Part 8 (1/2)

[6] The word _Biology_ was introduced by Gottfried Reinhold Trevira.n.u.s (1776-1837) in his _Biologie oder die Philosophie der lebenden Natur_, 6 vols., Gottingen, 1802-22, and was adopted by J.-B. de Lamarck (1744-1829) in his _Hydrogeologie_, 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 h.e.l.lenic 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.[7] The pharmacopia also of some of the earliest works of the Hippocratic collection betrays considerable knowledge of both native and foreign plants.[8] 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.

[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 pe?? ???a??e??? f?s??? {peri gynaikeies physios}, _On the nature of woman_, and the pe?? ???a??e??? {peri gynaikeion}, _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 dent.i.tion 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, but still 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).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 1. Lioness and young from an Ionian vase of the sixth century B. C. found at Caere in Southern Etruria (Louvre, Salle E, No. 298), from _Le Dessin des Animaux en Grece d'apres les vases peints_, by J. Morin, Paris (Renouard), 1911. The animal is drawing itself up to attack its hunters. The scanty mane, the form of the paws, the udders, and the dent.i.tion are all heavily though accurately represented.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2. A, Jaw bones of lion; B, head of lioness from Caere vase (Fig. 1), after Morin. Note the careful way in which the artist has distinguished the molar from the cutting teeth.]

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 painting them as in other departments of Art, the supremacy of Attica had a.s.serted 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).

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 3. Paintings of fish on plates. Italo-Greek work of the fourth century B. C. From Morin.

A. Sargus vulgaris.

B. Crenilabrus mediterraneus.

C. Uranoscopus scaber?]

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 dent.i.tion, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 4. Head and talons of the Sea-eagle, _Haliaetus albicilla_:

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 ma.s.s 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:

Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man:

The light-witted birds of the air, the beasts of the weald and the wood He traps with his woven snare, and the brood of the briny flood.

Master of cunning he: the savage bull, and the hart Who roams the mountain free, are tamed by his infinite art.

And the s.h.a.ggy rough-maned steed is broken to bear the bit.

Sophocles, _Antigone_, verses 342 ff.

(Translation of F. Storr.)

It is thus not surprising that our first systematic treatment of animals is in a practical medical work, the pe?? d?a?t?? {peri diaites}, _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, s.e.x, 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.