correlation among the human organs with the consequent recognition of the general disorder resulting from the sickness of any one of them, is with us still. Likewise the fundamental Hippocratic tenet of assisting nature to work her own cure has remained valid and accepted, in some form at least of re-expression to suit the different and finally larger knowledge of later times. No one disputes it today; and it was doubly wise and sound for men whose knowledge was as pardonably rudimentary as that of Hippocrates. Charles Singer expresses his judgment of the Hippocratics thus: "The work of these men may be summed up by saying that without dissection, without any experimental physiology or pathology, and without any instrumental aid, they pushed the knowledge of the course and origin of disease as far as it is conceivable that men in such circumstances could push it. This was done as a process of pure scientific induction. Their surgery, though hardly based on anatomy, was grounded on the most carefully recorded experience. In therapeutics they allowed themselves neither to be deceived by false hopes nor led aside by vain traditions. Yet in diagnosis, prognosis, surgery and therapeutics

alike they were in many departments unsurpassed until the nineteenth century, and to some of their methods we have reverted in the twentieth. Persisting throughout the ages as a more or less definite tradition, which attained clearer form during and after the sixteenth century, Hippocratic methods have formed the basis of all departments of modern advance." 20

III. ARISTOTLE'S BIOLOGY

UR DEBT to Greek biology is not to be appraised through any attempt to trace a causal continuity between Greece and the modern world in the development of this science, or group of sciences. The continuity is problematical and lacking in causality. Modern biological science sprang from the direct investigation of the natural objects forming its provinces. Modern anatomy for instance, arose with Leonardo and Vesalius from dissections of human bodies and not from study of books. It is not to be regarded as a graft upon the ancient stock.

The fundamental aim of biology, with the Greeks and with ourselves, has been to learn about living organisms. Nevertheless, Greek biology differed from the modern biological sciences in origins and associations, in method and in temperament. Our present debt to the ancient time is owing not a little to these differences. Let us see.

In origins; Greek science began in the large unity of the grand desire to know the

constituents and processes of the world. It was pursued by men whom we have been taught to call philosophers; and in fact only gradually did philosophy, more properly speaking, differentiate itself from physics, that is, from the elemental attempt to observe and know the physical world. Greek philosophy was to consist of logical and metaphysical conceptions; Greek physical, or let us say specifically biological, science was to continue as observation and induction. Yet it did not part company from philosophy, and occasionally employed the same processes of logic and even metaphysics. The same men might still be both scientists and philosophers or metaphysicians. The greatest of Greek biologists was very nearly the greatest of Greek philosophers; and Aristotle the biologist did not abjure the logical and metaphysical reasonings of Aristotle the philosopher.21

But modern biology, if we fix our eyes upon its most fecund inceptions and vigorous growth, was departmental or special from the beginning, and alien from those sweeping explanations and ultimate accountings which seemed to constitute philosophy. In this sense, neither Leonardo nor Vesalius nor Harvey was a phi

losopher; 22 and though Descartes, a great philosopher, followed the investigations of Harvey and dissected animals, his work along these lines was unimportant.

The origins of Greek biology correspond with its methods and its intellectual temper and predilections. Assuredly it did observe, and observed primarily, the objects or matters which attracted Greek attention. Heraclitus and Aristotle might bid men not to scorn to notice humble, even disgusting, things. But usually it was the objects which were most noticeable and alive that caught the Greek attention, like the quick and cunning animals whose acts and natures might throw some light upon man himself, in whom the Greek was interested most of all. In accord, moreover, with its origins, Greek biology sought for broad and satisfying facts or truths, such as appealed to the Greek reasoning mind. And the Greek mind, like the Greek hand, was a little impatient of drudgery. It was predisposed to accept data which satisfied its love of order and symmetry and reason and its desire to find these qualities in nature. Hence it failed to make experiments and cautiously to verify what it observed or desired to observe.