GREEK BIOLOGY AND

B

MEDICINE

I. THE EARLY BIOLOGY

EYOND all other ancient people, the better sort of men among the dwellers

in the Ionian cities on the west coast of Asia Minor and the neighboring islands were blessed with lively intellectual curiosity. They were also free, and meant to keep their freedom. Their cities might for a time be brought within the sway of a Lydian monarch or the Great King of Persia; but such intermittent pressure from without did not hamper the commerce of these coast and island towns, or restrict the free thinking of their citizens. Religion was tolerant or uncertain; there was no constraining caste of priests. Men might think as they saw fit upon the origin and order of the world, and freely express their opinions. And it came to pass that the gifted thoughtleaders of Ionian Greece devised conceptions of

the world, the impress of which has never been expunged from human thinking.

The old Ionian speculation upon Nature or puois was curious as to the material of the world, and considered how its visible component rocks and earth and waters came to be. This speculation, supplemented by investigation, was directed also to the origins of plants and animals, to the manner of their growth and to their living structure. Accordingly, the quotoλovia, which is to say the natural history or philosophy, of these physicists, included the beginnings of biology, which is the science of all living things, if we use this comparatively modern word in its most comprehensive sense.

There is no need to re-state the physical theories of the early Ionian philosophers and of their compeers who were Greeks even when not so evidently Ionians. It is more to our purpose to remark that for us Greek biology begins in some extraordinary fragments ascribed to the great Milesian Anaximander, who was a younger friend of Thales and lived through the first half of the sixth century before Christ. They are as follows:

Living creatures arose from the moist ele

ment as it was evaporated by the sun. Man was like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning.

"The first animals were produced in the moisture, each enclosed in a prickly bark. As they advanced in age, they came out upon the drier part. When the bark broke off, they survived for a short time.

"Further, he says that originally man was born from animals of another species. His reason is that while other animals quickly find food by themselves, man alone requires a lengthy period of suckling. Hence, had he been originally as he is now, he would never have survived.

"He declares that at first human beings arose in the inside of fishes, and after having been reared like sharks, and become capable of protecting themselves, they were finally cast ashore and took to land." 1

We may puzzle ourselves and find much or little in these syncopated fragments. They do not disclose the manner of Anaximander's investigations, but represent his conclusions, which were drawn from his study of nature. They stand for his explanations of the visible facts, his accounting for phenomena. This

dawning biology, like the cosmological physics of which it appears as part, was free from superstitious fear; it admitted no magic, recognized no supernatural; it had little religious awe. Such unembarrassed observation of nature, such free and rational conclusions, were unique in the world; and unique the consequent endeavor to build up a systematic body of natural knowledge, with accordant hypotheses, or explanations, which should rationally account for the world in which man lived. Even with the Greeks these intellectual aims were not to become common. And as such an observation of nature was then utterly unknown in Babylonia or Egypt or anywhere else on earth, so outside of the elect of the Greek race and a very few others who imbibed their spirit, it was never accepted by the ancient world.

And here at once be it said that, taking full account of the admirable Greek achievements in biology and medicine, our modern indebtedness is less for their substance than for the clear spirit of scientific investigation which was one of the immortal legacies of Greece, however few the men or periods that could accept it. In medicine, in surgery, in every field of science, modern investigation has advanced

very far beyond the Greeks. It has not, however, altogether improved upon their spirit, although in practice it has brought the habit of careful and toilsome verification which was not theirs. Yet the methods of modern medicine have ever and anon been fain to hark back to the broad wisdom of Hippocrates; and as for the genius and accomplishment of Aristotle in biology, why, he will reappear as Harvey's god and' Darwin's admiration.2

After Anaximander, other natural philosophers thought much upon the origin of plants and animals. Biological considerations and medical doctrines appear in the fragments of the early philosophers and fill out the traditions of their lives, — with Anaxagoras, in his recognition of the differences between living organisms and inanimate objects, with Empedocles, presumably an important figure in the history of medicine, with Democritus, a dissector and penetrating investigator, of whom Aristotle said that no one had so profoundly considered growth and change.

Can we discover a general purpose in their investigations and reflections? Possibly, - by a moderate use of constructive interpretation. They were searching for the source and cause