352 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE xiv 



seek for them now. The anger of a god was a 

 sufficient reason for the existence of a malady, and 

 a dream ample warranty for therapeutic measures; 

 that a physical phenomenon must needs have a 

 physical cause was not the implied or expressed 

 axiom that it is to us moderns. 



The great man whose name is inseparably 

 connected with the foundation of medicine, Hip- 

 pocrates, certainly knew very little, indeed prac- 

 tically nothing, of anatomy or physiology; and he 

 would probably have been perplexed even to im- 

 agine the possibility of a connection between the 

 zoological studies of his contemporary Democritus 

 and medicine. Nevertheless, in so far as he, and 

 those who worked before and after him, in the 

 same spirit, ascertained, as matters of experi- 

 ence, that a wound, or a luxation, or a fever, 

 presented such and such symptoms, and that the 

 return of the patient to health was facilitated 

 by such and such measures, they established 

 laws of nature, and began the construction of 

 the science of pathology. All true science begins 

 with empiricism — though all true science is such 

 exactly, in so far as it strives to pass out of the 

 empirical stage into that of the deduction of em- 

 pirical from more general truths. Thus, it is not 

 wonderful, that the early physicians had little 

 or nothing to do with the development of bio- 

 logical science; and, on the other hand, that the 

 early biologists did not much concern themselves 



