Part 2

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. But the ideas we associate with the word are clearly developed in Greek philosophy and the foundations of biology are of great antiquity.

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. The pharmacopœia also of some of the earliest works of the Hippocratic collection betrays considerable knowledge of both native and foreign plants. 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.

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.

Especially the περὶ γυναικείης φύσιος, On the nature of woman, and the περὶ γυναικείων, On (the diseases of) women.

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).

A. Sargus vulgaris.]

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.

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: