LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



incentive to embtyological study so long as the process of child- 

 birth was left to the charms and incantations of barbarous midwives. 

 But for a better insight into the economic position of embryologists 

 in past ages nearly all the work remains to be done. 



One necessity must constantly be kept before the mind's eye, 

 namely, the knowledge of the relations between scientific thought 

 and technical practice at any given period. For embryology this 

 knowledge is difficult to acquire, since up to the time of the Renaissance 

 obstetrics remained a part of primitive folk-medicine rather than of 

 serious medical science. We see, however, in the publication of the 

 Hellenistic gynaecological treatises in the i6th century (Bauhin,^ 

 Spach^) the satisfaction of a new demand, even though it took the 

 t\^pical Renaissance form of reprinting the Graeco-Roman classics. 

 It was part of that movement to rationalise obstetrics which included 

 William Harvey's Exercitadones De Generatione Animalium^ and 

 Malpighi's De Formatione Pulli^'^ and culminated in the celebrated 

 man-midwives of the i8th century.^ Again, the relation of the early 

 systematists — Belon,^ Rondelet,^ Aldrovandus,® Ray^ — to the be- 

 ginnings of capitalist expansion is fairly clear, for the mediaeval 

 bestiary could not cope with the influx of new animals and plants 

 from hitherto unknown regions, any one of which might prove to 

 be an exploitable commodity. 



The Hellenistic divorce between scientific thought and empirical 

 technique is an important case in point. Greek life was divided strictly 

 into Oeojpia and TTpd^Ls; theory and practice. The latter was not 

 thought fitting for a man of good birth. "Antiquity," says Diels,^^ 

 "was entirely aristocratic in attitude. Even prominent artists, such as 

 Pheidias, were classed as artisans, and were incapable of bursting 

 through the barrier separating the workers and peasants from the 

 upper class. A second cause of the slight technical progress in antiquity 

 was its slave-holding system, which led to a lack of any impulse to 

 develop the machine as a substitute for manual labour." Xenophon 



^ Gynaeciorum, etc., 1586. ^ Ibid., etc.," 1597. 



^ 1651, Eng. tr. 1653. * 1672. 



^ E.g. The Chamberlens, Mauriceau, William Smellie, John Burton of York ("Dr. 

 Slop") and Joseph Needham of Devizes; see the articles of Rosenthal, Janus, 1923, 27, 

 117 and 192 and Mengert, Ann. Med. Hist., 1932, 4,453. The dissertation of Caspar 

 Bose (^De obstetricum Erroribus, 1729) is a typical attack on the midwives of the time. 



^ Natural History of Fishes, 1591, . . . of Birds, 1555. 



' De Piscibus Marinis, 1554. * Ornithologia, 1597. 



* Wisdom of God in Creation, 1714. ^^ Antike Technik (Leipzig, 1920). 



