Fig. 4. Head and talons of the Sea-eagle, Haliaëtus albicilla:
- From an Ionic vase of the sixth century B. C.
- Drawn from the object.
From Morin.
The Book about Animals, the Historia Animalium as we say, from which I have quoted these few examples of Aristotle’s store of information, may be taken to represent the first necessary stage of scientific inquiry. There is a kind of manual philosophy (as old Lord Monboddo called it) which investigates facts which escape the vulgar, and may be called the anecdotes or secret history of nature. In this fascinating pursuit Gilbert White excelled, and John Ray and many another—the whole brotherhood of simple naturalists. But such accumulated knowledge of facts is but the foundation of a philosophy; and ‘nothing deserves the name of philosophy, except what explains the causes and principles of things’. Aristotle would have done much had he merely shown (as Gilbert White showed to the country gentlemen of his day) that the minute observation of nature was something worth the scholar and the gentleman’s while; but, far more than this, he made a Science of natural knowledge, and set it once for all within the realm of Philosophy. He set it side by side with the more ancient science of Astronomy, which for many hundred years in Egypt and the East, and for some few centuries in Hellas, had occupied the mind of philosophers[156] and the attention of educated men. I have quoted before a great sentence in which he explains his purpose, and makes excuse for his temerity. ‘The glory, doubtless, of the heavenly bodies fills us with more delight than the contemplation of these lowly things; for the sun and stars are born not, neither do they decay, but are eternal and divine. But the heavens are high and afar off, and of celestial things the knowledge that our senses give us is scanty and dim. The living creatures, on the other hand, are at our door, and if we so desire it we may gain ample and certain knowledge of each and all. We take pleasure in the beauty of a statue, shall not then the living fill us with delight; and all the more if in the spirit of philosophy we search for causes and recognize the evidences of design. Then will nature’s purpose and her deep-seated laws be everywhere revealed, all tending in her multitudinous work to one form or another of the Beautiful.’
Aristotle’s voluminous writings have come down to us through many grave vicissitudes. The greatest of them all are happily intact, or very nearly so; but some are lost and others have suffered disorder and corruption. The work known as the ‘Parts of Animals’ opens (as our text has it) with a chapter which seems meant for a general exordium to the whole series of biological treatises; and I know no chapter in all Aristotle’s books which better shows (in plainer English or easier Greek) the master-hand of the great Teacher and Philosopher. He begins by telling us (it has ever since been a common saying) that every science, every branch of knowledge, admits of two sorts of proficiency—that which may properly be termed scientific knowledge, and that which is within the reach of ordinary educated men. He proceeds to discuss the ‘method’ of scientific inquiry, whether we should begin with the specific and proceed to the general, or whether we are to deal first with common or generical characters and thereafterward with special peculiarities. Are we entitled to treat of animals, as is done in mathematical astronomy, by [157] dealing first with facts or phenomena and then proceeding to discover and relate their several causes? At once this leads to a brief discussion (elaborated elsewhere) of the two great Causes, or aspects of cause—the final cause and the ‘moving’ or efficient cause—the reason why or the purpose for which, and the antecedent cause which, of necessity, brings a thing to be such as it is. Here is one of the great crucial questions of philosophy, and Aristotle’s leaning to the side of the Final Cause has been a dominant influence upon the minds of men throughout the whole history of learning. Empedocles had taken another view: he held that the rain comes when it listeth, or ‘of necessity’; that we have no right to suppose it comes to make the corn grow in spring, any more than to spoil the autumn sheaves: that the teeth grow by the operation of some natural (or physical) law, and that their apparent and undoubted fitness for cutting and grinding is not purposeful but coincident; that the backbone is divided into vertebrae because of the antecedent forces, or flexions, which act upon it in the womb. And Empedocles proceeds to the great evolutionary deduction, the clear prevision of Darwin’s philosophy, that fit and unfit arise alike, but that what is fit to survive does survive and what is unfit perishes.
The story is far too long and the theme involved too grave and difficult for treatment here. But I would venture to suggest that Aristotle inclined to slur over the physical and lean the more to the final cause, for this simple reason (whatever other reasons there may be), that he was a better biologist than a physicist: that he lacked somewhat the mathematical turn of mind which was intrinsic to the older schools of philosophy. For better for worse the course he took, the choice he made, was of incalculable import, and had power for centuries to guide (dare we say, to bias) the teaching of the schools, the progress of learning, and the innermost beliefs of men.
In this one short but pregnant chapter of Aristotle’s there is far more than we can hope even to epitomize. He has much [158] to say in it of ‘classification’, an important matter indeed, and he discusses it as a great logician should, in all its rigour. Many commentators have sought for Aristotle’s ‘classification of animals’; for my part I have never found it, and, in our sense of the word, I am certain it is not there. An unbending, unchanging classification of animals would have been something foreign to all his logic; it is all very well, it becomes practically necessary, when we have to arrange our animals on the shelves of a museum or in the arid pages of a ‘systematic’ catalogue; and it takes a new complexion when, or if, we can attain to a real or historical classification, following lines of actual descent and based on proven facts of historical evolution. But Aristotle (as it seems to me) neither was bound to a museum catalogue nor indulged in visions either of a complete scala naturae or of an hypothetical phylogeny. He classified animals as he found them; and, as a logician, he had a dichotomy for every difference which presented itself to his mind. At one time he divided animals into those with blood and those without, at another into the air-breathers and the water-breathers; into the wild and the tame, the social and the solitary, and so on in endless ways besides. At the same time he had a quick eye for the great natural groups, such ‘genera’ (as he called them) as Fish or Bird, Insect or Mollusc. So it comes to pass that, while he fashioned no hard and fast scheme of classification, and would undoubtedly (I hold) have thought it vain to do so, the threads of his several partial or temporary classifications come together after all, though in a somewhat hazy pattern, yet in a very beautiful and coherent parti-coloured web. And though his order is not always our order, yet a certain exquisite orderliness is of the very essence of his thought and style. It is the characteristic which Molière hits upon in Les Femmes savantes,—‘Je m’attache pour l’ordre au péripatétisme’.
Before he finishes the great chapter of which we have begun to speak he indicates that there are more ways than one of [159] relating, or classifying, our facts; that, for instance, it may be equally proper and necessary to deal now with the animals and their several parts or properties, and at another time with the parts or properties as such, explaining and illustrating them in turn by the several animals which display or possess them. The ‘Parts of Animals’ is, then, a corollary, a necessary corollary, to the more anecdotal Historia Animalium. And yet again, there is a third alternative—to discuss the great functions or actions or potentialities of the organism, as it were first of all in the abstract, and then to correlate them with the parts which in this or that creature are provided and are ‘designed’ to effect them. This involves the conception and the writing of separate physiological treatises on such themes as Respiration, Locomotion, on Sleeping and Waking, and lastly (and in some respects the most ambitious, most erudite, and most astonishing of them all) the great account of the Generation of Animals.
So the whole range, we might say the whole conceivable range, of biological science is sketched out, and the greater part of the great canvas is painted in. But to bring it into touch with human life, and to make good its claim to the high places of philosophy, we must go yet farther and study Life itself, and what men call the Soul. So grows the great conception. We begin with trivial anecdote, with the things that fisherman, huntsman, peasant know; the sciences of zoology, anatomy, physiology take shape before our very eyes; and by evening we sit humbly at the feet of the great teacher of Life itself, the historian of the Soul. It is not for us to attempt to show that even here the story does not end, but the highest chapters of philosophy begin. Then, when we remember that this short narrative of ours is but the faintest adumbration of one side only of the philosopher’s many-sided task and enterprise, we begin to rise towards a comprehension of Roger Bacon‘s saying, that ‘although Aristotle did not arrive at the end of knowledge, he set in order all parts of [160] philosophy’. In the same spirit a modern critic declares: ‘Il n’a seulement défini et constitué chacune des parties de la science; il en a de plus montré le lien et l’unité’.
Aristotle, like Shakespeare, is full of old saws, tags of wisdom, jewels five words long. Here is such a one, good for teacher and pupil alike—Δει πιστευειν τον μανθανοντα. It tells us that the road to Learning lies through Faith; and it means that to be a scholar one should have a heart as well as brains.
By reason partly of extraneous interpolation, but doubtless also through a lingering credulity from which even philosophers are not immune, we find in Aristotle many a strange story. The goats that breathe through their ears, the vulture impregnated by the wind, the eagle that dies of hunger, the stag caught by music, the salamander which walks through fire, the unicorn, the mantichore, are but a few of the ‘Vulgar Errors’ or ‘Received Tenents’ (as Sir Thomas Browne has it) which are perpetuated, not originated, in the Historia Animalium. Some of them come, through Persia, from the farther East: and others (we meet with them once more in Horapollo the Egyptian priest) are but the exoteric or allegorical expression of the arcana of ancient Egyptian religion.
So it comes to pass that for two thousand years and throughout all lands men have come to Aristotle, and found in him information and instruction—that which they desired. Arab and Moor and Syrian and Jew treasured his books while the western world sat in darkness; the great centuries of Scholasticism hung upon his words; the oldest of our Universities, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, were based upon his teaching, yea, all but established for his study. Where he has been, there, seen or unseen, his influence remains; even the Moor and the Arab find in him, to this day, a teacher after their own hearts: a teacher of eternal verities, telling of sleep and dreams, of youth and age, of life and death, of generation and corruption, of growth and of decay: a guide to the book of Nature, a revealer of the Spirit, a prophet of the works of God.
[161] The purpose of these little essays, I have been told (though I had half forgotten it), is to help though ever so little to defend and justify the study of the language and the vast literature of Greece. It is a task for which I am unfitted and unprepared. When Oliver Goldsmith proposed to teach Greek at Leyden, where he ‘had been told it was a desideratum’, the Principal of that celebrated University met him (as we all know) with weighty objections. ‘I never learned Greek’, said the Principal, ‘and I don’t find that I have ever missed it. I have had a Doctor’s cap and gown without Greek. I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; and, in short’, continued he, ‘as I don’t know Greek, I do not believe there is any good in it.’—I have heard or read the story again and again, for is it not written in the Vicar of Wakefield? But I never heard that any man, not Goldsmith himself, attempted to confute the argument. I agree for the most part with the Principal, and can see clearly that all the Greek that Goldsmith knew, and all the Greek in all the world, would have meant nothing and done nothing for him. But there is and will be many another who finds in Greek wisdom and sweet Hellenic speech something which he needs must have, and lacking which he would be poor indeed: something which is as a staff in his hand, a light upon his path, a lantern to his feet.
In this workaday world we may still easily possess ourselves, as Gibbon says the subjects of the Byzantine Throne, even in their lowest servitude and depression, were still possessed, ‘of a golden key that could unlock the treasures of antiquity, of a musical and prolific language that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy’.
Our very lives seem prolonged by the recollection of antiquity; for, as Cicero says, not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. I borrow the citation from Dr. Johnson, who reminds us also of a saying of Aristotle himself, that as students we ought first to examine[162] and understand what has been written by the ancients, and then cast our eyes round upon the world. And Johnson prefaces both quotations by another:
But now I, who have dared to draw my tiny draft from Aristotle’s great well, seem after all to be seeking an excuse, seeking it in example and precept. Precept, at least, I know to be of no avail. My father spent all the many days of his life in the study of Greek; you might suppose it was for Wisdom’s sake,—but my father was a modest man. The fact is, he did it for a simpler reason still, a very curious reason, to be whispered rather than told: he did it for love.
Nigh forty years ago, I first stepped out on the east-windy streets of a certain lean and hungry town (lean, I mean, as regards scholarship) where it was to be my lot to spend thereafter many and many a year. And the very first thing I saw there was an inscription over a very humble doorway, ‘Hic mecum habitant Dante, Cervantes, Molière’. It was the home of a poor schoolmaster, who as a teacher of languages eked out the scanty profits of his school. I was not a little comforted by the announcement. So the poor scholar, looking on the ragged regiment of his few books, is helped, consoled, exalted by the reflection: Hic mecum habitant ... Homerus, Plato, Aristoteles. And were one in a moment of inadvertence to inquire of him why he occupied himself with Greek, he might perchance stammer (like Dominie Sampson) an almost inarticulate reply; but more probably he would be stricken speechless by the enormous outrage of the request, and the reason of his devotion would be hidden from the questioner for ever.
D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson.
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. 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.
Fig. 4. Head and talons of the Sea-eagle, Haliaëtus albicilla:
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[168] 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:
It is thus not surprising that our first systematic treatment of animals is in a practical medical work, the περι διαιτης, On diet, 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.
[169] 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 [170] 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, 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. 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).
Fig. 11. Illustrating Galen’s
physiological teaching.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 (τραχεια αρτηρια, 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 (αρτηρια φλεβωδης, 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 (πνευμα φυσικον, 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 [190] 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 (φλεπς αρτηριωδης, the mediaeval vena arterialis, 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 (πνευμα ζωτικον, 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 (πλεγμα μεγιστον θαυμα), and passing into the brain became converted by the action of that organ into a yet higher type of spirits, the animal spirits (πνευμα ψυχικον, 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 δυναμεις), 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.
[191] 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[192] 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.’[46] 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.[47] 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.[48] 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 those were gifts to a society that knew little of their real value.[49]
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[195] 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[196] 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.’[50]
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.[51]
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[197] 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.’[52]
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[199] 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).[53] 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 (1796-1876).[54]
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,[200] 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.’
Charles Singer.
[1] Since this paper was first written Euclid, Book I, in the Greek, has been edited with a commentary by Sir Thomas Heath (Cambridge Press, 1920). It is full of interest and instruction.
[2] See my paper on ‘The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul’. Proceedings of the British Academy, 1915-16, pp. 235 sqq.
[3] In the case of the parabola, the base (as distinct from the ‘erect side’) of the rectangle is what is called the abscissa (Gk. αποτεμνομενη, ‘cut off’) of the ordinate, and the rectangle itself is equal to the square on the ordinate. In the case of the central conics, the base of the rectangle is ‘the transverse side of the figure’ or the transverse diameter (the diameter of reference), and the rectangle is equal to the square on the diameter conjugate to the diameter of reference.
[4] This word primarily means an all-round athlete, a winner in all five of the sports constituting the πενταθλον, namely jumping, discus-throwing, running, wrestling, and boxing (or javelin-throwing).
[5] επι δε τουτοις Πυθαγορας την περι αυτην φιλοσοφιαν εις σχημα παιδειας ελευθερου μετεστησεν. {epi de toutois Pythagoras tên peri autên philosophian eis schêma paideias eleutherou metestêsen.} Procli Comment. Euclidis lib. I, Prolegom. II (p. 65, ed. Friedlein).
[6] 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.
[7] The remains of Alcmaeon are given in H. Diel’s Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Berlin, 1903, p. 103. Alcmaeon is considered in the companion chapter on Greek Medicine.
[8] Especially the περι γυναικειης φυσιος, On the nature of woman, and the περι γυναικειων, On the diseases of women.
[9] περι ἑβδομαδων. The Greek text is lost. We have, however, an early and barbarous Latin translation, and there has recently been printed an Arabic commentary. G. Bergstrasser, Pseudogaleni in Hippocratis de septimanis commentarium ab Hunnino Q. F. arabice versum, Leipzig, 1914.
[10] περι νουσων δ.
[11] περι καρδιης.
[12] Especially in the περι γονης.
[13] The three works περι γονης, περι φυσιος παιδιου, περι νουσων δ, On generation, on the nature of the embryo, on diseases, book IV, form really one treatise on generation.
[14] περι φυσιος παιδιου, On the nature of the embryo, § 13. The same experience is described in the περι σαρκων, On the muscles.
[15] περι φυσιος παιδιου, On the nature of the embryo, § 29.
[16] περι φυσιος παιδιου, On the nature of the embryo, § 22.
[17] Ibid. § 23.
[18] It is possible that Theophrastus derived the word pericarp from Aristotle. Cp. De anima, ii. 1, 412 b 2. In the passage το φυλλον περικαρπιου σκεπασμα, το δε περικαρπιον καρπου, in the De anima the word does not, however, seem to have the full technical force that Theophrastus gives to it.
[19] Historia plantarum, i. 2, vi.
[20] Ibid. i. 1, iv.
[21] Historia plantarum, ii. 1, i.
[22] Historia plantarum, viii. 1, i.
[23] Nathaniel Highmore, A History of Generation, London, 1651.
[24] Marcello Malpighi, Anatome plantarum, London, 1675.
[25] Nehemiah Grew, Anatomy of Vegetables begun, London, 1672.
[26] Pliny, Naturalis historia, xiii. 4.
[27] The curious word ολυνθαζειν, here translated to use the wild fig, is from ολυνθος, 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 το δε επι των φοινικων συμβαινον ου ταυτον μεν, εχει δε τινα ὁμοιοτητα τουτω δι’ ὁ καλουσιν ολυνθαζειν αυτους {to de epi tôn phoinikôn symbainon ou tauton men, echei de tina homoiotêta toutô di’ ho kalousin olynthazein autous} ‘The same thing is not done with dates, but something analogous to it, whence this is called ολυνθαζειν’.
[28] Historia plantarum, ii. 8, iv.
[29] Herodotus i. 193.
[30] Historia plantarum, ii. 8, i.
[31] Ibid. ii. 8, ii.
[32] Historia plantarum, ii. 8, iv.
[33] Ibid. i. 1, ix.
[34] Ibid. iii. 18, x.
[35] De causis plantarum, ii. 23.
[36] Historia plantarum, i. 13, iii.
[37] See the companion chapter on Greek Medicine.
[38] The surviving fragments of the works of Crateuas have recently been printed by M. Wellmann as an appendix to the text of Dioscorides, De materia medica, 3 vols., Berlin, 1906-17, iii. pp. 144-6. The source and fate of his plant drawings are discussed in the same author’s Krateuas, Berlin, 1897.
[39] 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.
[40] 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.
[41] 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.
[42] This manuscript is at the University Library at Leyden, where it is numbered Voss Q 9.
[43] A good instance of Galen’s teleological point of view is afforded by his classical description of the hand in the περι χρειας των εν ανθρωπου σωματι μοριων, 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.
[44] The early European translations from the Arabic are tabulated with unparalleled learning by M. Steinschneider, ‘Die Europäischen Uebersetzungen aus dem Arabischen bis Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts’, in the Sitzungsberichte der kais. Akad. der Wissenschaften in Wien, cxlix and cli, Vienna, 1904 and 1905.
[45] C. H. Haskins, ‘The reception of Arabic science in England,’ English Historical Review, London, 1915, p. 56.
[46] Roger Bacon, Opus majus, edited by J. H. Bridges, 3 vols., London, 1897-1900. Vol. iii, p. 66.
[47] On the Aristotelian translations of Scott see A. H. Querfeld, Michael Scottus und seine Schrift, De secretis naturae, Leipzig, 1919; and C. H. Haskins, ‘Michael Scot and Frederick II’ in Isis, ii. 250, Brussels, 1922.
[48] 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.
[49] 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 uber die lateinischen Aristoteles Ubersetzungen des XIII. Jahrhunderts, Münster i/W., 1916; and F. Wüstenfeld, Die Ubersetzungen arabischer Werke in das Lateinische seit dem XI. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, 1877.
[50] 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.
[51] 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).
[52] Hieronimo Fabrizio of Acquapendente, De formato foetu, Padua, 1604.
[53] William Harvey, Exercitationes de generatione animalium, London, 1651.
[54] Karl Ernst von Baer, Ueber die Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere, Königsberg, 1828-37.
[55] The works of Herophilus are lost. This fine passage has been preserved for us by Sextus Empiricus, a third-century physician, in his προς τοις μαθηματικους αιτιρρητικοι, 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.
[56] The word φυσικος, 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.
[57] 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, Auszuge eines Unbekannten aus Aristoteles-Menons Handbuch der Medizin, Berlin, 1896.
[58] As we go to press there appears a preliminary account of the very remarkable Edwin Smith papyrus, see J. H. Breasted in Recueil d’études egyptologiques dédiées à la mémoire de Champollion, Paris 1922, and New York Historical Society Bulletin, 1922.
[59] It is tempting, also, to connect the Asclepian snake cult with the prominence of the serpent in Minoan religion.
[60] This word pronoia, as Galen explains (εις το Ἱπποκρατους προγνωστικον, 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.
[61] Prognostics 1.
[62] 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.
[63] The works of Anaximenes are lost. This phrase of his, however, is preserved by the later writer Aetios.
[64] For the work of these physicians see especially M. Wellmann, Fragmentsammlung der griechischen Aerzte, Bd. I, Berlin, 1901.
[65] Galen, περι ανατομικων εγχειρησεων, On anatomical preparations, § 1, K. II, p. 282.
[66] Historia animalium, iii. 3, where it is ascribed to Polybus. The same passage is, however, repeated twice in the Hippocratic writings, viz. in the περι φυσιος ανθρωπου, On the nature of man, Littré, vi. 58, and in the περι οστεων φυσιος, On the nature of bones, Littré, ix. 174.
[67] Παραγγελιαι, § 6.
[68] See Fig. 1.
[69] Translation by Professor Arthur Platt.
[70] It must, however, be admitted that in the Hippocratic collection are breaches of the oath, e. g. in the induction of abortion related in περι φυσιος παιδιου. There is evidence, however, that the author of this work was not a medical practitioner.
[71] Rome Urbinas 64, fo. 116.
[72] Kühlewein, i. 79, regards this as an interpolated passage.
[73] Littré, ii. 112; Kühlewein, i. 79. The texts vary: Kühlewein is followed except in the last sentence.
[74] Περι τεχνης, § 3.
[75] Περι νουσων α', § 6.
[76] A reference to dissection in the περι αρθρων, On the joints, § 1, appears to the present writer to be of Alexandrian date.
[77] They are to be found as an Appendix to Books I and III of the Epidemics and embedded in Book III.
[78] 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.
[79] 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).
[80] We are almost told as much in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, § 1, a work probably composed about the end of the fourth century.
[81] 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.
[82] This famous manuscript is known as Laurentian, Plutarch 74, 7, and its figures have been reproduced by H. Schöne, Apollonius von Kitium, Leipzig, 1896.
[83] The first lines are the source of the famous lines in Goethe’s Faust:
[84] The extreme of treatment refers in the original to the extreme restriction of diet, ες ακριβειην, but the meaning of the Aphorism has always been taken as more generalized.
[85] 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 περι διαφορας πυρετων, 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.
[86] K. F. H. Marx, Herophilus, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Medizin, Karlsruhe, 1838.
[87] Galen, περι ανατομικων εγχειρησεων, On anatomical preparations, ix. 5 (last sentence).
[88] Galen, περι φλεβων και αρτηριων ανατομης, On the anatomy of veins and arteries, i.
[89] 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.
[90] Sanctorio Santorio, Oratio in archilyceo patavino anno 1612 habita; de medicina statica aphorismi. Venice, 1614.
[91] This is the only passage of Hegetor’s writing that has survived. It has been preserved in the work of Apollonius of Citium.
[92] Leyden Voss 4° 9* of the sixth century is a fragment of this work.
[93] V. Rose, Sorani Ephesii vetus translatio Latina cum additis Graeci textus reliquiis, Leipzig, 1882; F. Weindler, Geschichte der gynäkologisch-anatomischen Abbildung, Dresden, 1908.
[94] 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.
[95] First Latin edition Venice, 1552; first Greek edition Paris, 1554.
[96] e. g. περι κρασεως και δυναμεως των ἁπαντων φαρμακων and the φαρμακα.
[97] e. g. De dinamidiis Galeni, Secreta Hippocratis and many astrological tracts.
[98] Dissection of animals was practised at Salerno as early as the eleventh century.
[99] 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.
[100] Benivieni’s notes were published posthumously. Some of the spurious Greek works of the Hippocratic collection have also case notes.
[101] Tusc. 1. 1. 2.
[102] Inst. Or. I. 1. 12.
[103] Goethe, Gespräche, 3. 387.
[104] Ibid., 3. 443.
[105] Wordsworth, Table-talk.
[106] Shelley, On the Manners of the Ancients.
[107] Mill, Dissertations, ii. 283 f.
[108] Macaulay, Life and Letters, i. 43.
[109] Homer, Iliad, vi. 466 ff. (with omissions: chiefly from the translation of Lang, Leaf, and Myers). It should be remembered that, of the three figures in this scene, the husband will be dead in a few days, while within a year the wife will be a slave and the child thrown from the city wall.
[110] Genesis xxi. 14 f.
[111] Iliad, xvi. 428 f.: ‘As vultures with crooked talons and curved beaks that upon some high crag fight, screaming loudly.’ Ibid. v. 770 f.: ‘As far as a man’s view ranges in the haze, as he sits on a point of outlook and gazes over the wine-dark sea, so far at a spring leap the loud-neighing horses of the gods.’
[112] Poetics, c. 23 (tr. Butcher).
[113] ‘Stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here, obeying their words.’
[114] Phaedo, 118 B.
[115] fr. 95: ‘Star of evening, bringing all things that bright dawn has scattered, you bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.’
[116] Iliad, xxiv. 277 f. (with omissions).
[117] I have taken these quotations of Keats from Bradley, Oxford Lecture on Poetry, p. 238.
[118] Callimachus, Epigr. 20: ‘His father Philip laid here to rest his twelve-year old son, his high hope, Nicoteles.’
[119] Thuc. iv. 104, 105, 106 (tr. Jowett, mainly).
[120] The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us, pp. 74 ff.
[121] In these novels and in The Dynasts Mr. Hardy allows his personal views to depress one side of the scales: in his lesser novels he has often shown that he can hold the balance even. This distinction should be borne in mind in all the criticisms of his work, which I have ventured to make.
[122] Keats, Preface to Endymion.
[123] Hymn to Demeter, l. 2 ff. The translation is mainly from Pater, Greek Studies. ‘Whom, by the consent of far-seeing, deep-thundering Zeus, Aidoneus carried away, as she played with the deep-bosomed daughters of Ocean, gathering flowers in a meadow of soft grass and roses and crocus and fair violets and iris and hyacinths and the strange glory of the narcissus which the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus, brought forth to snare the flower-like girl. A wonder it was to all, immortal gods and mortal men. A hundred blossoms grew up from the roots of it, and very sweet was its scent, and the broad sky above, and all the earth and the salt wave of the sea laughed to see it. She in wonder stretched out her two hands to take the lovely plaything: thereupon the wide-wayed earth opened in the Nysian plain and the king of the great nation of the dead sprang out with his immortal horses.’
[124] ll. 732 f. (tr. Murray).
[125] Vitruvius, De Architectura.
[126] Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis, xxxvi.
[127] Pausanias, Ἑλλαδος Περιηγησις.
[128] Sir Arthur Evans has drawn up an ingenious chronology of Early Minoan (2800-2200 B. C.), Middle Minoan (2200-1700 B. C.), and Late Minoan (1700-1200 B. C.). The evidence is almost entirely that of pottery discovered on the site. The whole question of the relations of Minoan to Mycenaean art, and of this archaic art to the earlier civilizations of Egypt and Chaldea, is very obscure and uncertain.
[129] The heraldic treatment of the lions is of Eastern origin. The Greeks had a tradition that the chieftains of Mycenae came from Lydia.
[130] Portions of these columns are now in the British Museum.
[131] The order, I may say for the uninitiated, means the complete ordonnance of the column, the architrave resting immediately on its capital, the frieze and the cornice. It is the final expression of the simple device of the post and lintel, of the beam resting on the heads of two or more posts; and there is little doubt that in its ultimate origin, the Order is the translation into stone of the details of a rudimentary wooden construction.
[132] Hellenistic Sculpture, by Guy Dickins, p. 85. The author, who wrote with something of the insight of the artist as well as the accurate knowledge of the scholar, died of wounds, on the Somme, in 1916.
[133] Vitruvius, iii. 1. The difficulty was, that if the triglyph was placed on the angle of the building (the practice of the Greeks) and the next triglyph was placed over the axis of the column, the metope (or panel) between these two triglyphs would be larger than the metopes between the triglyphs axial over the other columns. The Greeks solved it by reducing the width of the end intercolumniation, but later critics disliked this, and solved it by removing the end triglyph from the angle and placing it axial over the end column.
[134] Vitruvius gives this as the ‘aedes in antis’.
[135] Pro-style (colonnade in front).
[136] Amphipro-style (colonnade at both ends).
[137] Peripteral (single colonnade all round).
[138] Dipteral (double colonnade all round).
[139] Pseudo-dipteral (inner row of columns omitted).
[140] The Erechtheum was an exception.
[141] See Delphi, by Dr. Frederick Poulsen, p. 52. It is suggested that the Sacred Way was in existence before the shrines were built, and that its wanderings were necessitated by the gradients of the hillside. No sort of attempt, however, seems to have been made to correct this, or to treat it as an element of design.
[142] The Place Vendôme measures 450 ft. × 420 ft.; Grosvenor Square about 650 × 530; and Lincoln’s Inn Fields about 800 × 630, measured from wall to wall of buildings.
[143] Choisy, History of Architecture, vol. i, p. 298.
Illustrations have been moved to the appropriate placed in the text.
The following typographical errors have been corrected.
| Page | Error | Correction |
| 218 | back | black |
| 424 | stedfast | steadfast |
The following words are found in hyphenated and unhyphenated forms in the text. The numbers of instances are given in parentheses.
| cuttle-fish (2) | cuttlefish (1) |
| fresh-water (1) | freshwater (1) |
| pre-occupation (4) | preoccupation (1) |
| preoccupations (1) | |
| re-arranging (1) | rearranging (1) |
| re-discovery (2) | rediscovery (3) |
| super-men (1) | supermen (1) |
| super-women (1) | superwomen (1) |
| text-book (5) | textbook (2) |
| text-books (2) | textbooks (3) |