After Aristotle 75 



Greek artists of the first century B. c. But their work, copied 

 at each stage without reference to the object, moved constantly 

 farther from resemblance to the original. At last the illustra- 

 tions became little but formal patterns, a state in which they 

 remained in some late copies prepared as recently as the 

 sixteenth century. But at a certain period a change set in, 

 and the artist, no longer content to rely on tradition, appeals 

 at last to nature. This new stirring in art corresponds with the 

 new stirring in letters, the Arabian revival itself a legacy of 

 Greece, though sadly deteriorated in transit that gave rise 

 to scholasticism. In much of the beautiful carved and sculp- 

 tured work of the French cathedrals the new movement 

 appears in the earlier part of the thirteenth century. At such 

 a place as Chartres we see the attempt to render plants and 

 animals faithfully in stone as early as 1240 or before. In the 

 easier medium of parchment the same tendency appears even 

 earlier. When once it begins the process progresses slowly until 

 the great recovery of the Greek texts in the fifteenth century, 

 when it is again accelerated. 



During the sixteenth century the energy of botanists and 

 zoologists was largely absorbed in producing most carefully 

 annotated and illustrated editions of Dioscorides and Theo- 

 phrastusand accounts of animals, habits, and structure that were 

 intended to illustrate the writings of Aristotle, while the anato- 

 mists explored the bodies of man and beast to confirm or refute 

 Galen. The great monographs on birds, fishes, and plants of* 

 this period, ostensibly little but commentaries on Pliny, 

 Aristotle, and Dioscorides, represent really the first important 

 efforts of modern times at a natural history. They pass 

 naturally into the encyclopaedias of the later sixteenth century, 

 and these into the physiological works of the seventeenth. 

 Aristotle was never a dead hand in Biology as he was in Physics, 

 and this for the reason that he was a great biologist but was 

 not a great physicist. 



