 1894[60].

[59] J. B. Verany, _Mollusques méditerranéens_, Genoa, 1851.

[60] E. Racovitza. _Archives de zoologie experimentale_, Paris, 1894.

Aristotle is perhaps at his best and happiest when describing the
habits of living animals that he has himself observed. Among his most
pleasing accounts are those of the fishing-frog and torpedo. In these
creatures he did not fail to notice the displacement of the fins
associated with the depressed form of the body.

‘In marine creatures,’ he says, ‘one may observe many ingenious devices
adapted to the circumstances of their lives. For the account commonly
given of the frog-fish or angler is quite true; as is also that of the
torpedo....

‘In the Torpedo and the Fishing-frog the breadth of the anterior part
of the body is not so great as to render locomotion by fins impossible,
but in consequence of it the upper pair [_pectorals_] are placed
further back and the under pair [_ventrals_] are placed close to the
head, while to compensate for this advancement they are reduced in size
so as to be smaller than the upper ones.

‘In the Torpedo the two upper fins [pectorals] are placed in the tail,
and the fish uses the broad expansion of its body to supply their
place, each lateral half of its circumference serving the office of a
fin.... The torpedo narcotizes the creatures that it wants to catch,
overpowering them by the force of shock that is resident in its body,
and feeds upon them; it also hides in the sand and mud, and catches
all the creatures that swim in its way and come under its narcotizing
influence. This phenomenon has been actually observed in operation....
The torpedo-fish is known to cause a numbness even in human beings.

‘The frog-fish has a set of filaments that project in front of its
eyes; they are long and thin, like hairs, and are round at the tips;
they lie on either side, and are used as baits.... The little creatures
on which this fish feeds swim up to the filaments, taking them for bits
of seaweed such as they feed upon. Accordingly, when the frog-fish
stirs himself up a place where there is plenty of sand and mud and
conceals himself therein, it raises the filaments, and when the little
fish strike against them the frog-fish draws them in underneath into
its mouth.... That the creatures get their living by this means is
obvious from the fact that, whereas they are peculiarly inactive,
they are often caught with mullets, the swiftest of fishes, in their
interior. Furthermore, the frog-fish is usually thin when he is caught
after losing the tips of his filaments.’[61]

[61] The paragraphs concerning the fishing-frog and torpedo are made up
of sentences rearranged from the _De partibus animalium_, iv. 13; 696ᵅ
26, and the _Historia animalium_, ix. 37; 620ᵇ 15.

The modification of the musculature of the torpedo-fish for electric
purposes and the fishing habits of the fishing-frog or _Lophius_ are
now well known, but it was many centuries before naturalists had
confirmed the observations of the father of biology.

When we turn from Aristotle’s observations in the department of natural
history to his discussion of the actual mechanism of the living body,
the subject now contained under the heading _Experimental Physiology_,
we are in the presence of much less satisfactory material. Aristotle
here exhibits his weakness in physics and not being endowed with any
experimental knowledge of that subject his physiological development is
very greatly handicapped. He seems often to accept fancies of his own
in place of generalizations from collated observations. This tendency
of his was conveyed to his successors and delayed physiological
advance for many centuries. It forms a striking contrast to the
method of certain of the Hippocratic works such as the _Epidemics_
and the _Aphorisms_ which exhibit an investigator intent on recording
actual observations and on deducing general laws therefrom. Had the
Hippocratic method been extended by Aristotle beyond the field of
natural history, where he freely follows it, to that of physiology, the
succeeding generations might have established medicine far more firmly
as a science.

An important factor in Aristotle’s physical and physiological
teaching is the doctrine that matter is continuous and not made
up of indivisible parts. He thus rejected the atomic views of his
predecessors Leucippus and Democritus which have been preserved for us
by the poem of Lucretius. The different kinds of matter existing merely
in their state of simple mixture formed various uniform or homogeneous
substances, _homoeomeria_, of which the _tissues_ of living bodies
provided one type. We now consider tissues as having structure made up
of living cells or their products, but to Aristotle their structure was
an essential fact following on their particular elemental constitution.
The structure of muscle or flesh was perhaps comparable to that of
a crystalline substance, for, as we have seen, Aristotle made no
fundamental distinction between organic and inorganic _substances_,
which are in his view alike subject to the processes of generation and
corruption. The difference between them lies not in their structure
but in their potential relation to the various degrees of soul, the
vegetative, the animal, and the rational.

‘There are’, says Aristotle, ‘three degrees of composition, and of
these the first in order is composition out of what some call the
_elements_, earth, air, water, and fire....

‘The second degree of composition is that by which the _homogeneous_
parts of animals (ὁμοιομερῆ), such as bone, flesh, and the like, are
constituted out of [these] primary substances.

‘The third and last stage is the composition which forms the
_heterogeneous_ parts (ἀνομοιομερῆ) such as face, hand, and the
rest.’[62]

[62] _De partibus animalium_, ii. 1; 646ᵅ 12.

The distinctions are not altogether clear but may perhaps be explained
along such lines as the following. The division into homogeneous and
heterogeneous corresponds in a general way to the later division
into Tissues and Organs, the former, however, including much that we
should not call tissue. The homogeneous parts were again of two kinds:
(_a_) simple tissues or stuffs without any notion of size or shape,
that is, mere substance capable of endowment with life or soul, e.g.
cartilaginous or osseous tissues; and (_b_) simple structure, that is
actual structure made of such a single tissue but with definite form
and size, matter to which form had been added and which either was
actually or had been endowed with soul, e.g. _a_ cartilage or _a_ bone.

As a physiologist Aristotle is, in fact, in much the same position as
he is as a physicist. He never dissected the human body, he had only
the roughest idea of the course of the vessels, and his description of
the vascular system is so difficult and confused that a considerable
literature has been written on its interpretation. He regarded the
heart as the central organ of the body and the seat of sensation and he
probably believed that the arteries contained air as well as blood. He
made no adequate distinction between veins and arteries. He tells us
that two great vessels arise from the heart and that the heart is, as
it were, a part of these vessels. The two vessels are apparently the
aorta and the vena cava, and a very elementary and not very accurate
description is given of the branches of these vessels. He believed that
the heart had three chambers or cavities and that it took in air direct
from the lung.

The brain was for him mainly an organ by which were secreted certain
cold humours which prevented any overheating of the body by the furnace
of the heart under the action of the bellows of the lung. He formally
rejected the older views of Diogenes of Apollonia, of Alcmaeon of
Croton, and of the Hippocratic writings, that placed the seat of
sensation in the brain.[63] He failed to trace any adequate relation of
sense organs and nerves to brain. He considered that the spinal marrow
served to hold the vertebrae together.

[63] _De partibus animalium_, ii. 10.

In general we may say that his physiology is on a much lower plane than
his natural history, since in dealing with physiological questions he
always seems to have in mind the body as a whole and seldom pauses for
any detailed investigation of a particular part. The physiological
views of Aristotle were far from being fully accepted even by the
generation which followed him. There was already growing up a school
of physiologists whose work culminated five centuries later in that of
Galen, where we find quite other views of the bodily functions. It is
these views which we may take as more typical of the bases of Greek
physiology (see p. 66).

In much of the Aristotelian material that we have discussed we have
seen the development of a class of interests very foreign to those
of the modern biologist, in whose work the general discussion of the
ultimate nature and origin of life seldom plays a large part. The
business of the modern biologist is mainly with vital phenomena as he
encounters them and he is not concerned with the deeper philosophical
problems. The man of science considers a part of the Universe where the
philosopher makes it his business to regard the whole. With Aristotle
this modern scientific process of taking a part of the sensible
Universe, such as a particular group of animals or the particular
action of a particular organ, and considering it in and by and for
itself without reference to other things, had not yet fully emerged.
Philosophy and science are still inextricably linked and there is no
clear demarcation between them.

This is at least his theoretical view. But besides being a philosopher
by choice he was a supreme naturalist by his natural endowments and he
cannot suppress his love for nature and his capacity for observation.
We see Aristotle the naturalist at his greatest as a direct observer
or when reasoning directly about the observations that he has made.
When he disregards his own observations and begins to erect theories
on the observations or the views of others, he becomes weaker and less
comprehensible.


§ 3. _After Aristotle_

All Aristotle’s surviving biological works refer primarily to the
animal creation. His work on plants is lost or rather has survived
as the merest corrupted fragment. We are fortunate, however, in the
possession of a couple of complete works by his pupil and successor
Theophrastus (372-287), which may not only be taken to represent the
Aristotelian attitude towards the plant world, but also give us an
inkling of the general state of biological science in the generation
which succeeded the master.

These treatises of Theophrastus are in many respects the most complete
and orderly of all ancient biological works that have reached our time.
They give an idea of the kind of interest that the working scientist
of that day could develop when inspired rather by the genius of a
great teacher than by the power of his own thoughts. Theophrastus
is a pedestrian where Aristotle is a creature of wings, he is in a
relation to the master of the same order that the morphologists of the
second half of the nineteenth century were to Darwin. For a couple
of generations after the appearance of the _Origin of Species_ in
1859 the industry and ability of naturalists all over the world were
occupied in working out in detail the structure and mode of life of
living things on the basis of the Evolutionary philosophy. Nearly
all the work on morphology and much of that on physiology since his
time might be treated as a commentary on the works of Darwin. These
volumes of Theophrastus give the same impression. They represent the
remains—alas, almost the only biological remains—of a school working
under the impulse of a great idea and spurred by the memory of a great
teacher. As such they afford a parallel to much scientific work of our
own day, produced by men without genius save that provided by a vision
and a hope and an ideal. Of such men it is impossible to write as of
Aristotle. Their lives are summed up by their actual achievement, and
since Theophrastus is an orderly writer whose works have descended to
us in good state, he is a very suitable instance of the actual standard
of achievement of ancient biology. ‘Without vision the people perish’
and the very breath of life of science is drawn, and can only be drawn,
from that very small band of prophets who from time to time, during the
ages, have provided the great generalizations and the great ideals. In
this light let us examine the work of Theophrastus.

In the absence of any adequate system of classification, almost all
botany until the seventeenth century consisted mainly of descriptions
of species. To describe accurately a leaf or a root in the language
in ordinary use would often take pages. Modern botanists have
invented an elaborate terminology which, however hideous to eye and
ear, has the crowning merit of helping to abbreviate scientific
literature. Botanical writers previous to the seventeenth century were
substantially without this special mode of expression. It is partly to
this lack that we owe the persistent attempts throughout the centuries
to represent plants pictorially in herbals, manuscript and printed, and
thus the possibility of an adequate history of plant illustration.

Theophrastus seems to have felt acutely the need of botanical terms,
and there are cases in which he seeks to give a special technical
meaning to words in more or less current use. Among such words are
_carpos_ = fruit, _pericarpion_ = seed vessel = pericarp, and _metra_,
the word used by him for the central core of any stem whether formed of
wood, pith, or other substance. It is from the usage of Theophrastus
that the exact definition of fruit and pericarp has come down to
us.[64] We may easily discern also the purpose for which he introduces
into botany the term _metra_, a word meaning primarily the _womb_, and
the vacancy in the Greek language which it was made to fill. ‘_Metra_,’
he says, ‘is that which is in the middle of the wood, being third in
order from the bark and [thus] like to the marrow in bones. Some call
it the _heart_ (καρδίαν), others the _inside_ (ἐντεριώνην), yet others
call only the innermost part of the metra itself the heart, while
others again call this _marrow_.’[65] He is thus inventing a word to
cover all the different kinds of core and importing it from another
study. This is the method of modern scientific nomenclature which
hardly existed for botanists even as late as the sixteenth century of
our era. The real foundations of our modern nomenclature were laid in
the later sixteenth and in the seventeenth century by Cesalpino and
Joachim Jung.

[64] It is possible that Theophrastus derived the word pericarp from
Aristotle. Cp. _De anima_, ii. 1, 412ᵇ 2. In the passage τὸ φύλλον
περικαρπίου σκέπασμα, τὸ δὲ περικάρπιον καρποῦ, in the _De anima_ the
word does not, however, seem to have the full technical force that
Theophrastus gives to it.

[65] _Historia plantarum_, i. 2, vi.

Theophrastus understood the value of developmental study, a conception
derived from his master. ‘A plant’, he says, ‘has power of germination
in all its parts, for it has life in them all, wherefore we should
regard them not for what they are but for what they are becoming.’[66]
The various modes of plant reproduction are correctly distinguished
in a way that passes beyond the only surviving earlier treatise
that deals in detail with the subject, the Hippocratic work _On
generation_. ‘The manner of generation of trees and plants are these:
spontaneous, from a seed, from a root, from a piece torn off, from a
branch or twig, from the trunk itself, or from pieces of the wood cut
up small.’[67] The marvel of generation must have awakened admiration
from a very early date. We have already seen it occupying a more
ancient author, and it had also been one of the chief pre-occupations
of Aristotle. It is thus not remarkable that the process should impress
Theophrastus, who has left on record his views on the formation of the
plant from the seed.

[66] _Ibid._ i. 1, iv.

[67] _Historia plantarum_, ii. 1, i.

      ‘Some germinate, root and leaves, from the same
    point, some separately from either end of the seed.
    Thus wheat, barley, spelt, and all such cereals
    [germinate] from either end, corresponding to the
    position [of the seed] in the ear, the root from the
    stout lower part, the shoot from the upper; but the
    two, root and stem, form a single continuous whole.
    The bean and other leguminous plants are not so, but
    in them root and stem are from the same point, namely,
    their place of attachment to the pod, where, it is
    plain, they have their origin. In some cases there is
    a process, as in beans, chick peas, and especially
    lupines, from which the root grows downward, the leaf
    and stem upward.... In certain trees the bud first
    germinates within the seed, and, as it increases in
    size, the seeds split—all such seeds are, as it were,
    in two halves; again, all those of leguminous plants
    have plainly two lobes and are double—and then the
    root is immediately thrust out. But in cereals, the
    seeds being in one piece, this does not happen, but the
    root grows a little before [the shoot].

      ‘Barley and wheat come up monophyllous, but peas,
    beans, and chick peas polyphyllous. All leguminous
    plants have a single woody root, from which grow
    slender side roots ... but wheat, barley, and the other
    cereals have numerous slender roots by which they are
    matted together.... There is a contrast between these
    two kinds; the leguminous plants have a single root and
    have many side-growths above from the [single] stem
    ... while the cereals have many roots and send up many
    shoots, but these have no side-shoots.’[68]

There can be no doubt that here is a piece of minute observation on the
behaviour of germinating seeds. The distinction between dicotyledons
and monocotyledons is accurately set forth, though the stress is
laid not so much on the cotyledonous character of the seed as on the
relation of root and shoot. In the dicotyledons root and shoot are
represented as springing from the same point, and in monocotyledons
from opposite poles in the seed.

No further effective work was done on the germinating seed until
the invention of the microscope, and the appearance of the work of
Highmore (1613-85),[69] and the much more searching investigations of
Malpighi (1628-94)[70] and Grew (1641-1712)[71] after the middle of the
seventeenth century. The observations of Theophrastus are, however, so
accurate, so lucid, and so complete that they might well be used as
legends for the plates of these writers two thousand years after him.

[68] _Historia plantarum_, viii. 1, i.

[69] Nathaniel Highmore, _A History of Generation_, London, 1651.

[70] Marcello Malpighi, _Anatome plantarum_, London, 1675.

[71] Nehemiah Grew, _Anatomy of Vegetables begun_, London, 1672.

Much has been written as to the knowledge of the sex of plants among
the ancients. It may be stated that of the sexual elements of the
flower no ancient writer had any clear idea. Nevertheless, sex is often
attributed to plants, and the simile of the Loves of Plants enters
into works of the poets. Plants are frequently described as male and
female in ancient biological writings also, and Pliny goes so far as
to say that some students considered that all herbs and trees were
sexual.[72] Yet when such passages can be tested it will be found that
these so-called males and females are usually different species. In
a few cases a sterile variety is described as the male and a fertile
as the female. In a small residuum of cases diœcious plants or flowers
are regarded as male and female, but with no real comprehension of the
sexual nature of the flowers. There remain the palms, in which the
knowledge of plant sex had advanced a trifle farther. ‘With dates’,
says Theophrastus, ‘the males should be brought to the females; for the
males make the fruit persist and ripen, and this some call by analogy
_to use the wild fig_ (ὀλυνθάζειν).[73] The process is thus: when the
male is in flower they at once cut off the spathe with the flower
and shake the bloom, with its flower and dust, over the fruit of the
female, and, if it is thus treated, it retains the fruit and does not
shed it.’[74] The fertilizing character of the spathe of the male date
palm was familiar in Babylon from a very early date. It is recorded by
Herodotus[75] and is represented by a frequent symbol on the Assyrian
monuments.

[72] Pliny, _Naturalis historia_, xiii. 4.

[73] The curious word ὀλυνθάζειν, here translated _to use the wild
fig_, is from ὄλυνθος, a kind of wild fig which seldom ripens. The
special meaning here given to the word is explained in another work
of Theophrastus, _De causis plantarum_, ii. 9, xv. After describing
caprification in figs, he says τὸ δὲ ἐπὶ τῶν φοινίκων συμβαῖνον οὐ
ταὐτὸν μέν, ἔχει δέ τινα ὁμοιότητα τούτω δι’ ὁ καλοῦσιν ὀλυνθάζειν
αὐτούς. ‘The same thing is not done with dates, but something analogous
to it, whence this is called ὀλυνθάζειν’.

[74] _Historia plantarum_, ii. 8, iv.

[75] Herodotus i. 193.

The comparison of the fertilization of the date palm to the use of the
wild fig refers to the practice of Caprification. Theophrastus tells
us that there are certain trees, the fig among them, which are apt
to shed their fruit prematurely. To remedy this ‘the device adopted
is caprification. Gall-insects come out of the wild figs which are
hanging there, eat the tops of the cultivated figs, and so make them
swell’.[76] These gall-insects ‘are engendered from the seeds’.[77]
Theophrastus distinguished between the process as applied to the fig
and the date, observing that ‘in both [fig and date] the male aids
the female—for they call the fruit-bearing [palm] _female_—but whilst
in the one there is a union of the two sexes, in the other things are
different’.[78]

[76] _Historia plantarum_, ii. 8, i.

[77] _Ibid._ ii. 8, ii.

[78] _Historia plantarum_, ii. 8, iv.

Theophrastus was not very successful in distinguishing the nature
of the primary elements of plants, though he was able to separate
root, stem, leaf, stipule, and flower on morphological as well
as to a limited extent on physiological grounds. For the root he
adopts the familiar definition, the only one possible before the
rise of chemistry, that it ‘is that by which the plant draws up
nourishment’,[79] a description that applies to the account given by
the pre-Aristotelian author of the work περὶ γονῆς, _On generation_.
But Theophrastus shows by many examples that he is capable of following
out morphological homologies. Thus he knows that the ivy regularly puts
forth roots from the shoots between the leaves, by means of which it
gets hold of trees and walls,[80] that the mistletoe will not sprout
except on the bark of living trees into which it strikes its roots,
and that the very peculiar formation of the mangrove tree is to be
explained by the fact that ‘this plant sends out roots from the shoots
till it has hold on the ground and roots again: and so there comes to
be a continuous circle of roots round the tree, not connected with
the main stem, but at a distance from it’.[81] He does not succeed,
however, in distinguishing the real nature of such structures as bulbs,
rhizomes, and tubers, but regards them all as roots. Nor is he more
successful in his discussion of the nature of stems. As to leaves, he
is more definite and satisfactory, though wholly in the dark as to
their function; he is quite clear that the pinnate leaf of the rowan
tree, for instance, is a leaf and not a branch.

[79] _Ibid._ i. 1, ix.

[80] _Ibid._ iii. 18, x.

[81] _De causis plantarum_, ii. 23.

[Illustration: Fig. 8. THEOPHRASTUS

From VILLA ALBANI

Copy (second century A. D.?) of earlier work]

Notwithstanding his lack of insight as to the nature of sex in flowers,
he attains to an approximately correct idea of the relation of flower
and fruit. Some plants, he says, ‘have [the flower] around the fruit
itself as vine and olive; [the flowers] of the latter, when they drop,
look as though they had a hole through them, and this is taken for a
sign that it has blossomed well; for if [the flower] is burnt up or
sodden, the fruit falls with it, and so it does not become pierced.
Most flowers have the fruit case in the middle, or it may be the flower
is on the top of the pericarp as in pomegranate, apple, pear, plum,
and myrtle ... for these have their seeds below the flower.... In
some cases again the flower is on top of the seeds themselves as in
... all thistle-like plants’.[82] Thus Theophrastus has succeeded in
distinguishing between the hypogynous, perigynous, and epigynous types
of flower, and has almost come to regard its relation to the fruit as
the essential floral element.

[82] _Historia plantarum_, i. 13, iii.

Theophrastus has a perfectly clear idea of plant distribution as
dependent on soil and climate, and at times seems to be on the point
of passing from a statement of climatic distribution into one of real
geographical regions. The general question of plant distribution long
remained at, if it did not recede from, the position where he left
it. The usefulness of the manuscript and early printed herbals in the
West was for centuries marred by the retention of plant descriptions
prepared for the Greek East and Latin South, and these works were saved
from complete ineffectiveness only by an occasional appeal to nature.

With the death of Theophrastus about 287 B. C. pure biological science
substantially disappears from the Greek world, and we get the same
type of deterioration that is later encountered in other scientific
departments. Science ceases to have the motive of the desire to know,
and becomes an applied study, subservient to the practical arts. It
is an attitude from which in the end applied science itself must
suffer also. Yet the centuries that follow were not without biological
writers of very great ability. In the medical school of Alexandria
anatomy and physiology became placed on a firm basis from about 300
B. C., but always in the position subordinate to medicine that they
have since occupied. Two great names of that school, Herophilus
and Erasistratus, we must consider elsewhere.[83] Their works have
disappeared and we have the merest fragments of them. In the last
pre-Christian and the first two post-Christian centuries, however,
there were several writers, portions of whose works have survived and
are of great biological importance. Among them we include Crateuas, a
botanical writer and illustrator, who greatly developed, if he did not
actually introduce, the method of representing plants systematically by
illustration rather than by description. This method, important still,
was even more important when there was no proper system of botanical
nomenclature. Crateuas by his paintings of plants, copies of which have
not improbably descended to our time, began a tradition which, fixed
about the fifth century, remained almost rigid until the rediscovery
of nature in the sixteenth. He was physician to Mithridates VI Eupator
(120-63 B. C.), but his work was well known and appreciated at Rome,
which became the place of resort for Greek talent.[84]

[83] See the companion chapter on _Greek Medicine_.

[84] The works of Crateuas have recently been printed by M. Wellmann
as an appendix to the text of Dioscorides, _De re medica_, 3 vols.,
Berlin, 1906-17. The source and fate of his plant drawings are
discussed in the same author’s _Krateuas_, Berlin, 1897.

Celsus, who flourished about 20 B. C., wrote an excellent work on
medicine, but gives all too little glimpse of anatomy and physiology.
Rufus of Ephesus, however, in the next century practised dissection
of apes and other animals. He described the decussation of the optic
nerves and the capsule of the crystalline lens, and gave the first
clear description that has survived of the structure of the eye. He
regarded the nerves as originating from the brain, and distinguished
between nerves of motion and of sensation. He described the oviduct of
the sheep and rightly held that life was possible without the spleen.

The second Christian century brings us two writers who, while
scientifically inconsiderable, acted as the main carriers of such
tradition of Greek biology as reached the Middle Ages, Pliny and
Dioscorides. Pliny (A. D. 23-79), though a Latin, owes almost
everything of value in his encyclopaedia to Greek writings. In his
_Natural History_ we have a collection of current views on the nature,
origin, and uses of plants and animals such as we might expect from an
intelligent, industrious, and honest member of the landed class who
was devoid of critical or special scientific skill. Scientifically the
work is contemptible, but it demands mention in any study of the legacy
of Greece, since it was, for centuries, a main conduit of the ancient
teaching and observations on natural history. Read throughout the ages,
alike in the darkest as in the more enlightened periods, copied and
recopied, translated, commented on, extracted and abridged, a large
part of Pliny’s work has gradually passed into folk-keeping, so that
through its agency the gipsy fortune-teller of to-day is still reciting
garbled versions of the formulae of Aristotle and Hippocrates of two
and a half millennia ago.

The fate of Dioscorides (flourished A. D. 60) has been not dissimilar.
His work _On Materia Medica_ consists of a series of short accounts
of plants, arranged almost without reference to the nature of the
plants themselves, but quite invaluable for its terse and striking
descriptions which often include habits and habitats. Its history has
shown it to be one of the most influential botanical treatises ever
penned. It provided most of the little botanical knowledge that reached
the Middle Ages. It furnished the chief stimulus to botanical research
at the time of the Renaissance. It has decided the general form of
every modern pharmacopœia. It has practically determined modern plant
nomenclature both popular and scientific.

Translated into nearly every language from Anglo-Saxon and Provençal
to Persian and Hebrew, appearing both abstracted and in full in
innumerable beautifully illuminated manuscripts, some of which are
still among the fairest treasures of the great national libraries,
Dioscorides, the drug-monger, appealed to scholasticized minds for
centuries. The frequency with which fragments of him are encountered in
papyri shows how popular his work was in Egypt in the third and fourth
centuries. One of the earliest datable Greek codices in existence is a
glorious volume of Dioscorides written in capitals,[85] thought worthy
to form a wedding gift for a lady who was the daughter of one Roman
emperor and the betrothed of a second.[86] The illustrations of this
fifth century manuscript are a very valuable monument for the history
of art and the chief adornment of what was once the Royal Library at
Vienna[87] (figs. 9-10). Illustrated Latin translations of Dioscorides
were in use in the time of Cassiodorus (490-585). A work based on it,
similarly illustrated, but bearing the name of Apuleius, is among
the most frequent of mediaeval botanical documents and the earliest
surviving specimen is almost contemporary with Cassiodorus himself.[88]
After the revival of learning Dioscorides continued to attract an
immense amount of philological and botanical ability, and scores of
editions of his works, many of them nobly illustrated, poured out of
the presses of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

[85] The manuscript in question is Med. Graec. 1 at what was the Royal
Library at Vienna. It is known as the _Constantinopolitanus_. After the
war it was taken to St. Mark’s at Venice, but either has been or is
about to be restored to Vienna. A facsimile of this grand manuscript
was published by Sijthoff, Leyden, 1906.

[86] The lady in question was Juliana Anicia, daughter of Anicius
Olybrius, Emperor of the West in 472, and his wife Placidia, daughter
of Valentinian III. Juliana was betrothed in 479 by the Eastern Emperor
Zeno to Theodoric the Ostrogoth, but was married, probably in 487 when
the manuscript was presented to her, to Areobindus, a high military
officer under the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius.

[87] The importance of this manuscript as well as the position of
Dioscorides as medical botanist is discussed by Charles Singer in an
article ‘Greek Biology and the Rise of Modern Biology’; _Studies in the
History and Method of Science_, vol. ii, Oxford, 1921.

[88] This manuscript is at the University Library at Leyden, where it
is numbered Voss Q 9.

[Illustration: Fifth century drawings from JULIANA ANICIA MS., copied
from originals of first century B. C.(?)

Fig. 9.

ΣΟΝΚΟΣ ΤΡΥΦΕΡΟΣ = _Crepis paludosa_, _Mœn._]

[Illustration: Fig. 10.

ΓΕΡΑΝΙΟΝ = _Erodium malachoides_, _L._]

But the greatest biologist of the late Greek period, and indeed one of
the greatest biologists of all time, was Claudius Galen of Pergamon
(A. D. 131-201). Galen devoted himself to medicine from an early
age, and in his twenty-first year we hear of him studying anatomy at
Smyrna under Pelops. With the object of extending his knowledge of
drugs he early made long journeys to Asia Minor. Later he proceeded to
Alexandria, where he improved his anatomical equipment, and here, he
tells us, he examined a human skeleton. It is indeed probable that his
direct practical acquaintance with human anatomy was limited to the
skeleton and that dissection of the human body was no longer carried
on at Alexandria in his time. Thus his physiology and anatomy had to
be derived mainly from animal sources. He is the most voluminous of
all ancient scientific writers and one of the most voluminous writers
of antiquity in any department. We are not here concerned with the
medical material which mainly fills these huge volumes, but merely with
the physiological views which not only prevailed in medicine until
Harvey and after, but also governed for fifteen hundred years alike
the scientific and the popular ideas on the nature and workings of the
animal body, and have for centuries been embedded in our speech. A
knowledge of these physiological views of Galen is necessary for any
understanding of the history of biology and illuminates many literary
allusions of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Between the foundation of the Alexandrian school and the time of Galen,
medicine was divided among a great number of sects. Galen was an
eclectic and took portions of his teaching from many of these schools,
but he was also a naturalist of great ability and industry, and knew
well the value of the experimental way. Yet he was a somewhat windy
philosopher and, priding himself on his philosophic powers, did not
hesitate to draw conclusions from evidence which was by no means always
adequate. The physiological system that he thus succeeded in building
up we may now briefly consider (fig. 11).

The basic principle of life, in the Galenic physiology, is a _spirit_,
_anima_ or _pneuma_, drawn from the general world-soul in the act of
respiration. It enters the body through the _rough artery_ (τραχεῖα
ἀρτηρία, _arteria aspera_ of mediaeval notation), the organ known to
our nomenclature as the trachea. From this trachea the pneuma passes to
the lung and then, through the _vein-like artery_ (ἀρτηρία φλεβώδης,
_arteria venalis_ of mediaeval writers, the pulmonary vein of our
nomenclature), to the left ventricle. Here it will be best to leave it
for a moment and trace the vascular system along a different route.

Ingested food, passing down the alimentary tract, was absorbed as chyle
from the intestine, collected by the portal vessel, and conveyed by it
to the liver. That organ, the site of the innate heat in Galen’s view,
had the power of elaborating the chyle into venous blood and of imbuing
it with a spirit or pneuma which is innate in all living substance,
so long as it remains alive, the _natural spirits_ (πνεῦμα φυσικόν,
_spiritus naturalis_ of the mediaevals). Charged with this, and also
with the nutritive material derived from the food, the venous blood is
distributed by the liver through the veins which arise from it in the
same way as the arteries from the heart. These veins carry nourishment
and _natural spirits_ to all parts of the body. _Iecur fons venarum_,
the liver as the source of the veins, remained through the centuries
the watchword of the Galenic physiology. The blood was held to ebb and
flow continuously in the veins during life.

[Illustration: FIG. 11. Illustrating Galen’s physiological teaching.]

Now from the liver arose one great vessel, the hepatic vein, from
division of which the others were held to come off as branches. Of
these branches, one, our _common vena cava_, entered the right side
of the heart. For the blood that it conveyed to the heart there were
two fates possible. The greater part remained awhile in the ventricle,
parting with its impurities and vapours, exhalations of the organs,
which were carried off by the _artery-like vein_ (φλὲπς ἀρτηριώδης,
the mediaeval _vena pulmonalis_, our pulmonary artery) to the lung
and then exhaled to the outer air. These impurities and vapours gave
its poisonous and suffocating character to the breath. Having parted
thus with its impurities, the venous blood ebbed back again from the
right ventricle into the venous system. But for a small fraction of
the venous blood that entered the right ventricle another fate was
reserved. This small fraction of venous blood, charged still with
the _natural spirits_ derived from the liver, passed through minute
channels in the septum between the ventricles and entered the left
chamber. Arrived there, it encountered the external pneuma and became
thereby elaborated into a higher form of spirit, the _vital spirits_
(πνεῦμα ζωτικόν, _spiritus vitalis_), which is distributed together
with blood by the arterial system to various parts of the body. In the
arterial system it also ebbed and flowed, and might be seen and felt to
pulsate there.

But among the great arterial vessels that sent forth arterial blood
thus charged with vital spirits were certain vessels which ascended
to the brain. Before reaching that organ they divided up into minute
channels, the _rete mirabile_ (πλέγμα μέγιστον θαῦμα), and passing
into the brain became converted by the action of that organ into a yet
higher type of spirits, the _animal spirits_ (πνεῦμα ψυχικόν, _spiritus
animalis_), an ethereal substance distributed to the various parts of
the body by the structures known to-day as nerves, but believed then to
be hollow channels. The three fundamental faculties (δυνάμεις), the
_natural_, the _vital_, and the _animal_, which brought into action the
corresponding functions of the body, thus originated as an expression
of the primal force or pneuma.

This physiology, we may emphasize, is not derived from an investigation
of human anatomy. In the human brain there is no _rete mirabile_,
though such an organ is found in the calf. In the human liver there
is no _hepatic vein_, though such an organ is found in the dog. Dogs,
calves, pigs, bears, and, above all, Barbary apes were freely dissected
by Galen and were the creatures from which he derived his physiological
ideas. Many of Galen’s anatomical and physiological errors are due to
his attributing to one creature the structures found in another, a fact
that only very gradually dawned on the Renaissance anatomists.

The whole knowledge possessed by the world in the department of
physiology from the third to the seventeenth century, nearly all the
biological conceptions till the thirteenth, and most of the anatomy and
much of the botany until the sixteenth century, all the ideas of the
physical structure of living things throughout the Middle Ages, were
contained in a small number of these works of Galen. The biological
works of Aristotle and Theophrastus lingered precariously in a few
rare manuscripts in the monasteries of the East; the total output of
hundreds of years of Alexandrian and Pergamenian activities was utterly
destroyed; the Ionian biological works, of which a sample has by a
miracle survived, were forgotten; but these vast, windy, ill-arranged
treatises of Galen lingered on. Translated into Latin, Syriac, Arabic,
and Hebrew, they saturated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages.
Commented on by later Greek writers, who were themselves in turn
translated into the same list of languages, they were yet again served
up under the names of such Greek writers as Oribasius, Paul of Aegina,
or Alexander of Tralles.

What is the secret of the vitality of these Galenic biological
conceptions? The answer can be given in four words. _Galen is a
teleologist_; and a teleologist of a kind whose views happened to fit
in with the prevailing theological attitude of the Middle Ages, whether
Christian, Moslem, or Jewish. According to him everything which exists
and displays activity in the human body originates in and is formed
by an intelligent being and on an intelligent plan, so that the organ
in structure and function is the result of that plan. ‘It was the
Creator’s infinite wisdom which selected the best means to attain his
beneficent ends, and it is a proof of His omnipotence that he created
every good thing according to His design, and thereby fulfilled His
will.’[89]

[89] A good instance of Galen’s teleological point of view is afforded
by his classical description of _the hand_ in the περὶ χρείας τῶν
ἐν ἀνθρώπου σώματι μορίων, _On the uses of the parts of the body of
man_, i. 1. This passage is available in English in a tract by Thomas
Bellott, London, 1840.

After Galen there is a thousand years of darkness, and biology ceases
to have a history. The mind of the Dark Ages turned towards theology,
and such remains of Neoplatonic philosophy as were absorbed into the
religious system were little likely to be of aid to the scientific
attitude. One department of positive knowledge must of course persist.
Men still suffered from the infirmities of the flesh and still sought
relief from them. But the books from which that advice was sought had
nothing to do with general principles nor with knowledge as such.
They were the most wretched of the treatises that still masqueraded
under the names of Hippocrates and Galen, mostly mere formularies,
antidotaries, or perhaps at best symptom lists. And, when the
depression of the western intellect had passed its worst, there was
still no biological material on which it could be nourished.

The prevailing interest of the barbarian world, at last beginning to
settle into its heritage of antiquity, was with Logic. Of Aristotle
there survived in Latin dress only the _Categories_ and the _De
interpretatione_, the merciful legacy of Boethius, the last of the
philosophers. Had a translation of Aristotle’s _Historia animalium_
or _De generatione animalium_ survived, had a Latin version of the
Hippocratic work _On generation_ or of the treatises of Theophrastus
_On plants_ reached the earlier Middle Ages, the whole mental history
of Europe might have been different and the rediscovery of nature might
have been antedated by centuries. But this was a change of heart for
which the world had long to wait; something much less was the earliest
biological gift of Greece. The gift, when it came, came in two forms,
one of which has not been adequately recognized, but both are equally
her legacy. These two forms are, firstly, the well-known work of the
early translators and, secondly, the tardily recognized work of certain
schools of minor art.

The earliest biological treatises that became accessible in the west
were rendered not from Greek but from Arabic. The first of them was
perhaps the treatise περὶ μυῶν κινήσεως, _On movement of muscles_ of
Galen, a work which contains more than its title suggests and indeed
sets forth much of the Galenic physiological system. It was rendered
into Latin from the Arabic of Joannitius (Hunain ibn Ishaq, 809-73),
probably about the year 1200, by one Mark of Toledo. It attracted
little attention, but very soon after biological works of Aristotle
began to become accessible. The first was probably the fragment _On
plants_. The Greek original of this is lost, and besides the Latin,
only an Arabic version of a former Arabic translation of a Syriac
rendering of a Greek commentary is now known! Such a work appeared from
the hand of a translator known as Alfred the Englishman about 1220 or a
little later. Neither it nor another work from the same translator, _On
the motion of the heart_, which sought to establish the primacy of that
organ on Aristotelian grounds, can be said to contain any of the spirit
of the master.[90]

[90] C. H. Haskins, ‘The reception of Arabic science in England,’
_English Historical Review_, London, 1915, p. 56.

A little better than these is the work of the wizard Michael the Scot
(1175?-1234?). Roger Bacon tells us that Michael in 1230 ‘appeared
[at Oxford], bringing with him the works of Aristotle in natural
history and mathematics, with wise expositors, so that the philosophy
of Aristotle was magnified among the Latins’. Scott produced his work
_De animalibus_ about this date and he included in it the three great
biological works of Aristotle, all rendered from an inferior Arabic
version.[91] Albertus Magnus (1206-80) had not as yet a translation
direct from the Greek to go upon for his great commentary on the
_History of animals_, but he depended on Scott. The biological works
of Aristotle were rendered into Latin direct from the Greek in the
year 1260 probably by William of Moerbeke.[92] Such translations,
appearing in the full scholastic age when everything was against
direct observation, cannot be said to have fallen on a fertile ground.
They presented an ordered account of nature and a good method of
investigation, but these were gifts to a society that knew little of
their real value.[93]

[91] The latest and best work on the Aristotelian translations of Scott
is an inaugural dissertation by A. H. Querfeld, _Michael Scottus und
seine Schrift, De secretis naturae_, Leipzig, 1919.

[92] J. G. Schneider, _Aristotelis de animalibus historiae_, Leipzig,
1811, p. cxxvi. L. Dittmeyer, _Guilelmi Moerbekensis translatio
commentationis Aristotelicae de generatione animalium_, Dillingen,
1915. L. Dittmeyer, _De animalibus historia_, Leipzig, 1907.

[93] The subject of the Latin translations of Aristotle is traversed
by A. and C. Jourdain, _Recherches critiques sur l’âge des
traductions latines d’Aristote_, 2nd ed., Paris, 1843; M. Grabmann,
_Forschungen über die lateinischen Aristoteles-Übersetzungen des
XIII. Jahrhunderts_, Münster i/W., 1916; and F. Wüstenfeld, _Die
Übersetzungen arabischer Werke in das Lateinische seit dem XI.
Jahrhundert_, Göttingen, 1877.

Yet the advent of these texts was coincident with a returning desire to
observe nature. Albert, with all his scholasticism, was no contemptible
naturalist. He may be said to have begun first-hand plant study in
modern times so far as literary records are concerned. His book _De
vegetabilibus_ contains excellent observations, and he is worthy
of inclusion among the fathers of botany. In his vast treatise _De
animalibus_, hampered as he is by his learning and verbosity, he shows
himself a true observer and one who has absorbed something of the
spirit of the great naturalist to whose works he had devoted a lifetime
of study and on which he professes to be commenting. We see clearly
the leaven of the Aristotelian spirit working, though Albert is still
a schoolman. We may select for quotation a passage on the generation
of fish, a subject on which some of Aristotle’s most remarkable
descriptions remained unconfirmed till modern times. These descriptions
impressed Albert in the same way as they do the modern naturalist. To
those who know nothing of the stimulating power of the Aristotelian
biological works, Albert’s description of the embryos of fish and his
accurate distinction of their mode of development from that of birds,
by the absence of an allantoic membrane in the one and its presence
in the other, must surely be startling. Albert depends on Aristotle—a
third-hand version of Aristotle—but does not slavishly follow him.

‘Between the mode of development (_anathomiam generationis_) of birds’
and fishes’ eggs there is this difference: during the development of
the fish the second of the two veins which extend from the heart [as
described by Aristotle in birds] does not exist. For we do not find
the vein which extends to the outer covering in the eggs of birds
which some wrongly call the navel because it carries the blood to the
exterior parts; but we do find the vein that corresponds to the yolk
vein of birds, for this vein imbibes the nourishment by which the limbs
increase.... In fishes as in birds, channels extend from the heart
first to the head and the eyes, and first in them appear the great
upper parts. As the growth of the young fish increases the albumen
decreases, being incorporated into the members of the young fish, and
it disappears entirely when development and formation are complete. The
beating of the heart ... is conveyed to the lower part of the belly,
carrying pulse and life to the inferior members.

‘While the young [fish] are small and not yet fully developed they have
veins of great length which take the place of the navel-string, but as
they grow and develop, these shorten and contract into the body towards
the heart, as we have said about birds. The young fish and the eggs are
enclosed and in a covering, as are the eggs and young of birds. This
covering resembles the dura mater [of the brain], and beneath it is
another [corresponding therefore to the pia mater of the brain] which
contains the young animal and nothing else.’[94]

In the next century Conrad von Megenberg (1309-98) produced his _Book
of Nature_, a complete work on natural history, the first of the kind
in the vernacular, founded on Latin versions, now rendered direct
from the Greek, of the Aristotelian and Galenic biological works. It
is well ordered and opens with a systematic account of the structure
and physiology of man as a type of the animal creation, which is then
systematically described and followed by an account of plants. Conrad,
though guided by Aristotle, uses his own eyes and ears, and with him
and Albert the era of direct observation has begun.[95]

[94] The enormous _De Animalibus_ of Albert of Cologne is now available
in an edition by H. Stadler, _Albertus Magnus De Animalibus Libri
XXVI nach der cölner Urschrift_, 2 vols., Münster i/W., 1916-21. The
quotation is translated from vol. i, pp. 465-6.

[95] Conrad’s work is conveniently edited by H. Schultz, _Das Buch der
Natur von Conrad von Megenberg, die erste Naturgeschichte in deutscher
Sprache, in Neu-Hochdeutsche Sprache bearbeitet_, Greifswald, 1897.
Conrad’s work is based on that of Thomas of Cantimpré (1201-70).

But there was another department in which the legacy of Greece found
an even earlier appreciation. For centuries the illustrations to
herbals and bestiaries had been copied from hand to hand, continuing
a tradition that had its rise with Greek artists of the first century
B. C. But their work, copied at each stage without reference to the
object, moved constantly farther from resemblance to the original. At
last the illustrations became little but formal patterns, a state in
which they remained in some late copies prepared as recently as the
sixteenth century. But at a certain period a change set in, and the
artist, no longer content to rely on tradition, appeals at last to
nature. This new stirring in art corresponds with the new stirring in
letters, the Arabian revival—itself a legacy of Greece, though sadly
deteriorated in transit—that gave rise to scholasticism. In much of the
beautiful carved and sculptured work of the French cathedrals the new
movement appears in the earlier part of the thirteenth century. At such
a place as Chartres we see the attempt to render plants and animals
faithfully in stone as early as 1240 or before. In the easier medium of
parchment the same tendency appears even earlier. When once it begins
the process progresses slowly until the great recovery of the Greek
texts in the fifteenth century, when it is again accelerated.

During the sixteenth century the energy of botanists and zoologists was
largely absorbed in producing most carefully annotated and illustrated
editions of Dioscorides and Theophrastus and accounts of animals,
habits, and structure that were intended to illustrate the writings of
Aristotle, while the anatomists explored the bodies of man and beast
to confirm or refute Galen. The great monographs on birds, fishes, and
plants of this period, ostensibly little but commentaries on Pliny,
Aristotle, and Dioscorides, represent really the first important
efforts of modern times at a natural history. They pass naturally into
the encyclopaedias of the later sixteenth century, and these into the
physiological works of the seventeenth. Aristotle was never a dead hand
in Biology as he was in Physics, and this for the reason that he was a
great biologist but was not a great physicist.

With the advance of the sixteenth century the works of Aristotle, and
to a less extent those of Dioscorides and Galen, became the great
stimulus to the foundation of a new biological science. Matthioli
(1520-77), in his commentary on Dioscorides (first edition 1544), which
was one of the first works of its type to appear in the vernacular,
made a number of first-hand observations on the habits and structure
of plants that is startling even to a modern botanist. About the same
time Galenic physiology, expressed also in numerous works in the
vulgar tongue and rousing the curiosity of the physicians, became the
clear parent of modern physiology and comparative anatomy. But, above
all, the Aristotelian biological works were fertilizers of the mind.
It is very interesting to watch a fine observer such as Fabricius ab
Acquapendente (1537-1619) laying the foundations of modern embryology
in a splendid series of first-hand observations, treating his own great
researches almost as a commentary on Aristotle. What an impressive
contrast to the arid physics of the time based also on Aristotle! ‘My
purpose’, says Fabricius, ‘is to treat of the formation of the foetus
in every animal, setting out from that which proceeds from the egg: for
this ought to take precedence of all other discussion of the subject,
both because it is not difficult to make out Aristotle’s view of the
matter, and because his treatise on the Formation of the Foetus from
the egg is by far the fullest, and the subject is by much the most
extensive and difficult.’[96]

[96] Hieronimo Fabrizio of Acquapendente, _De formato foetu_, Padua,
1604.

The industrious and careful Fabricius, with a wonderful talent for
observation lit not by his own lamp but by that of Aristotle, bears
a relation to the master much like that held by Aristotle’s pupil
in the flesh, Theophrastus. The works of the two men, Fabricius and
Theophrastus, bear indeed a resemblance to each other. Both rely
on the same group of general ideas, both progress in much the same
ordered calm from observation to observation, both have an inspiration
which is efficient and stimulating but below the greatest, both are
enthusiastic and effective as investigators of fact, but timid and
ineffective in drawing conclusions.

But Fabricius was more happy in his pupils than Theophrastus, for
we may watch the same Aristotelian ideas fermenting in the mind of
Fabricius’s successor, the greatest biologist since Aristotle himself,
William Harvey (1578-1657).[97] This writer’s work _On generation_ is a
careful commentary on Aristotle’s work on the same topic, but it is a
commentary not in the old sense but in the spirit of Aristotle himself.
Each statement is weighed and tested in the light of experience, and
the younger naturalist, with all his reverence for Aristotle, does not
hesitate to criticize his conclusions. He exhibits an independence of
thought, an ingenuity in experiment, and a power of deduction that
places his treatise as the middle term of the three great works on
embryology of which the other members are those of Aristotle and Karl
Ernst von Baer (1796-1870).[98]

[97] William Harvey, _Exercitationes de generatione animalium_, London,
1651.

[98] Karl Ernst von Baer, _Ueber die Entwickelungsgeschichte der
Thiere_, Königsberg, 1828-37.

With the second half of the seventeenth century and during a large part
of the eighteenth the biological works of Aristotle attracted less
attention. The battle against the Aristotelian physics had been fought
and won, but with them the biological works of Aristotle unjustly
passed into the shadow that overhung all the idols of the Middle Ages.

The rediscovery of the Aristotelian biology is a modern thing. The
collection of the vast wealth of living forms absorbed the energies
of the generations of naturalists from Ray (1627-1705) and Willoughby
(1635-72) to Réaumur (1683-1757) and Linnaeus (1707-1778) and beyond to
the nineteenth century. The magnitude and fascination of the work seems
almost to have excluded general ideas. With the end of this period
and the advent of a more philosophical type of naturalist, such as
Cuvier (1769-1832) and members of the Saint-Hilaire family, Aristotle
came again to his own. Since the dawn of the nineteenth century,
and since naturalists have been in a position to verify the work of
Aristotle, his reputation as a naturalist has continuously risen.
Johannes Müller (1801-58), Richard Owen (1804-92), George Henry Lewes
(1817-78), William Ogle (1827-1912) are a few of the long line of those
who have derived direct inspiration from his biological work. With
improved modern methods of investigation the problems of generation
have absorbed a large amount of biological attention, and interest
has become specially concentrated on Aristotle’s work on that topic
which is perhaps, at the moment, more widely read than any biological
treatise, ancient or modern, except the works of Darwin. That great
naturalist wrote to Ogle in 1882: ‘From quotations I had seen I had a
high notion of Aristotle’s merits, but I had not the most remote notion
what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods,
though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old
Aristotle.’




GREEK MEDICINE


Ἡρόφιλος δὲ ᾝἐν τῷ Διαιτητικῷ καὶ σοφίαν φησὶν ἀνεπίδεικτον καὶ τέχνην
ἄδηλον καὶ ἰσχὺν ἀναγώνιστον καὶ πλοῦτον ἀχρεῖον καὶ λόγον ἀδύνατον,
ὑγιείας ἀπούσης.

Herophilus, a Greek philosopher and physician (_c._ 300 B. C.), has
truly written ‘that Science and Art have equally nothing to show,
that Strength is incapable of effort, Wealth useless, and Eloquence
powerless if Health be wanting’.[99] All peoples therefore have had
their methods of treating those departures from health that we call
disease, and among peoples of higher culture such methods have been
reduced in most cases to something resembling a system. In antiquity,
as now, a variety of such systems were in vogue, and those nations who
practised the art of writing from an early date have left considerable
records of their medical methods and doctrines. We may thus form a
fairly good idea of the medical principles of the Mesopotamian, the
Egyptian, the Iranian, the Indian, and the Chinese civilizations. Much
in these systems, as in the medical procedure of more primitive tribes,
was based upon some theory of disease which fitted in with a larger
theory of the nature of evil. Of these theories the commonest was and
is the demonic, the view that regards deviation from the normal state
of health as due either to the attacks of supernatural beings or to
their actual entry into the body of the sufferer. A medical system
based on such a view is susceptible of great elaboration in a higher
civilization, but not being founded on observation is hardly capable of
indefinite development, for a point must ultimately be reached at which
the mind recoils from complex conclusions far remote from observed
phenomena. The medicine of the ancient and settled civilization of such
a people as the Assyro-Babylonians, for instance, of which substantial
traces have been recovered, is hardly, if at all, more effective,
though far more systematized, than that of many a wild and unlettered
tribe that may be observed to-day. Of such medicine as this we may give
an account, but we can hardly write a _history_. We cannot establish
those elements of continuity and of development from which alone
history can be constructed.

[99] The works of Herophilus are lost. This fine passage has been
preserved for us by Sextus Empiricus, a third century physician, in
his πρὸς τοὺς μαθηματικοὺς ἀντιρῥητικοί, which is in essence an attack
on all positive philosophy. It is an entertaining fact that we should
have to go to such a work for remains of the greatest anatomist of
antiquity. The passage is in the section directed against ethical
writers, xi. 50.

It is the distinction of the Greeks alone among the nations of
antiquity that they practised a system of medicine based not on theory
but on observation accumulated systematically as time went on. The
claim can be made for the Greeks that some at least among them were
deflected by no theory, were deceived by no theurgy, were hampered by
no tradition in their search for the facts of disease and in their
attempts at interpreting its phenomena. Only the Greeks among the
ancients could look on their healers as _physicians_ (= naturalists,
φύσις = nature), and that word itself stands as a lasting reminder of
their achievement.[100]

[100] The word φυσικός, though it passed over into Latin (Cicero) with
the meaning _naturalist_, acquired the connotation of _sorcerer_ among
the later Greek writers. Perhaps the word _physicianus_ was introduced
to make a distinction from the charm-mongering _physicus_. In later
Latin _physicus_ and _medicus_ are almost always interchangeable.

At a certain stage in the history of the Western world—the exact point
in time may be disputed but the event is admitted by all—men turned
to explore the treasures of the ancient wisdom and the whole mass of
Greek medical learning was gradually laid before the student. That
mass contained much dross, material that survived from early as from
late Greek times which was hardly, if at all, superior to the debased
compositions that circulated in the name of medicine in the middle
centuries. But the recovered Greek medical writings also contained some
material of the purest and most scientific type, and that material and
the spirit in which it was written, form the debt of modern medicine to
antiquity.

It is a debt the value of which cannot be exaggerated. The physicians
of the revival of learning, and for long after, doubtless pinned their
faith too much to the written word of their Greek forbears and sought
to imprison the free spirit of Hippocrates and Galen in the rigid
wall of their own rediscovered texts. The great medical pioneers of
a somewhat later age, enraged by this attempt, the real nature of
which was largely hidden from them, not infrequently revolted and
rightly revolted against the bondage to the Greeks in which they had
been brought up. Yet it is sure that these modern discoverers were
the true inheritors of the Greeks. Without Herophilus we should have
had no Harvey and the rise of physiology might have been delayed for
centuries; had Galen’s works not survived, Vesalius would never have
reconstructed Anatomy, and Surgery too might have stayed behind with
her laggard sister, Medicine; the Hippocratic collection was the
necessary and acknowledged basis for the work of the greatest of modern
clinical observers, Thomas Sydenham, and the teaching of Hippocrates
and of his school is the substantial basis of instruction in the wards
of a modern hospital. In the pages which follow we propose therefore
to review the general character of medical knowledge in the best Greek
period and to consider briefly how much of that great heritage remained
accessible to the earlier modern physicians. The reader will thus be
able to form some estimate of the degree to which the legacy has been
passed on to our own times.

It is evident that among such a group of peoples as the Greeks,
varying in state of civilization, in mental power, in geographical
and economic position and in general outlook, the practice of medicine
can have been by no means uniform. Without any method of centralizing
medical education and standardizing teaching there was a great variety
of doctrines and of practice in vogue among them, and much of this
was on a low level of folk custom. Such lower grade material of Greek
origin has come down to us in abundance, though much of it, curiously
enough, from a later time. But the overwhelming mass of earlier Greek
medical literature sets forth for us a pure scientific effort to
observe and to classify disease, to make generalizations from carefully
collected data, to explain the origin of disease on rational grounds,
and to apply remedies, when possible, on a reasoned basis. We may thus
rest fairly well assured that, despite serious and irreparable losses,
we are still in possession of some of the very finest products of the
Greek medical intellect.

There is ample evidence that the Greeks inherited, in common with many
other peoples of Mediterranean and Asiatic origin, a whole system of
magical or at least non-rational pharmacy and medicine from a remoter
ancestry. Striking parallels can be drawn between these folk elements
among the Greeks and the medical systems of the early Romans, as well
as with the medicine of the Indian Vedas, of the ancient Egyptians, and
of the earliest European barbarian writings. It is thus reasonable to
suppose that these elements, when they appear in later Greek writings,
represent more primitive folk elements working up, under the influence
of social disintegration and consequent mental deterioration, through
the upper strata of the literate Greek world. But with these elements,
intensely interesting to the anthropologist, the psychologist, the
ethnologist, and to the historian of religion, we are not here greatly
concerned. Important as they are, they constitute no part of the
special claim of the Greek people to distinction, but rather aid us in
uniting the Greek mentality with that of other kindred peoples. Here we
shall rather discuss the course of Greek scientific medicine proper,
the type of medical doctrine and practice, capable of development
in the proper sense of the word, that forms the basis of our modern
system. We are concerned, in fact, with the earliest evolutionary
medicine.

We need hardly discuss the first origins of Greek Medicine. The
material is scanty and the conclusions somewhat doubtful and
perhaps premature, for the discovery of a considerable fragment of
the historical work of Menon, a pupil of Aristotle, containing a
description of the views of some of the precursors of the Hippocratic
school, renews a hope that more extended investigation may yield
further information as to the sources and nature of the earliest Greek
medical writings.[101] The study of Mesopotamian star-lore has linked
it up with early Greek astronomical science. The efforts of cuneiform
scholars have not, however, been equally successful for medicine, and
on the whole the general tendency of modern research is to give less
weight to Mesopotamian and more to Egyptian sources than had previously
been admitted; thus, as an instance, some prescriptions in the Ebers
papyrus of the eighteenth dynasty (about the sixteenth century B. C.)
discovered at Thebes in 1872 resemble certain formulae in the Corpus
Hippocraticum. A number of drugs, too, habitually used by the Greeks,
such as _Andropogon_, _Cardamoms_, and _Sesame orientalis_, are of
Indian origin. There are also the Minoan cultures to be considered,
and our knowledge is not yet sufficient to speak of the heritage that
Greek medicine may or may not have derived from that source, though
it seems not improbable that Greek hygiene may here owe a debt.[102]
Omitting, therefore, this early epoch, we pass direct to the later
period, between the sixth and fourth centuries, from which documents
have actually come down to us.

[101] This fragment has been published in vol. iii, part 1, of the
_Supplementum Aristotelicum_ by H. Diels as _Anonymi Londinensis ex
Aristotelis Iatricis Menonis et Aliis Medicis Eclogae_, Berlin, 1893.
See also H. Bekh and F. Spät, _Anonymus Londinensis, Auszüge eines
Unbekannten aus Aristoteles-Menons Handbuch der Medizin_, Berlin, 1896.

[102] It is tempting, also, to connect the Asclepian snake cult with
the prominence of the serpent in Minoan religion.

The earliest medical school of which we have definite information is
that of Cnidus, a Lacedaemonian colony in Asiatic Doris. Its origin may
perhaps reach back to the seventh century B. C. We have actual records
that the teachers of Cnidus were accustomed to collect systematically
the phenomena of disease, of which they had produced a very complex
classification, and we probably possess also several of their actual
works. The physicians of Cos, their only contemporary critics whose
writings have survived, considered that the Cnidian physicians paid
too much attention to the actual sensations of the patient and to
the physical signs of the disease. The most important of the Cnidian
doctrines were drawn up in a series of _Sentences_ or Aphorisms, and
these, it appears, inculcated a treatment along Egyptian lines of the
symptom or at most the disease, rather than the patient, a statement
borne out by the contents of the gynaecological works of probable
Cnidian origin included in the so-called ‘Hippocratic Collection’.
A few names of Cnidian physicians have, moreover, come down to us
with titles of their works, and a later statement that they practised
anatomy. There can be little doubt too that the Cnidian school drew
also on Persian and Indian Medicine.

The origin of the school of the neighbouring island of Cos was a little
later than that of Cnidus and probably dates from the sixth century
B. C. Of the Coan school, or at least of the general tendencies that
it represented, we have a magnificent and copious literary monument
in the Corpus Hippocraticum, a collection which was probably put
together in the early part of the third century B. C. by a commission
of Alexandrian scholars at the order of the book-loving Ptolemy Soter
(reigned 323-285 B. C.). The elements of which this collection is
composed are of varying dates from the sixth to the fourth century B.
C., and of varying value and origin, but they mainly represent the
point of view of physicians of the eastern part of the Greek world in
the fifth and fourth centuries.

The most obvious feature, the outstanding element that at once
strikes the modern observer in these ‘Coan’ writings, is the enormous
emphasis laid on the actual course of disease. ‘It appears to me a
most excellent thing’, so opens one of the greatest of the Hippocratic
works, ‘for a physician to cultivate _pronoia_.[103] Foreknowing
and foretelling in the presence of the sick the past, present, and
future (of their symptoms) and explaining all that the patients are
neglecting, he would be believed to understand their condition, so that
men would have confidence to entrust themselves to his care.... Thus he
would win just respect and be a good physician. By an earlier forecast
in each case he would be more able to tend those aright who have a
chance of surviving, and by foreseeing and stating who will die, and
who will survive, he will escape blame....’[104]

[103] This word _pronoia_, as Galen explains (εἰς τὸ Ἱπποκράτους
προγνωστικόν, K. xviii, B. p. 10), is not used in the philosophic
sense, as when we ask whether the universe was made by chance or by
_pronoia_, nor is it used quite in the modern sense of _prognosis_,
though it includes that too. _Pronoia_ in Hippocrates means knowing
things about a patient before you are told them. See E. T. Withington,
‘Some Greek medical terms with reference to Luke and Liddell and
Scott,’ _Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine_ (_Section of the
History of Medicine_), xiii, p. 124, London, 1920.

[104] _Prognostics_ 1.

Just as the Cnidians by dividing up diseases according to symptoms
over-emphasized diagnosis and over-elaborated treatment, so the Coans
laid very great force on prognosis and adopted therefore a largely
expectant attitude towards diseases. Both Cnidian and Coan physicians
were held together by a common bond which was, historically if not
actually, related to temple worship. Physicians leagued together in the
name of a god, as were the Asclepiadae, might escape, and did escape,
the baser theurgic elements of temple medicine. Of these they were as
devoid as a modern Catholic physician might be expected to be free from
the absurdities of Lourdes. But the extreme cult of prognosis among
the Coans may not improbably be traced back to the medical lore of the
temple soothsayers whose divine omens were replaced by indications of
a physical nature in the patient himself.[105] We are tempted too to
link it with that process of astronomical and astrological prognosis
practised in the Mesopotamian civilizations from which Ionia imitated
and derived so much. Religion had thus the same relation to medicine
that it would have with a modern ‘religious’ medical man as suggesting
the motive and determining the general direction of his practice though
without influence on the details and method.

[105] There is a discussion of the relation of the Asclepiadae to
temple practice in an article by E. T. Withington, ‘The Asclepiadae
and the Priest of Asclepius,’ in _Studies in the History and Method of
Science_, edited by Charles Singer, vol. ii, Oxford, 1921.

During the development of the Coan medical school along these lines in
the sixth and fifth centuries, there was going on a most remarkable
movement at the very other extreme of the Greek world. Into the course
and general importance of Sicilian philosophy it is not our place to
enter, but that extraordinary movement was not without its repercussion
on medical theory and practice. Very important in this direction was
Empedocles of Agrigentum (_c._ 500-_c._ 430 B. C.). His view that the
blood is the seat of the ‘innate heat’, ἔμφυτον θερμόν, he took from
folk belief—‘the blood is the life’—and this innate heat he closely
identified with soul. More profitable was his doctrine that breathing
takes place not only through what are now known as the respiratory
passages but also through the pores of the skin. His teaching led to a
belief in the heart as the centre of the vascular system and the chief
organ of the ‘pneuma’ which was distributed by the blood vessels. This
pneuma was equivalent to both soul and life, but it was something more.
It was identified with air and breath, and the pneuma could be seen
to rise as shimmering steam from the shed blood of the sacrificial
victim—for was not the blood its natural home? There was a pneuma, too,
that interpenetrated the universe around us and gave it those qualities
of life that it was felt to possess. Anaximenes (_c._ 610-_c._ 545
B. C.), an Ionian predecessor of Empedocles, may be said to have
defined for us these functions of the pneuma; οῖον ἡ ψυχὴ ἡ ἡμετέρα
ἀὴρ οῧσα συγκρατεί ἡμᾶς, ὅλον τὸν κόσμον πνεῦμα καὶ ἀὴρ περιέχει ‘As
our soul, being air, sustains us, so pneuma and air pervade the whole
universe’;[106] but it is the speculation of Empedocles himself that
came to be regarded as the basis of the Pneumatic School in Medicine
which had later very important developments.

[106] The works of Anaximenes are lost. This phrase of his, however, is
preserved by the later writer Aetios.

Another early member of the Western school who made important
contributions to medical doctrine—in which relation alone we need
consider him—was Pythagoras of Samos (_c._ 580-_c._ 490 B. C.). For
him number, as the purest conception, formed the basis of philosophy.
Unity was the symbol of perfection and corresponded to God Himself. The
material universe was represented by 2, and was divided by the number
12, whence we have 3 worlds and 4 spheres. These in turn, according
at least to the later Pythagoreans, give rise to the four elements,
earth, air, fire, and water—a primary doctrine of medicine and of
science derived perhaps from ancient Egypt and surviving for more than
two millennia. The Pythagoreans taught, too, of the existence of an
animal soul, an emanation of the soul of the universe. In all this we
may distinguish the germ of that doctrine of the relation of man and
universe, microcosm and macrocosm, which, suppressed as irrelevant in
the Hippocratic works, reappears in the Platonic and especially in
the Neoplatonic writings, and forms a very important dogma in later
medicine.

A pupil of Pythagoras and an older contemporary of Empedocles was
Alcmaeon of Croton (_c._ 500 B. C.), who began to construct a positive
basis for medical science by the practice of dissection of animals, and
discovered the optic nerves and the Eustachian tubes. He even extended
his researches to Embryology, describing the head of the foetus as the
first part to be developed—a justifiable deduction from appearances.
Alcmaeon introduced also the doctrine that health depends on harmony,
disease on discord of the elements within the body. Curiosity as to the
distribution of the vessels was excited by Empedocles and Alcmaeon and
led to further dissection, and Alcmaeon’s pupils Acron (_c._ 480 B. C.)
and Pausanias (_c._ 480 B. C.), and the later Philistion of Lokri,[107]
the contemporary of Plato, all made anatomical investigations.

[107] For the work of these physicians see especially M. Wellmann,
_Fragmentsammlung der griechischen Aerzte_, Bd. I, Berlin, 1901.

The views of Empedocles, and especially his doctrine that regarded
the heart as the main site of the pneuma, though rejected by the Coan
school as a whole, were not without influence on Ionia. Diogenes
of Apollonia, the philosopher of pneumatism, a late fifth century
writer who must have been contemporary with Hippocrates the Great,
himself made an investigation of the blood vessels; and the influence
of the same school may be traced in a little work περὶ καρδίης, _On
the heart_, which is the best anatomical treatise of the Hippocratic
Collection. This work describes the aorta and the pulmonary artery as
well as the three valves at the root of each of the great vessels,
and it speaks of experiments to test their validity. It treats of the
pericardium and of the pericardial fluid and perhaps of the musculi
papillares, and contrasts the thickness of the walls of right and left
ventricles. The author considers that the left ventricle is empty of
blood—as indeed it is after death—and is the source of the innate heat
and of the absolute intelligence. These views fit in with the doctrines
of Empedocles, so that we may perhaps even venture to regard this work
as a surviving document of the Sicilian school. It is interesting to
observe that we have here the first hint of human dissection, for the
author tells us that the hearts of animals may be compared to that
of man. The distinction of having been the first to write on human
anatomy, as such, belongs however, probably to a later writer, Diocles,
son of Archidamus of Carystus, who lived in the fourth century B.
C.[108]

[108] Galen, περὶ ἀνατομικῶν ἐγχειρήσεων, _On anatomical preparations_,
§ 1, K. II, p. 282.

We may now turn to the Hippocratic Corpus as a whole. This collection
consists of about 60 or 70 separate works, written at various periods
and in various states of preservation. At best only a very small
proportion of them can be attributed to Hippocrates, but the discussion
of the general question of the ‘genuineness’ of the works is now
admitted to be futile, for it is certain that we have no criteria
whatever to determine whether or no a particular work be from the pen
of the Father of Medicine, and the most we can ever say of such a
treatise is that it appears to be of his school and in his spirit. Yet
among the great gifts of this collection to our time and to all time
are two which stand out above all others, the picture of a man, and the
picture of a method.

The man is Hippocrates himself. Of the actual details of his life we
know next to nothing. His period of greatest activity falls about
400 B. C. He seems to have led a wandering life. Born of a long
line of physicians in the island of Cos, he exerted his activities
in Thrace, Abdera, Delos, the Propontis (Cyzicus), Thasos, Thessaly
(notably at Larissa and Meliboea), Athens, and elsewhere, dying at
Larissa in extreme old age about the year 377 B. C. He had many
pupils, among whom were his two sons Thessalus and Dracon, who also
undertook journeys, his son-in-law Polybus, of whose works a fragment
has been preserved for us by Aristotle,[109] together with three
other Coans bearing the names Apollonius, Dexippus, and Praxagoras.
This is practically all we know of him with certainty. But though
this glimpse is very dim and distant, yet we cannot exaggerate the
influence on the course of medicine and the value for physicians of
all time of the traditional picture that was early formed of him and
that may indeed well be drawn again from the works bearing his name.
In beauty and dignity that figure is beyond praise. Perhaps gaining in
stateliness what he loses in clearness, Hippocrates will ever remain
the type of the perfect physician. Learned, observant, humane, with a
profound reverence for the claims of his patients, but an overmastering
desire that his experience shall benefit others, orderly and calm,
disturbed only by anxiety to record his knowledge for the use of his
brother physicians and for the relief of suffering, grave, thoughtful
and reticent, pure of mind and master of his passions, this is no
overdrawn picture of the Father of Medicine as he appeared to his
contemporaries and successors. It is a figure of character and virtue
which has had an ethical value to medical men of all ages comparable
only to the influence exerted on their followers by the founders of
the great religions. If one needed a maxim to place upon the statue
of Hippocrates, none could be found better than that from the book
Παραγγελίαι, _Precepts_:

           ἢν γὰρ παρῆ φιλανθρωπίη πάρεστὶ καὶ φιλοτεχνίη
    ‘Where the love of man is, there also is love of the Art.’[110]

[109] _Historia animalium_, iii. 3, where it is ascribed to Polybus.
The same passage is, however, repeated twice in the Hippocratic
writings, viz. in the περὶ φύσιος ἀνθρώπου, _On the nature of man_,
Littré, vi. 58, and in the περὶ ὀστέων φύσιος, _On the nature of
bones_, Littré, ix. 174.

[110] Παραγγελίαι, § 6.

[Illustration: Fig. 1. HIPPOCRATES

British Museum, second or third century B. C.]

[Illustration: Fig. 2. ASCLEPIUS

British Museum, fourth century B. C.]

The numerous busts of him which have reached our time are no portraits.
But the best of them are something much better and more helpful to us
than any portrait. They are idealized representations of the kind of
man a physician should be and was in the eyes of the best and wisest of
the Greeks. (See Fig. 1.)

The method of the Hippocratic writers is that known to-day as the
‘inductive’. Without the vast scientific heritage that is in our own
hands, with only a comparatively small number of observations drawn
from the Coan and neighbouring schools, surrounded by all manner of
bizarre oriental religions in which no adequate relation of cause and
effect was recognized, and above all constantly urged by the exuberant
genius for speculation of that Greek people in the midst of whom they
lived and whose intellectual temptations they shared, they remain
nevertheless, for the most part, patient observers of fact, sceptical
of the marvellous and the unverifiable, hesitating to theorize beyond
the data, yet eager always to generalize from actual experience; calm,
faithful, effective servants of the sick. There is almost no type of
mental activity known to us that was not exhibited by the Greeks and
cannot be paralleled from their writings; but careful and constant
return to verification from experience, expressed in a record of
actual observations—the habitual method adopted in modern scientific
departments—is rare among them except in these early medical authors.

The spirit of their practice cannot be better illustrated than by the
words of the so-called ‘Hippocratic oath’:

      ‘I swear by Apollo the healer, and Asclepius, and Hygieia,
    and All-heal (Panacea) and all the gods and goddesses ...
    that, according to my ability and judgement, I will keep
    this Oath and this stipulation—to reckon him who taught me
    this Art as dear to me as those who bore me ... to look upon
    his offspring as my own brothers, and to teach them this
    Art, if they would learn it, without fee or stipulation. By
    precept, lecture, and all other modes of instruction, I will
    impart a knowledge of the Art to my own sons, and those of
    my teacher, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and
    oath according to the Law of Medicine, but to none other.
    I will follow that system of regimen which, according to
    my ability and judgement, I consider for the benefit of
    my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and
    mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to any one
    if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; nor will I aid
    a woman to produce abortion. With purity and holiness I
    will pass my life and practise my Art.... Into whatever
    houses I enter, I will go there for the benefit of the
    sick, and will abstain from every act of mischief and
    corruption; and above all from seduction.... Whatever in
    my professional practice—or even not in connexion with
    it—I see or hear in the lives of men which ought not to
    be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, deeming that
    on such matters we should be silent. While I keep this
    Oath unviolated, may it be granted me to enjoy life and
    the practice of the Art, always respected among men, but
    should I break or violate this Oath, may the reverse be my
    lot.’

Respected equally throughout the ages by Arab, Jew, and Christian, the
oath remains the watchword of the profession of medicine.[111] The
ethical value of such a declaration could not escape the attention even
of a Byzantine formalist, and it is interesting to observe that in our
oldest Greek manuscript of the Hippocratic text, dating from the tenth
century, this magnificent passage is headed by the words ‘from the oath
of Hippocrates according as it may be sworn by a Christian.’[112]

[111] It must, however, be admitted that even in the Hippocratic
collection itself are cases of breach of the oath. Such, for instance,
is the induction of abortion related in περὶ φύσιος παιδίον, _On the
nature of the embryo_. There is evidence, however, that the author of
this work was not a medical practitioner.

[112] Rome Urbinas 64, fo. 116.

When we examine the Hippocratic corpus more closely, we discern that
not only are the treatises by many hands, but there is not even a
uniform opinion and doctrine running through them. This is well brought
out by some of the more famous of the phrases of this remarkable
collection. Thus a well-known passage from the _Airs, Waters, and
Places_ tells us that the Scythians attribute a certain physical
disability to a god, ‘but it appears to me’, says the author, ‘that
these affections are just as much divine as are all others and that no
disease is either more divine or more human than another, but that all
are equally divine, for each of them has its own nature, and none of
them arise without a natural cause.’ But, on the other hand, the author
of the great work on _Prognostics_ advises us that when the physician
is called in he must seek to ascertain the nature of the affections
that he is treating, and especially ‘if there be anything divine in
the disease, and to learn a foreknowledge of this also.’[113] We may
note too that this sentence almost immediately precedes what is perhaps
the most famous of all the Hippocratic sentences, the description of
what has since been termed the _Hippocratic facies_. This wonderful
description of the signs of death may be given as an illustration of
the habitual attitude of the Hippocratic school towards prognosis and
of the very careful way in which they noted details:

[113] Kühlewein, i. 79, regards this as an interpolated passage.

      ‘He [the physician] should observe thus in acute diseases:
    first, the countenance of the patient, if it be like to
    those who are in health, _and especially if it be like
    itself, for this would be the best_; but the more unlike to
    this, the worse it is; such would be these: _sharp nose,
    hollow eyes, collapsed temples_; _ears cold, contracted,
    and their lobes turned out_; _skin about the forehead
    rough, distended, and parched_; _the colour of the whole
    face greenish or dusky_. If the countenance be so at the
    beginning of the disease, and if this cannot be accounted
    for from the other symptoms, inquiry must be made whether he
    has passed a sleepless night; whether his bowels have been
    very loose; or whether he is suffering from hunger; and if
    any of these be admitted the danger may be reckoned as less;
    and it may be judged in the course of a day and night if the
    appearance of the countenance proceed from these. But if
    none of these be said to exist, and the symptoms do not
    subside in that time, be it known for certain that death is
    at hand.’[114]

Again, in the work _On the Art [of Medicine]_ we read: ‘I hold it to
be physicianly to abstain from treating those who are overwhelmed by
disease’,[115] a prudent if inhumane procedure among a people who might
regard the doctor’s powers as partaking of the nature of magic, and
perhaps a wise course to follow at this day in some places not very
far from Cos. Yet in the book _On Diseases_ we are advised even in the
presence of an incurable disease ‘to give relief with such treatment as
is possible’.[116]

[114] Littré, ii. 112; Kühlewein, i. 79. The texts vary: Kühlewein is
followed except in the last sentence.

[115] Περὶ τέχνες, § 3.

[116] Περὶ νούσων α’, § 6.

Furthermore, works by authors of the Hippocratic school stand sometimes
in a position of direct controversy with each other. Thus in the
treatise _On the Heart_ an experiment is set forth which is held to
prove that a part at least of imbibed fluid passes into the cavity
of the lung and thence to the parts of the body, a popular error in
antiquity which recurs in Plato’s _Timaeus_. This view, however, is
specifically held to be fallacious by the author of the work _On
Diseases_, who is supported by a polemical section in the surviving
Menon fragment.

Passages like these have convinced all students that we have to deal
in this collection with a variety of works written at different dates
by different authors and under different conditions, a state that may
be well understood when we reflect that among the Greeks medicine was
a progressive study for a far longer period of time than has yet been
the case in the Western world. An account of such a collection can
therefore only be given in the most general fashion. The system or
systems of medicine that we shall thus attempt to describe was in vogue
up to the Alexandrian period, that is, to the beginning of the third
century B. C.

Anatomy and physiology, the basis of our modern system, was still a
very weak point in the knowledge of the pre-Alexandrians. The surface
form of the body was intimately studied in connexion especially with
fractures, but there is no evidence in the literature of the period
of any closer acquaintance with human anatomical structure.[117] The
same fact is well borne out by Greek Art, for in its noblest period the
artist betrays no evidence of assistance derived from anatomization.
Such evidence is not found until we come to sculpture of Alexandrian
date, when the somewhat strained attitudes and exaggerated musculature
of certain works of the school of Pergamon suggest that the artist
derived hints, if not direct information, from anatomists who, we know,
were active at that time. It is not improbable, however, that separate
bones, if not complete skeletons, were commonly studied earlier, for
the surgical works of the Hippocratic collection, and especially those
on fractures and dislocations, give evidence of a knowledge of the
relations of bones to each other and of their natural position in
the body which could not be obtained, or only obtained with greatest
difficulty, without this aid.

[117] A reference to dissection in the περὶ ἄρθρων, _On the joints_, §
1, appears of the present writer to be of Alexandrian date.

There are in the Hippocratic works a certain number of comparisons
between human and animal structures that would have been made possible
by surgical operations and occasional accidents. The view has been put
forward that some anatomical knowledge was derived through the practice
of augury from the entrails of sacrificial animals. It appears,
however, improbable that a system so scientific and so little related
to temple practice would have had much to learn from these sources,
and, moreover, since we know that animals were actually dissected as
early as the time of Alcmaeon it would be unnecessary to invoke the
aid of the priests. The unknown author of the περὶ τόπων τῶν κατὰ
ἄνθρωπον, _On the sites of [diseases] in man_, a work written about
400 B. C., declares indeed that ‘physical structure is the basis of
medicine’, but the formal treatises on anatomy that we possess from
Hippocratic times give the general anatomical standard of the corpus,
and it is a very disappointing one. The tract _On Anatomy_, though
probably of much later date (perhaps _c._ 330 B. C.), is inferior even
to the treatise _On the Heart_ (perhaps of about 400 B. C.).

Physiology and Pathology are almost as much in the background as
anatomy in the Hippocratic collection. As a formal discipline and
part of medical education we find no trace of these studies among
the pre-Alexandrian physicians. But the meagreness of the number of
ascertained facts did not prevent much speculation among a people eager
to seek the causes of things. Of that speculation we learn much from
the fragments of contemporary medical writers and philosophers, from
the medical works of the Alexandrian period, and to some extent from
the Hippocratic writings themselves. But the wiser and more sober among
the writers of the Hippocratic corpus were bent on something other
than the causes of things. Their pre-occupation was primarily with the
suffering patient, and the best of them therefore excluded—and we may
assume consciously—all but the rarest references to such speculation.

The general state of health of the body was considered by the
Hippocratists to depend on the distribution of the four elements,
earth, air, fire, and water, whose mixture (_crasis_) and cardinal
properties, dryness, warmth, coldness, and moistness, form the body
and its constituents. To these correspond the cardinal fluids, blood,
phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The fundamental condition of life
is the _innate heat_, the abdication of which is death. This innate
heat is greatest in youth when most fuel is therefore required, but
gradually declines with age. Another necessity for the support of
life is the _pneuma_ which circulates in the vessels. All this may
seem fanciful enough, but we may remember that the first half of the
nineteenth century had waned before the doctrine of the humours which
had then lasted for at least twenty-two centuries became obsolete, and
perhaps it still survives in certain modern scientific developments.
Moreover, the finest and most characteristic of the Hippocratic works
either do not mention or but casually refer to these theories which are
not essential to their main pre-occupation. Their task of observation
of symptoms, of the separation of the essentials from the accidents of
disease, and of generalization from experience could go on unaffected
by any view of the nature of man and of the world. Even treatment,
which must almost of necessity be based on _some_ theory of causation,
was little deflected by a view of elements and humours on which it was
impossible to act directly, while therapeutics was further safeguarded
from such influence by the doctrine of _Nature as the healer of
diseases_, νούσων φύσεις ἰητροί, the _vis medicatrix naturae_ of the
later Latin writers and of the present day.

Diseases are to be cured, in the Hippocratic view, by restoring the
disturbed harmony in the relation of the elements and humours. These,
in fact, tend naturally to an equilibrium and in most cases if left to
themselves will be brought to this state by the natural tendency to
recovery. The process is known as _pepsis_ or, to give it the Latin
form, _coctio_, and the turning-point at which the effects of this
process exhibit themselves is the _crisis_, a term which, together
with some of its original content, has still a place in medicine. Such
a turning-point does in fact occur in many diseases, especially those
of a zymotic character, on certain special days, though undue emphasis
was laid by the Greek physicians upon the exact numerical character of
the event. It was no unimportant duty of the physician to assist nature
by bringing his remedies to bear at the critical times. If the crisis
is wanting, or if the remedies are applied at the wrong moment, the
disease may become incurable. But diseases were only immediately or
proximately caused by disturbances in the balance or harmony of the
humours. This was a mere hypothesis, as the Hippocratists themselves
well knew. There were other more remote causes which came into the
actual purview of the physician, conditions which he could and did
study. Such conditions were, for instance, injudicious modes of life,
exposure to climatic changes, advancing age, and the like. Many of
these could be directly corrected. But for those that could not there
were various therapeutic measures at hand.

That human bodies are and normally remain in a state of health, and
that on the whole they tend to recover from disease, is an attitude
so familiar to us to-day that we scarcely need to be reminded of it.
We live some twenty-three centuries later than Hippocrates; for some
sixteen of those centuries the civilized world thought that to retain
health periodical bleedings and potions were necessary; for the last
century or two we have been gradually returning on the Hippocratic
position!

The chief glory of the Hippocratic collection regarded from the
clinical point of view is perhaps the actual description of cases. A
number of these—forty-two in all—have survived.[118] They are not only
unique as a collection for nearly 2,000 years, but they are still to
this day models of what succinct clinical records should be, clear and
short, without a superfluous word, yet with all that is most essential,
and exhibiting merely a desire to record the most important facts
without the least attempt to prejudge the case. They illustrate to the
full the Greek genius for seizing on the essential. The writer show’s
not the least wish to exalt his own skill. He seeks merely to put the
data before the reader for his guidance under like circumstances. It
is a reflex of the spirit of full honesty in which these men lived and
worked that the great majority of the cases are recorded to have died.
Two of this remarkable little collection may be given:

      ‘The woman with quinsy, who lodged with Aristion: her
    complaint began in the tongue; voice inarticulate; tongue
    red and parched. _First day_, shivered, then became heated.
    _Third day_, rigor, acute fever; reddish and hard swelling
    on both sides of neck and chest; extremities cold and livid;
    respiration elevated; drink returned by the nose; she could
    not swallow; alvine and urinary discharges suppressed.
    _Fourth day_, all symptoms exacerbated. _Fifth day_, she
    died.’

[118] They are to be found as an Appendix to Books I and III of the
_Epidemics_ and embedded in Book III.

We probably have here to do with a case of diphtheria. The quinsy,
the paralysis of the palate leading to return of the food through
the nose, and the difficulty with speech and swallowing are typical
results of this affection which was here complicated by a spread of
the septic processes into the neck and chest, a not uncommon sequela
of the disease. The rapid onset of the conditions is rather unusual,
but may be explained if we regard the case as a mild and unnoticed
diphtheria, subsequently complicated by paralysis and by secondary
septic infection, for which reasons she came under observation.

      ‘In Thasos, the wife of Delearces who lodged on the plain,
    through sorrow was seized with an acute and shivering fever.
    From first to last she always wrapped herself up in her
    bedclothes; kept silent, fumbled, picked, bored and gathered
    hairs [from the clothes]; tears, and again laughter; no
    sleep; bowels irritable, but passed nothing; when urged
    drank a little; urine thin and scanty; to the touch the
    fever was slight; coldness of the extremities. _Ninth day_,
    talked much incoherently, and again sank into silence.
    _Fourteenth day_, breathing rare, large, and spaced, and
    again hurried. _Seventeenth day_, after stimulation of the
    bowels she passed even drinks, nor could retain anything;
    totally insensible; skin parched and tense. _Twentieth
    day_, much talk, and again became composed, then voiceless;
    respiration hurried. _Twenty-first day_, died. Her
    respiration throughout was rare and large; she was totally
    insensible; always wrapped up in her bedclothes; throughout
    either much talk, or complete silence.’

This second case is in part a description of low muttering delirium,
a common end of continued fevers such as, for instance, typhoid. The
description closely resembles the condition known now in medicine as
the ‘typhoid state’. Incidentally the case contains a reference to
a type of breathing common among the dying. The respiration becomes
deep and slow, as it sinks gradually into quietude and becomes rarer
and rarer until it seems to cease altogether, and then it gradually
becomes more rapid and so on alternately. This type of breathing is
known to physicians as ‘Cheyne-Stokes’ respiration in commemoration of
two distinguished Irish physicians of the last century who brought it
to the attention of medical men.[119] Recently it has been partially
explained on a physiological basis. We may note that there is another
and even better pen-picture of Cheyne-Stokes respiration in the
Hippocratic collection. It is in the famous case of ‘Philescos who
lived by the wall and who took to his bed on the first day of acute
fever’. About the middle of the sixth day he died and the physician
notes that ‘the respiration throughout was _like that of a person
recollecting himself_ and was large and rare’. Cheyne-Stokes breathing
is admirably described as ‘that of a person recollecting himself’.

[119] John Cheyne (1777-1836) described this type of respiration in
the _Dublin Hospital Reports_, 1818, ii, p. 216. An extreme case of
this condition had been described by Cheyne’s namesake George Cheyne
(1671-1743) as the famous ‘Case of the Hon. Col. Townshend’ in his
_English Malady_, London, 1733. William Stokes (1804-78) published his
account of Cheyne-Stokes breathing in the _Dublin Quarterly Journal of
the Medical Sciences_, 1846, ii, p. 73.

Such records as these may be contrasted with certain others that have
come down from Greek antiquity. We may instance two steles discovered
at Epidaurus in 1885, bearing accounts of forty-four temple cures. The
following two are fair samples of the cures there described:

      ‘_Aristagora of Troizen._ She had tape-worm, and while
    she slept in the Temple of Asclepius at Troizen, she saw a
    vision. She thought that, as the god was not present, but
    was away in Epidaurus, his sons cut off her head, but were
    unable to put it back again. Then they sent a messenger to
    Asklepius asking him to come to Troizen. Meanwhile day came,
    and the priest actually saw her head cut off from the body.
    The next night Aristagora had a dream. She thought the god
    came from Epidaurus and fastened her head on to her neck.
    Then he cut open her belly, and stitched it up again. So she
    was cured.’

      ‘A man had an abdominal abscess. He saw a vision, and
    thought that the god ordered the slaves who accompanied him
    to lift him up and hold him, so that his abdomen could be
    cut open. The man tried to get away, but his slaves caught
    him and bound him. So Asclepius cut him open, rid him of the
    abscess, and then stitched him up again, releasing him from
    his bonds. Straightway he departed cured, and the floor of
    the Abaton was covered with blood.’[120]

In the records of almost all temple cures, a great number of which
have survived in a wide variety of documents, an essential element is
the process of ἐγκοίμησις, _incubation_ or temple sleep, usually in a
special sleeping-place or Abaton. The process has a close parallel in
certain modern Greek churches and in places of worship much further
West; there are even traces of it in these islands, and it is more than
probable that the Christian practice is descended by direct continuity
from the pagan.[121] The whole character of the temple treatment
was—and is—of a kind to suggest to the patient that he should dream of
the god, an event which therefore usually takes place. Such treatment
by suggestion is applicable only to certain classes of disease and
is always liable to fall into the hands of fanatics and impostors.
The difficulty that the honest practitioner encounters is that the
sufferer, in the nature of the case, can hardly be brought to believe
that his ailment is what in fact it is, a lesion of the mind. It is
this which gives the miracle-monger his chance.

[120] The Epidaurian inscriptions are given by M. Fraenkel in the
_Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum_ IV, 951-6, and are discussed by Mary
Hamilton (Mrs. Guy Dickins), _Incubation_, St. Andrews, 1906, from
whose translation I have quoted. Further inscriptions are given by
Cavvadias in the _Archaiologike Ephemeris_, 1918, p. 155 (issued 1921).

[121] We are almost told as much in the apocryphal _Gospel of
Nicodemus_, § 1, a work probably composed about the end of the fourth
century.

Examine for a moment the two cases from Epidaurus, which are quite
typical of the series. We observe that the first is described simply
as a case of ‘tape-worm’ without any justification for the diagnosis.
It is not unfrequent nowadays for thin and anxious patients to state,
similarly without justification, that they suffer from this condition.
They attribute certain common gastric experiences to this cause of
which perhaps they have learned from sensational advertisements,
and then they ask cure for a condition which they themselves have
diagnosed, but which has no existence in fact. Such a case is often
appropriately treated by suggestion. Though the elaborateness of the
suggestion in the temple cure is a little startling, yet it can easily
be paralleled from the legends of the Christian saints. Moreover, we
must remember that we are not here dealing with an account set down by
the patient herself, but with an edificatory inscription put up by the
temple officials.

In the second inscription, the man with an abdominal abscess, we have
a much simpler state of affairs. It is evident that an operation was
actually performed by the priest masquerading as Asclepius, while the
patient was held down by the slaves. He is assured that all is a dream
and departs cured with the tell-tale comment ‘and the floor of the
Abaton was covered with blood’.

These cases might be multiplied indefinitely without great profit for
our particular theme, for in such matters there is no development, no
evolution, no history. There can be no doubt that a very large part
of Greek practice was on this level, as is a small part of modern
medicine, but it is not a level with which we are here dealing and we
shall therefore pass it by. But a word of caution must be added. Such
temple worship has been compared with modern psycho-analysis. That
method, like all methods, has doubtless been abused at times; but it is
in essence, unlike the temple system, a purely scientific process by
which the ultimate basis of the patient’s delusions are laid bare and
demonstrated to him.

There is indeed another side to these Asclepian temples. They gradually
developed along the lines of our health resorts and developed many
of the qualities—lovely and unlovely—that we associate with certain
continental watering places. On the bad side they became gossiping
centres or even something little better than brothels, as we may gather
from the _Mimes_ of Herondas. On the good side they formed a quiet
refuge among beautiful and interesting surroundings where the sick,
exhausted, and convalescent might gain the benefits that accrue from
pure air, fine scenery, and a regular and regulated mode of life. It is
more than probable too that the open air and manner of living benefited
many cases of incipient phthisis.

Returning to the Hippocratic collection, the purely surgical treatises
will be found no less remarkable than those of clinical observation.
A very able surgeon, Francis Adams (1796-1861), who was eminent as a
Greek scholar, gave it as his opinion in the middle of the nineteenth
century that no systematic writer on surgery up to his time had given
so good and so complete an account of certain dislocations, notably of
the hip-joint, as that to be found in the Hippocratic collection. Some
types of injury to the hip, as described in the Hippocratic writings,
were certainly otherwise quite inadequately known until described
by Sir Astley Cooper (1768-1841), himself a peculiarly Hippocratic
character.[122] The verdict of Adams was probably just, though since
his time the surgery of dislocations, aided especially by X-rays,
has been enabled to pass very definitely beyond the Hippocratic
position. Admirable, too, is the Hippocratic description of dislocation
of the shoulder and of the jaw. In dislocation of hip, shoulder, or
jaw, as in most similar lesions, there is considerable deformity
produced. The nature and meaning of this deformity is described with
remarkable exactness by the Hippocratic writer, who also sets forth
the resulting disability. The principles and indeed the very details
of treatment in these cases are, save for the use of an anaesthetic,
practically identical with those of the present day. The processes are
unfortunately not suitable for detailed quotation and description here,
but they are of special interest since a graphic record of them has
come down to us. There exists in the Laurentian Library at Florence
a ninth century Greek surgical manuscript which contains figures of
surgeons reducing the dislocations in question. There is good reason to
suppose that these miniatures are copied from figures first prepared
in pre-Christian times many centuries earlier, and we may here see the
actual processes of reduction of such fractures, as conducted by a
surgeon of the direct Hippocratic tradition[123] (see Figs. 3, 4).

[122] Astley Paston Cooper, _Treatise on Dislocations and Fractures of
the Joints_, London, 1822, and _Observations on Fractures of the Neck
and the Thighbone_, &c., London, 1823.

[123] This famous manuscript is known as Laurentian, Plutarch 74, 7,
and its figures have been reproduced by H. Schöne, _Apollonius von
Kitium_, Leipzig, 1896.

In keeping with all this is most of the surgical work of the
collection. We are almost startled by the modern sound of the whole
procedure as we run through the rough notebook κατ’ ἰητρεῖον,
_Concerning the Surgery_, or the more elaborate treatise περὶ ἰητροῦ,
_On the Physician_, where we may read minute directions for the
preparation of the operating-room, and on such points as the management
of light both artificial and natural, scrupulous cleanliness of
the hands, the care and use of the instruments, with the special
precautions needed when they are of iron, the decencies to be observed
during the operation, the general method of bandaging, the placing of
the patient, the use and abuse of splints, and the need for tidiness,
order, and cleanliness. Many of these directions are enlarged upon in
other surgical works of the collection, among which we find especially
full instructions for bandaging and for the diagnosis and treatment
of fractures and dislocations. A very fair representation of such a
surgery as these works describe is to be found on a vase-painting
of Ionic origin which is of the fifth century and therefore about
contemporary with Hippocrates himself (see fig. 5). There are also
several beautiful representations on vases of the actual processes of
bandaging (fig. 6).

[Illustration: From MS. of APOLLONIUS OF KITIUM, of Ninth Century

Copied from a pre-Christian original

Fig. 3.

REDUCING DISLOCATED SHOULDER]

[Illustration: Fig. 4.

REDUCING DISLOCATED JAW]

Among the surgical procedures of which descriptions are to be found in
the Hippocratic writings are the opening of the chest for the condition
known as _empyema_ (accumulation of pus within the pleura frequently
following pneumonia), and trephining the skull in cases of fracture of
that part—two fundamental operations of modern surgery. Surgical art
has advanced enormously in our own times, yet a text-book containing
much that is useful to this day might be prepared from these surgical
contents of the collection alone.

When we pass to the works on Medicine, in the restricted sense, we
enter into a region more difficult and perhaps even more fascinating.
We are no longer dealing with simple lesions of known origin, but with
the effects of disease and degeneration, of the essential character
of which the Hippocratic writers could in the nature of the case know
very little. Rigidly guarding themselves from any attempt to explain
disease by more immediate and hypothetical causes and thus diverting
the reader’s energies in the medically useless direction of vague
speculation—the prevalent mental vice of the Greeks—the best of these
physicians are content if they can put forward generalized conclusions
from actually observed cases. Many of their thoughts have now become
household words, and they have become so, largely as a direct heritage
from these ancient physicians. But it must be remembered that ideas so
familiar to us were with them the result of long and carefully recorded
experience and are like nothing that we encounter in the medicine of
other ancient nations. Such conclusions are best set forth perhaps
in the wonderful book of the _Aphorisms_ from which we may permit
ourselves a few quotations:

[Illustration: FIG. 5. A GREEK CLINIC OF ABOUT 400 B. C. From a
vase-painting.

      In the centre sits a physician holding a lancet and
    bleeding a patient from the median vein at the bend of
    the right elbow into a large open basin. Above and behind
    the physician are suspended three cupping vessels. To the
    right sits another patient awaiting his turn; his left arm
    is bandaged in the region of the biceps. The figure beyond
    him smells a flower, perhaps as a preservative against
    infection. Behind the physician stands a man leaning on a
    staff; he is wounded in the left leg, which is bandaged. By
    his side stands a dwarfish figure with disproportionately
    large head, whose body exhibits deformities typical of the
    developmental disease now known as _Achondroplasia_; in
    addition to these deformities we note that his body is hairy
    and the bridge of his nose sunken; on his back he carries
    a hare which is almost as tall as himself. Talking to the
    dwarf is a man leaning on a long staff, who has the remains
    of a bandage round his chest.

      See E. Pottier, ‘Une Clinique grecque au Vᵉ siècle (vase
    antique du collection Peztel)’, _Fondation Eugène Piot,
    Monuments et Mémoires_, xiii. 149, Paris, 1906. (Some of our
    interpretations differ from those of M. Pottier.)
]

[Illustration: ΣΟΣΙΑΣ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ

      FIG. 6. A kylix from the Berlin Museum of about
    490 B. C. It bears the inscription ΣΟΣΙΑΣ ΕΠΟΙΗΣΕΝ,
    _Sosias made (me)_, and represents Achilles bandaging
    Patroclus, the names of the two heroes being written round
    the margin. The painter is Euphronios, and the work is
    regarded as the masterpiece of that great artist. The left
    upper arm of Patroclus is injured, and Achilles is bandaging
    it with a two-rolled bandage, which he is trying to bring
    down to extend over the elbow. The treatment of the hands,
    a department in which Euphronios excelled, is particularly
    fine. Achilles was not a trained surgeon, and it will be
    observed, from the position of the two tails of the bandage,
    that he will have some difficulty when it comes to its final
    fastening!
]

‘Life is short, and the Art long; the opportunity fleeting; experiment
dangerous, and judgement difficult. Yet we must be prepared not only
to do our duty ourselves, but also patient, attendants, and external
circumstances must co-operate.’[124]

In this one memorable paragraph, so condensed in the original as
to be almost untranslatable, he who ‘first separated medicine from
philosophy’ puts aside at once all speculative interest while in the
actual presence of the sick. His whole energy is concentrated on the
case in hand with that peculiar attitude, at once impersonal and
intensely personal, that has since been the mark of the physician, and
that has made of Medicine both a science and an art.

‘For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure.’[125]

[124] The first lines are the source of the famous lines in Goethe’s
_Faust_:

‘Ach Gott! die Kunst ist lang Und kurz ist unser Leben, Mir wird bei
meinem kritischen Bestreben Doch oft um Kopf und Busen bang.’


[125] The extreme of treatment refers in the original to the extreme
restriction of diet, ἐς ἀκριβείην, but the meaning of the Aphorism has
always been taken as more generalized.

‘The aged endure fasting most easily; next adults; next young persons,
and least of all children, and especially such as are the most lively.’

‘Growing bodies have the most innate heat; they therefore require the
most nourishment, and if they have it not they waste. In the aged there
is little heat, and therefore they require little fuel, for it would be
extinguished by much. Similarly fevers in the aged are not so acute,
because their bodies are cold.’

‘In disease sleep that is laborious is a deadly symptom; but if sleep
relieves it is not deadly.’

‘Sleep that puts an end to delirium is a good symptom.’

‘If a convalescent eats well, but does not put on flesh, it is a bad
symptom.’

‘Food or drink which is a little less good but more palatable, is to be
preferred to such that is better but less palatable.’

‘The old have generally fewer complaints than young; but those chronic
diseases which do befall them generally never leave them.’

Here we have a group of observations, some of which have become
literally household words, nor is it difficult to understand how
such sayings have passed from professional into lay keeping. This
magnificent book of _Aphorisms_ was very early translated into Latin,
probably before and certainly not later than the sixth century of
the Christian era, and thus became accessible throughout the West.
Manuscripts of this Latin version, dating from the ninth and tenth
centuries of our era, have survived in the actual places in which they
were written, at Monte Cassino in Southern Italy and at Einsiedeln in
Switzerland, and in 991 the book of _Aphorisms_ was well known and
closely studied at the Cathedral school of Chartres. From France the
_Aphorisms_ reached England, and they are mentioned in documents of the
tenth or eleventh century. By now, too, the book had been translated
into Syriac and later into Arabic and Hebrew, so that in the true
mediaeval period it was known both East and West, and in the vernacular
as well as the classical tongues. From the oriental dialects several
further translations were again made into Latin. An enormous number of
manuscripts of the work have survived in almost every Western dialect,
and these show on the whole that the text has been surprisingly little
tampered with. In the middle of the thirteenth century some of the
better-known Aphorisms were absorbed into a very popular Latin poem
that went forth in the name of the medical school of Salerno, though
with a false ascription to a yet earlier date. The Salernitan poem,
being itself translated into every European vernacular, further helped
to bring Hippocrates into every home.

But by no means all the Aphorisms are of a kind that could well become
absorbed into folk medicine. It is only those concerning frequently
recurring states to which this fate could befall. The book contains
also a number of notes on rare conditions seldom seen or noted save by
medical men. Such are the following very acute observations:

‘Spasm supervening on a wound is fatal.’

‘Those seized with tetanus die within four days, or if they survive so
long they recover.’

‘A convulsion, or hiccup, supervening on a copious discharge of blood
is bad.’

‘If after severe and grave wounds no swelling appears, it is very
serious.’

These four sentences all concern wounds. The first two refer to the
disease _tetanus_, which is very liable to supervene on wounds fouled
with earth, especially in hot and moist localities. The disease is
characterized by a series of painful muscular contractions which in
the more severe and fatal form may become a continuous spasm, a type
that is referred to in the first sentence. It is true of tetanus that
the later the onset after the wound is sustained the better the chance
of recovery. This is brought out by the second sentence. The third and
fourth sentences record untoward symptoms following a severe wound,
now well recognized and watched for by every surgeon. There were, of
course, innumerable illustrations of the truth of these Aphorisms in
extensive wounds, especially those involving crushed limbs, in the late
war.

‘Phthisis occurs most commonly between the ages of eighteen and
thirty-five.’

‘Diarrhœa supervening on phthisis is mortal.’

The period given by the _Aphorisms_ for the maximum frequency of onset
of the disease is closely borne out by modern observations. The second
Aphorism is equally valid; continued diarrhœa is a very frequent
antecedent of the fatal event in chronic phthisis, and post-mortem
examination has shown that secondary involvement of the bowel is an
exceedingly common condition in this disease.

No less remarkable is the following saying: ‘In jaundice it is a grave
matter if the liver becomes indurated.’ Jaundice is a common and
comparatively trivial symptom following or accompanying a large variety
of diseases. In and by itself it is of little importance and almost
always disappears spontaneously. There is a small group of pathological
conditions, however, in which this is not the case. The commonest and
most important of these are the fatal affections of cirrhosis and
cancer of the liver in which that organ may be felt to be enlarged and
hardened. If therefore the liver can be so felt in a case of jaundice,
it is, as the Aphorism says, of gravest import. Representations of
such cases have actually come down to us from Greek times. Thus on
a monument erected at Athens to the memory of a physician who died
in the second century of the Christian era we may see the process of
clinical examination (fig. 7). The physician is palpating the liver of
a dwarfish figure whose swollen belly, wasted limbs, and anxious look
tell of some such condition as that described in the Aphorism. The
ridge caused by the enlarged liver can even be detected on the statue.

‘We must attend to the appearances of the eyes in sleep as presented
from below; for if a portion of the white be seen between the closing
eyelids, and if this be not connected with diarrhœa or severe purging,
it is a very bad and mortal symptom.’ In this, the last Aphorism which
we shall quote, we see the Hippocratic physician actually making his
observations. Now during sleep the eyeball is turned upward, so that
if the eye be then opened and examined only the white is seen. In the
later stages of all wasting and chronic diseases the eyelids tend not
to be closed during sleep. Such patients, as is well known, often die
with the eyes open and sometimes exhibiting only the whites.

But the Hippocratic physician was not content to make only passive
observation; he also took active measures to elicit the ‘physical
signs’. In modern times a large, perhaps the chief, task of the student
of medicine is to acquire a knowledge of these so-called physical
signs of disease, the tradition of which has been gradually rebuilt
during the last three centuries. Among the most important measures
in which he learns to acquire facility is that of auscultation. This
useful process has come specially into vogue since the invention of
the stethoscope in 1819 by Laennec, who derived valuable hints for it
from the Hippocratic writings. Auscultation is several times mentioned
and described by the Hippocratic physicians, who used the direct
method of listening and not the mediate method devised by Laennec.
There are, however, certain cases in which the modern physician still
finds the older non-instrumental Hippocratic method superior. In the
Hippocratic work περὶ νούσων, _On diseases_, we read of a case with
fluid in the pleura that ‘you will place the patient on a seat which
does not move, an assistant will hold him by the shoulders, and you
will shake him, applying the ear to the chest, so as to recognize on
which side the sign occurs’. This sign is still used by physicians and
is known as _Hippocratic succussion_. In another passage in the same
work the symptoms of pleurisy are described and ‘a creak like that of
leather may be heard’. This is the well known _pleuritic rub_ which the
physician is accustomed to seek in such cases, and of which the creak
of leather is an excellent representation.

Such quotations give an insight into the general method and attitude
of the Hippocratics. Of an art such as medicine, which even in those
times had a long and rational tradition behind it, it is impossible
to give more than the merest glimpse in such a review as this. The
actual practice is far too complex to set down briefly. This is
especially the case with the ancient teaching as regards epidemic
disease at which we must cursorily glance. The Hippocratic physicians
and indeed all antiquity were as yet ignorant of the nature, and
were but dimly aware of the existence, of infection.[126] For them
acute disease was something imposed on the patient from outside, but
how it reached him from outside and what it was that thus reached him
they were still admittedly ignorant. In this dilemma they turned to
prolonged observation and noted as a result of repeated experience
that epidemic diseases in their world had characteristic seasonal and
regional distributions. One country was not quite like another, nor was
one season like another nor even one year like another. By a series
of carefully collated observations as to how regions, seasons, and
years differed from each other, they succeeded in laying the basis of
a rational study of epidemiology which gave rise to the notion of an
‘epidemic constitution’ of the different years, a conception which was
very fertile and stimulating to the great clinicians of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries and is by no means without value even for the
modern epidemiologist. The work of the modern fathers of epidemiology
was consciously based on Hippocrates.

[126] The ancients knew almost nothing of infection as _applied
specifically_ to disease. All early peoples—including Greeks and
Romans—believed in the transmission of qualities from object to object.
Thus purity and impurity and good and bad luck were infections, and
diseases were held to be infections in that sense. But there is
little evidence in the belief of the special infectivity of _disease
as such_ in antiquity. Some few diseases are, however, unequivocally
referred to as infectious in a limited number of passages, e. g.
ophthalmia, scabies, and phthisis in the περὶ διαφορᾶς πυρετῶν, _On the
differentiae of fevers_, K. vii, p. 279. The references to infection in
antiquity are detailed by C. and D. Singer, ‘The scientific position of
Girolamo Fracastoro’, _Annals of Medical History_, vol. i, New York,
1917.

Before parting with the Hippocratic physician a word must be said
as to his therapeutic means. His general armoury may be described
as resembling that of the modern physician of about two generations
ago. During those two generations we have, it is true, added to our
list of effective remedies but, on the other hand, there has been by
common consent a return to the Hippocratic simplicity of treatment.
After rest and quiet the central factor in treatment was Dietetics.
This science regarded the age—‘Old persons use less nutriment than
young’; the season—‘In winter abundant nourishment is wholesome, in
summer a more frugal diet’; the bodily condition—‘Lean persons should
take little food, but this little should be fat, fat persons on the
other hand should take much food, but it should be lean’. Respect
was also paid to the digestibility of different foods—‘white meat is
more easily digestible than dark’—and to their preparation. Water,
barley water, and lime water were recommended as drinks. The dietetic
principles of the Hippocratics, especially in connexion with fevers,
are substantially those of the present day, and it may be said that
the general medical tendency of the last generation in these matters
has been an even closer approximation to the Hippocratic. ‘The more we
nourish unhealthy bodies the more we injure them’; ‘The sick upon whom
fever seizes with the greatest severity from the very outset, must at
once subject themselves to a rigid diet’; ‘Complete abstinence often
acts well, if the strength of the patient can in any way sustain it’;
yet ‘We should examine the strength of the sick, to see whether they be
in condition to maintain this spare diet to the crisis of the disease’.
‘In the application of these rules we must always be mindful of the
strength of the patient and of the course of each particular disease,
as well as of the constitution and ordinary mode of life in each
disease.’

Besides diet the Hippocratic physician had at his disposal a
considerable variety of other remedies. Baths, inunctions, clysters,
warm and cold suffusions, massage and gymnastic, as well as gentler
exercise are among them. He probably employed cupping and bleeding
rather too freely, and we have several representations of the
instruments used for these operations (fig. 8). He was no great user of
drugs and seldom names them except, we may note, in the works on the
treatment of women, which are probably of Cnidian origin and whence the
greater part of the 300 constituents of the Hippocratic pharmacopœia
are derived. Thus his list of drugs is small, but several known to him
are still used by us.

[Illustration: Fig. 7. ATHENIAN FUNERARY MONUMENT

Second century A. D. British Museum

Inscription reads: ‘Jason, also called Dekmos, the Acharnian, a
physician’, followed by his genealogy. By side of patient stands a
cupping vessel.]

The work of these men may be summed up by saying that without
dissection, without any experimental physiology or pathology, and
without any instrumental aid they pushed the knowledge of the course
and origin of disease as far as it is conceivable that men in such
circumstances could push it. This was done as a process of pure
scientific induction. Their surgery, though hardly based on anatomy,
was grounded on the most carefully recorded experience. In therapeutics
they allowed themselves neither to be deceived by false hopes nor led
aside by vain traditions. Yet in diagnosis, prognosis, surgery and
therapeutics alike they were in many departments unsurpassed until
the nineteenth century, and to some of their methods we have reverted
in the twentieth. Persisting throughout the ages as a more or less
definite tradition, which attained clearer form during and after the
sixteenth century, Hippocratic methods have formed the basis of all
departments of modern advance.

But the history of Greek medicine did not end with the Hippocratic
collection; in many respects it may indeed be held only to begin there;
yet we never get again a glimpse of so high an ethical and professional
standard as that which these works convey. From Alexandrian times
onwards, too, the history of Greek medicine becomes largely a history
of various schools of medical thought, each of which has only a partial
view of the course and nature of medical knowledge. The unravelling of
the course and teachings of these sects has long been a pre-occupation
of professed medical historians, but the general reader can hardly
take an interest in differences between the Dogmatists, Empirics, and
Methodists whose doctrines are as dead as themselves. In this later
Alexandrian and Hellenistic age the Greek intellect is no less active
than before, but there is a change in the taste of the material. A
general decay of the spirit is reflected in the medical as in the
literary products of the time, and we never again feel that elevation
of a beautiful and calmly righteous presence that breathes through the
Hippocratic collection and gives it a peculiar aroma.

We shall pass over the general course of later Greek medicine with
great rapidity. A definite medical school was established at Alexandria
and others perhaps at Pergamon and elsewhere. Athens, after the death
of Aristotle and his pupils, passes entirely into the background and is
of no importance so far as medicine is concerned. At Alexandria, where
a great medical library was collected, anatomy began to be studied and
two men whose discoveries were of primary importance for the history of
that subject, Erasistratus and Herophilus, early practised there. With
anatomy as a basis medical education could become much more systematic.
It is a very great misfortune that the works of these two eminent men
have disappeared. Of Herophilus fragments have survived embedded in the
works of Galen (A. D. 130-201), Caelius Aurelianus (fifth century), and
others. These fragments have been the subject of one of the earliest,
most laborious, and most successful attempts made in modern times to
reconstruct the lost work of an ancient author.[127] For Erasistratus
our chief source of information are two polemical treatises directed
against him by Galen. Recently, too, a little more information
concerning the works of both men has become available from the Menon
papyrus.

[127] K. F. H. Marx, _Herophilus, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der
Medizin_, Karlsruhe, 1838.

It has been found possible to reconstruct especially a treatise on
anatomy by Herophilus with a considerable show of probability. He
opened by giving general directions for the process of dissection and
followed with detailed descriptions of the various systems, nervous,
vascular, glandular, digestive, generative, and osseous. There was a
separate section on the liver, a small part of which has survived.
It is of his account of the nervous system that we have perhaps the
best record, and it is evident that he has advanced far beyond the
Hippocratic position. In the braincase he saw the membranes that cover
the brain and distinguished between the cerebrum and cerebellum. He
attained to some knowledge of the ventricles of the brain, the cranial
and spinal nerves, the nerves of the heart, and the coats of the eye.
He distinguished the blood sinuses of the skull, and the _torcular
Herophili_ (winepress of Herophilus), a sinus described by him, has
preserved his name in modern anatomical nomenclature. He even made out
more minute structures, such as the little depression in the fourth
ventricle of the brain, known to modern anatomists as the _calamus
scriptorius_, which still bears the name which he gave it (κάλαμος ῷ
γράφομεν), because it seemed to him, as Galen tells us, to resemble
the pens then in use in Alexandria.[128] We still use, too, his term
_duodenum_ (δωδεκαδάκτυλος ἔκφυσις = twelve-finger extension), for as
Galen assures us, Herophilus ‘so named the first part of the intestine
before it is rolled into folds‘.[129] The duodenum is a U-shaped
section of the intestine following immediately on the stomach. Being
fixed down behind the abdominal cavity it cannot be further convoluted,
and this accounts for Galen’s description of it. It is about twelve
fingers’ breadth long in the animals dissected by Herophilus.

[128] Galen, περὶ ἀνατομικῶν ἐγχειρήσεων, _On anatomical preparations_,
ix. 5 (last sentence).

[129] Galen, περὶ φλεβῶν καὶ ἀρτηριων ανατομῆς, _On the anatomy of
veins and arteries_, i.

Erasistratus, the slightly younger Alexandrian contemporary of
Herophilus, has the credit of further anatomical discoveries. He
described correctly the action of the epiglottis in preventing the
entrance of food and drink into the windpipe during the act of
swallowing, he saw the lacteal vessels in the mesentery, and pursued
further the anatomy of the brain. He improved on the anatomy of the
heart, and described the auriculo-ventricular valves and their mode
of closure. He distinguished clearly the motor and sensory nerves. He
seems to have adopted a definitely experimental attitude—a very rare
thing among ancient physicians—and a description of an experiment
made by him has recently been recovered. ‘If ’, he says, ‘you take an
animal, a bird, for example, and keep it for a time in a jar without
giving it food and then weigh it together with its excreta you will
find that there is a considerable loss of weight.’[130] The experiment
is a simple one, but it was about nineteen hundred years before a
modern professor, Sanctorio Santorio (1561-1636), thought of repeating
it.[131]

[130] The quotation is from chapter xxxiii, line 44 of the _Anonymus
Londinensis_. H. Diels, _Anonymus Londinensis_ in the _Supplementum
Aristotelicum_, vol. iii, pars 1, Berlin, 1893.

[131] Sanctorio Santorio, _Oratio in archilyceo patavino anno 1612
habita; de medicina statica aphorismi_. Venice, 1614.

The anatomical advances made by the Alexandrian school naturally
reacted on surgical efficiency. The improvement so effected may be
gathered, for instance, from an account of the anatomical relationships
in certain cases of dislocation of the hip given by the Alexandrian
surgeon Hegetor, who lived about 100 B. C. In his book περὶ αἰτιῶν,
_On causes [of disease]_, he asks ‘why (certain surgeons) do not seek
another way of reducing a luxation of the hip.... If the joints of
the jaw, shoulder, elbow, knee, finger, &c., can be replaced, the
same, they think, must be true of all parts, nor can they give an
account of why the femur cannot be put back into its place.... They
might have known, however, that from the head of the femur arises a
ligament which is inserted into the socket of the hip bone ... and
if this ligament is once ruptured the thigh bone cannot be retained
in place’.[132] This passage contains the first description of the
structure known to modern anatomists as the _ligamentum teres_, a
strong fibrous band which unites the head of the femur with the socket
into which it fits in the hip bone, like the string that binds the cup
and ball of a child’s toy. This ligament is ruptured in certain severe
cases of dislocation of the hip.

[132] This is the only passage of Hegetor’s writing that has survived.
It has been preserved in the work of Apollonius of Citium.

After the establishment of the school at Alexandria, medical teaching
rapidly became organized, but throughout the whole course of
antiquity it suffered from the absence of anything in the nature of
a state diploma. Any one could practise, with the result that many
quacks, cranks, and fanatics were to be found among the ranks of the
practitioners who often were or had been slaves. The great Alexandrian
school, however, did much to preserve some sort of professional
standard, and above all its anatomical discipline helped to this end.

Between the founding of the Alexandrian school and Galen we are not
rich in medical writings. Apart from fragments and minor productions,
the works of only five authors have survived from this period of
over four hundred years, namely, Celsus, Dioscorides, Aretaeus of
Cappadocia, and two Ephesian authors bearing the names of Rufus and
Soranus.

The work of Celsus of the end of the first century B. C. is a Latin
treatise, probably translated from Greek, and is the surviving medical
volume of a complete cyclopaedia of knowledge. In spite of its
unpromising origin it is an excellent compendium of its subject and
shows a good deal of advance in many respects beyond the Hippocratic
position. The moral tone too is very high, though without the lofty
and detached beauty of Hippocrates. Anatomy has greatly improved, and
with it surgical procedure, and the work is probably representative
of the best Alexandrian practice. The pharmacopœia is more copious,
but has not yet become burdensome. The general line of treatment is
sensible and humane and the language concise and clear. Among other
items he describes dental practice, with the indications for and
methods of tooth extraction, the wiring of teeth, and perhaps a dental
mirror. There is an excellent account of what might be thought to
be the modern operation for removal of the tonsils. Celsus is still
commemorated in modern medicine by the _area Celsi_, a not uncommon
disease of the skin. The _De re medica_ is in fact one of the very
best medical text-books that have come down to us from antiquity. It
has had a romantic history. Forgotten during the Middle Ages, it was
brought to light by the classical scholar Guarino of Verona (1374-1460)
in 1426, and a better copy was discovered by his friend Lamola in
1427. Another copy was found by Thomas Parentucelli (1397-1455),
afterwards Pope Nicholas V in 1443, and the text was later studied by
Politian (1454-94). Though one of the latest of the great classical
medical texts to be discovered, it was one of the first to be printed
(Florence, 1478), and it ran through very many early editions and had
great influence on the medical renaissance.

After Celsus comes Dioscorides in the first century A. D. He was a
Greek military surgeon of Cilician origin who served under Nero, and
in him the Greek intellect is obviously beginning to flag. His work
is prodigiously important for the history of botany, yet so far as
rational medicine is concerned he is almost negligible. He begins at
the wrong end, either giving lists of drugs with the symptoms that they
are said to cure or to relieve, or lists of symptoms with a series of
named drugs. Clinical observation and record are wholly absent, and the
spirit of Hippocrates has departed from this elaborate pharmacopœia.

[Illustration: Fig. 8. VOTIVE TABLET representing cupping and bleeding
instruments from Temple of Asclepius at Athens.

In centre is represented a folding case containing scalpels of various
forms. On either side are cupping vessels.]

With the second century of the Christian era we terminate the creative
period of Greek medicine. We are provided with the works of four
important writers of this century, of whom three, Rufus of Ephesus,
Soranus of Ephesus, and Aretaeus of Cappadocia, though valuable for
forming a picture of the state of medicine in their day, were without
substantial influence on the course of medicine in later ages.

Rufus of Ephesus, a little junior to Dioscorides, has left us the first
formal work on human anatomy and is of some importance in the history
of comparative anatomy. In medicine he is memorable as the first to
have described bubonic plague, and in surgery for his description of
the methods of arresting haemorrhage and his knowledge of the anatomy
of the eye. A work by him _On gout_ was translated into Latin in the
sixth century, but remained unknown till modern times.

Soranus of Ephesus (A. D. _c._ 90-_c._ 150), an acute writer on
gynaecology, has left a book which illustrates well the anatomy of
his day. It exercised an influence for many centuries to come, and a
Latin abstract of it prepared about the sixth century by one Moschion
has come down to us in an almost contemporary manuscript.[133] It is
interesting as opposing the Hippocratic theory that the male embryo
is originated in the right and the female in the left half of the
womb, a fallacy derived originally from Empedocles and Parmenides,
but perpetuated by Latin translations of the Hippocratic treatises
until the seventeenth century. His work was adorned by figures, and
some of these, naturally greatly altered by copyists, but still not
infinitely removed from the facts, have survived in a manuscript of
the ninth century, and give us a distant idea of the appearance of
ancient anatomical drawings.[134] We may assist our imagination a
little further, in forming an idea of what such diagrams were like,
with the help of certain other mediaeval figures representing the
form and distribution of the various anatomical ‘systems’, veins,
arteries, nerves, bones, and muscles which are probably traceable to an
Alexandrian origin.[135]

[133] Leyden Voss 4ᵒ 9^* of the sixth century is a fragment of this
work.

[134] V. Rose, _Sorani Ephesii vetus translatio Latina cum additis
Graeci textus reliquiis_, Leipzig, 1882; F. Weindler, _Geschichte der
gynäkologisch-anatomischen Abbildung_, Dresden, 1908.

[135] The discovery and attribution of these figures is the work of K.
Sudhoff. A bibliography of his writings on the subject will be found in
a ‘Study in Early Renaissance Anatomy’ in C. Singer’s _Studies in the
History and Method of Science_, vol. i, Oxford, 1917.

Aretaeus of Cappadocia was probably a contemporary of Galen (second
half of the second century A. D.). As a clinical author his reputation
stands high, perhaps too high, his descriptions of pneumonia,
emphysema, diabetes, and elephantiasis having especially drawn
attention. In treatment he uses simple remedies, is not affected by
polypharmacy, and suggests many ingenious mechanical devices. It
would appear that Aretaeus is not an independent writer, but mainly a
compiler. He relies largely on Archigenes, a distinguished physician
contemporary with Juvenal, whose works have perished save the fragments
preserved in this manner by Aretaeus and Aetius. Aretaeus was a very
popular writer among the Greeks in all ages, but he was not translated
into Latin, and was unknown in the West until the middle of the
sixteenth century.[136] He is philologically interesting as still using
the Ionic dialect.

[136] First Latin edition Venice, 1552; first Greek edition Paris, 1554.

There remains the huge overshadowing figure of Galen. The enormous mass
of the surviving work of this man, the dictator of medicine until the
revival of learning and beyond, tends to throw out of perspective the
whole of Greek medical records. The works of Galen alone form about
half of the mass of surviving Greek medical writings, and occupy, in
the standard edition, twenty-two thick, closely-printed volumes. These
cover every department of medicine, anatomy, physiology, pathology,
medical theory, therapeutics, as well as clinical medicine and surgery.
In style they are verbose and heavy and very frequently polemical. They
are saturated with a teleology which, at times, becomes excessively
tedious. In the anatomical works, masses of teleological explanation
dilute the account of often imperfectly described structures. Yet to
this element we owe the preservation of the mass of Galen’s works, for
his intensely teleological point of view appealed to the theological
bias both of Western Christianity and of Eastern Islam. Intolerable
as literature, his works are a valuable treasure house of medical
knowledge and experience, custom, tradition, and history.

As in the case of the Hippocratic corpus, so in the case of the
Galenic corpus we are dealing to some extent with material from
various sources. In the case of Galen, however, we have a good
standard of genuineness, for he has left us a list of his books
which can be checked off against those which we actually possess.
The general standpoint of the Galenic is not unlike that of the
Hippocratic writings, but the noble vision of the lofty-minded,
pure-souled physician has utterly passed away. In his place we have
an acute, honest, very contentious fellow, bristling with energy and
of prodigious industry, not unkindly, but loving strife, a thoroughly
‘aggressive’ character. He loves truth, but he loves argument quite
as much. The value of his philosophical writings, of which some have
survived, cannot be discussed here, but it is evident that he is
frequently satisfied with purely verbal explanations. An ingenious
physiologist, a born experimenter, an excellent anatomist and eager
to improve, possessing a good knowledge of the human skeleton and an
accurate acquaintance with the internal parts so far as this can be
derived from a most industrious devotion to dissection of animals,
equipped with all the learning of the schools of Pergamon, Smyrna,
and Alexandria, and rich with the experience of a vast practice at
Rome, Galen is essentially an ‘efficient’ man. He has the grace
to acknowledge constantly and repeatedly his indebtedness to the
Hippocratic writings. Such was the man whose remains, along with the
Hippocratic collection, formed the main medical legacy of Greece to the
Western world.

Some of Galen’s works are mere drug lists, little superior to those
of Dioscorides;[137] with the depression of the intelligence that
corresponded with the break up of the Roman Empire, it was these that
were chiefly seized on and distributed in the West. Attractive too to
the debased intellect of the late Roman world were certain spurious,
superstitious, and astrological works that circulated in the name of
Galen and Hippocrates.[138] The Greek medical writers after Galen
were but his imitators and abstractors, but through some of them
Galen’s works reached the West at a very early period in the Middle
Ages. Such abstractors who were early translated into Latin were
Oribasius (325-403), Paul of Aegina (625-690), and Alexander of Tralles
(525-605). Of the best and most scientific of Galen’s works the Middle
Ages knew little or nothing.

[137] e. g. περὶ κράσεως καὶ δυνάμεως τῶν ἁπάντων φαρμάκων and the
φάρμακα.

[138] e. g. _De dynamidiis Galeni_, _Secreta Hippocratis_ and many
astrological tracts.

Later Galen and Hippocrates became a little more accessible, not by
translation from the Greek, but by translation from the Arabic of a
Syriac version. The first work to be so rendered was a version of
_Aphorisms_ of Hippocrates which, however, as we have seen, were
already available in Latin dress, together with the Hippocratic
_Regimen in acute diseases_, and certain works of Galen as corruptly
interpreted by Isaac Judaeus. These were rendered from Arabic into
Latin by Constantine, an African adventurer who became a monk at Monte
Cassino and died there in 1087. Constantine was a wretched craftsman
with an imperfect knowledge of both Arabic and Latin. More effective
was the great twelfth century translator from the Arabic, Gerard of
Cremona (died 1185), who turned many medical works into Latin from
Arabic, and who was followed by a whole host of imitators. Yet more
important for the advance of medicine, however, was the learned
revival of the thirteenth century. In the main that revival was based
on translations from Arabic, but a certain number of works were
also rendered direct from the Greek. During the thirteenth century
Aristotle’s scientific works began to be treated in this way, but more
important for the course of medicine were those of Galen, and they had
to wait till the following century. The long treatise of Galen, περὶ
χρείας τῶν ἐν ἀνθρώπου σώματι μορίων, _On the uses of the bodily parts
in man_, was translated from the Greek into Latin by Nicholas of Reggio
in the earlier part of the fourteenth century. This work, with all its
defects, was by far the best account of the human body then available.
Many manuscripts of the Latin version have survived, and it was
translated into several vernaculars, including English, and profoundly
influenced surgery. The rendering into Latin of this treatise, and
its wide distribution, may be regarded as the starting-point of
modern scientific medicine. Its appearance is moreover a part of the
phenomenon of the revived interest in dissection which had begun to be
practised in the Universities in the thirteenth century,[139] and was a
generally accepted discipline in the fourteenth and fifteenth.[140]

[139] Dissection of animals was practised at Salerno as early as the
eleventh century.

[140] The sources of the anatomical knowledge of the Middle Ages
are discussed in detail in the following works: R. R. von Töply,
_Studien zur Geschichte der Anatomie im Mittelalter_, Vienna, 1898;
K. Sudhoff, _Tradition und Naturbeobachtung_, Leipzig, 1907; and
also numerous articles in the _Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und
Naturwissenschaften_; Charles Singer, ‘A Study in Early Renaissance
Anatomy’, in _Studies in the History and Method of Science_, vol. i,
Oxford, 1917.

Until the end of the fifteenth century progress in anatomy was
almost imperceptible. During the fifteenth century more Galenic and
Hippocratic texts were recovered and gradually turned into Latin, but
still without vitally affecting the course of Anatomy. The actual
printing of collected editions of Hippocrates and Galen came rather
late, for the debased taste of the Renaissance physicians continued to
prefer Dioscorides and the Arabs, of whom numerous editions appeared,
so that medicine made no advance corresponding to the progress of
scholarship. The Hippocratic works were first printed in 1525, and an
isolated edition of the inferior Galen in 1490, but the real advance
in Medicine was not made by direct study of these works. So long as
they were treated in the old scholastic spirit such works were of
no more value than those of the Arabists or others inherited from
the Middle Ages. Even Hippocrates can be spoilt by a commentary, and
it was not until the investigator began actually to compare his own
observations with those of Hippocrates and Galen that the real value
of these works became apparent. The department in which this happened
first was Anatomy, and such revolutionaries as Leonardo da Vinci
(1452-1518), who never published, and Vesalius (1514-1564), whose
great work appeared in 1543, were really basing their work on Galen,
though they were much occupied in proving Galen’s errors. Antonio
Benivieni (died 1502), an eager prophet of the new spirit, revived the
Hippocratic tradition by actually collecting notes of a few cases with
accompanying records of deaths and post-mortem findings, among which it
is interesting to observe a case of appendicitis.[141] His example was
occasionally followed during the sixteenth century, as for instance,
by the Portuguese Jewish physician Amatus Lusitanus (1511-_c._ 1562),
who printed no fewer than seven hundred cases; but the real revival
of the Hippocratic tradition came in the next century with Sydenham
(1624-1689) and Boerhaave (1668-1738), who were consciously working
on the Hippocratic basis and endeavouring to extend the Hippocratic
experience.

[141] Benivieni’s notes were published posthumously. Some of the
spurious Greek works of the Hippocratic collection have also case
notes.

Lastly surgery came to profit by the revival. The greatest of the
sixteenth century surgeons, the lovable and loving Ambroise Paré
(1510-1590), though he was, as he himself humbly confessed, an ignorant
man knowing neither Latin nor Greek, can be shown to have derived much
from the works of antiquity, which were circulating in translation in
his day and were thus filtering down to the unlearned.

Texts of Hippocrates and of Galen had formed an integral part in the
medical instruction of the universities from their commencement in
the thirteenth century. The first Greek text of the _Aphorisms_ of
Hippocrates appeared in 1532, edited by no less a hand than that of
François Rabelais. With the further recovery of the Greek texts and
preparation of better translations, these became almost the sole mode
of instruction during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The
translators became legion and their competence varied. One highly
skilled translator, however, is of special interest to English
readers. Thomas Linacre (1460?-1524), Physician to Henry VIII, Tutor
to the Princess Mary, founder and first president of the College of
Physicians, a benefactor of both the ancient Universities and one
of the earliest, ablest, most typical, and most exasperating of the
English humanists, spent much energy on this work of translation for
which his abilities peculiarly fitted him. He was responsible for
no less than six important works of Galen, of which one, the _De
temperamentis et de inaequali intemperie_, printed at Cambridge in
1521, was among the earliest books impressed in that town and is said
to be the first printed in England for which Greek types were used. It
has been honoured by reproduction in facsimile in modern times. Such
works as these, purely literary efforts, had great vogue for a century
and more, and were much in use in the Universities. These humanistic
products sometimes produced, among the advocates of the new scientific
method, a degree of fury which was only rivalled by that of some of
the humanists themselves towards the translators from the Arabic. But
these are now dead fires. As the clinical and scientific methods of
teaching gained ground, textual studies receded in medical education,
as Hippocrates and Galen themselves would have wished them to recede.

The texts of Hippocrates and Galen have now ceased to occupy a place in
any medical curriculum. Yet all who know these writings, know too, not
only that their spirit is still with us, but that the works themselves
form the background of modern practice, and that their very phraseology
is still in use at the bedside. Modern medicine may be truly described
as in essence a creation of the Greeks. To realize the nature of our
medical system, some knowledge of its Greek sources is essential. It
would indeed be a bad day for medicine if ever this debt to the Greeks
were forgotten, and the loss would be at least as much ethical as
intellectual. But there is happily no fear of this, for the figure and
spirit of Hippocrates are more real and living to-day than they have
been since the great collapse of the Greek scientific intellect in the
third and fourth centuries of the Christian era.

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*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 63591 ***