BY CHARLES SINGER OXFORD At the CLARENDON PRESS 1922 Oxford University Press Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University 2540.1 PRINTED IN ENGLAND....

This little book is an attempt to compress into a few pages an account of the general evolution of Greek biological and medical knowledge. The section on Aristotle appears here for the first time. The remaining sections are reprinted from articles contributed to a volume The Legacy of Greece edited by Mr. R. W. Livingstone, the only changes being the correction of a few errors and the addition of some further references to the literature. In quoting from the great Aristotelian biological treatis

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 essenti

With Aristotle we come in sight of the first clearly defined personality in the course of the development of Greek biological thought—for the attribution of the authorship of the earlier Hippocratic writings is more than doubtful, while the personality of the great man by whose name they are called cannot be provided with those clear outlines that historical treatment demands. Aristotle was born in 384 b. c. at Stagira, a Greek colony in the Chalcidice a few miles from the northern limit of the

All Aristotle’s surviving biological works refer primarily to the animal creation. His work on plants is lost or rather has survived as the merest corrupted fragment. We are fortunate, however, in the possession of a couple of complete works by his pupil and successor Theophrastus (372-287), which may not only be taken to represent the Aristotelian attitude towards the plant world, but also give us an inkling of the general state of biological science in the generation which succeeded the master

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 dise