Chapter III: Part 3

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.

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.

Fig. 9.

ΣΟΝΚΟΣ ΤΡΥΦΕΡΟΣ = _Crepis paludosa_, _Mœn._]

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.

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.