2 PRINCIPLES OF ANIMAL BIOLOGY 



embalming of the dead led to a knowledge of anatomy, and an art of 

 healing based not upon superstition but upon observation was developed. 

 The Israelitic tribes borrowed their scientific knowledge from other 

 peoples and clothed it with a religious significance but added nothing to 

 the store of biological information. The other great peoples who might 

 have contributed to early biological knowledge were interested in other 

 branches of culture — the Hindus in mathematics, the Chinese in ethical 

 and social problems. 



Early Greeks. — It was among the Greeks, therefore, that biology 

 received its first great impetus. The passion of these people for intel- 

 lectual inquiry was due partly to their innate qualities but in part to 

 the practical absence of powerful restrictive governmental and religious 

 organizations. The Ionic tribes, coming into contact with the cultivated 

 peoples of the East, through their colonies in Asia Minor, developed the 

 earliest natural philosophers. One of these was Thales (about 650-580 

 B.C.), who, though he left no writings, is reputed to have regarded water 

 as the source of all things, including life. Anaximander (about 611- 

 546 B.C.) entertained a theory of the origin of the universe from a vague 

 something which he called "apeiron," but his chief concern with biology 

 was his supposition that living things arose from mud. First, he thought, 

 came the lower animals and plants, and then human beings; but the 

 latter were in the form of fish and lived in water. Later these human 

 beings cast off their fish form and lived on land. This view of the origin 

 of living things was adopted by Diogenes of Apollonia (not the famous 

 cynic Diogenes), who conceived that the agent which brought forth 

 living things out of the earth was solar heat. Diogenes was the author 

 of the earliest known work on anatomy, fragments of which are still 

 preserved, and his ideas of human embrj^onic development give evidence 

 of being based on dissection. 



Some of the more important of the remaining Greek natural phi- 

 losophers came from the colonies of the west. Xenophanes, who had 

 wandered to southern Italy, is chiefly noted for his discover}^ of fossils, 

 his recognition that they were animal remains, and his conclusion there- 

 from that in some cases what are now mountains were once under the 

 sea. He died about 490 b.c. Another western Greek was the braggart 

 Empedocles, in Sicily, who lived about the middle of the fifth century 

 before Christ. Among the many things which he boasted of doing, he 

 appears actually to have rid a neighboring town of malaria by draining 

 the district. On the theoretical side of his biology, he conceived living 

 things to have arisen out of the earth, plants having come first. Animals 

 arose in the same way, but in pieces. Separate limbs, trunks, etc., arose, 

 kept apart by the force of hate. When love triumphed, these members 

 joined in accidental manner. Some such combinations were malformed 



