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INTRODUCTION 



Figure 1.1. Paintings by Upper Paleolithic man from the wall of the cavern at 

 Lascaux, Dordogne, France. (Photo by Windels Montignac.) (Villee: Biology.) 



Greek medical book of this time which classifies animals primarily as 

 to whether or not they are edible. Aristotle (384-322 b.c.) was one of 

 the greatest Greek philosophers and wrote on many topics. His Historia 

 animalium contains a lot of information about the animals of Greece 

 and the nearby regions of Asia Minor. The descriptions that Aristotle 

 made himself are quite good and are recognizable as those of particular 

 animals living today. The breadth and depth of his zoological interests 

 are impressive— he made a careful study of the development of the chick 

 and of the breeding of sharks and bees, and he had notions about the 

 functions of the human organs, some of which, not too surprisingly, were 

 quite wrong. He presented an elaborate theory that animals have gradu- 

 ally evolved, based on a metaphysical belief that nature strives to change 

 from the simple and imperfect to the more complex and perfect. His 

 contributions to logic, such as the development of the system of inductive 

 reasoning from specific observations to a generalization which explains 

 them all, have been of inestimable value to all branches of science. 



The Greek physician, Galen (131-200 a.d.), was one of the first to 

 do experiments and dissections of animals to determine structure and 

 functions. He was the first experimental physiologist and made some 

 notable discoveries on the functions of the brain and nerves and demon- 

 strated that arteries carry blood and not air. His descriptions of the 

 human body were the unquestioned authority for some 1300 years, even 

 though they contained some remarkable errors, being based on dissec- 

 tions of pigs and monkeys rather than of human bodies. Pliny (23-79 

 A.D.) and others in succeeding centuries compiled encyclopedias (Pliny's 

 Natural History was a 37 volume work) regarding the kinds of animals 



