GREEK BIOLOGY 



i. Before Aristotle 



WHAT is science? It is a question that cannot be an- 

 swered easily, nor perhaps answered at all. None of the defini- 

 tions 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. 1 But the 

 ideas we associate with the word are clearly developed in Greek 

 philosophy and the foundations of biology are of great antiquity. 



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 



1 The word Biology was introduced by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus 

 (1776-1837) in his Biologie oder die Philosophic 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 oj Man, London, 1819; 

 there are earlier English uses of the word, however, contrasted with biography- 



