CHAPTER I 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF BIOLOGY AMONGST THE PRIMITIVE 

 PEOPLES AND THE CIVILIZED NATIONS OF THE EAST 



Primitive man s speculations upon life 



THE EARLIEST FOUNDATION of all our natural scientific knowledge is to 

 be sought in the observations of nature collected in the course of 

 thousands of years by prehistoric peoples who had reached a primitive 

 stage of civilization. This empirical folk-knowledge, which the student of 

 folk-lore in our own day investigates from a historical and national-psycho- 

 logical point of view, has not only been the starting-point for all scientific 

 thought, but has also, right up to the most recent times, to a certain extent 

 influenced scientific research itself; increased its store of facts with material 

 for observation and even now and then given rise to problems which science 

 has debated. Primitive man's speculations upon life have naturally been 

 influenced by his mode of life in various climates and under varying con- 

 ditions. Common to them all, however, would appear to have been the fact 

 that the first thing that has induced man to reflect upon life has been its 

 cessation: death. And to the aborigines what we call a natural death is 

 actually the most wonderful; that a man should fall in a fight against wild 

 animals or his enemies is all part of the order of the day, but that the powers 

 of a sound and healthy man should suddenly and without reason begin to 

 fail and life to cease with or without the accompaniment of pain — that is a 

 thing one finds it hard to acquiesce in. And the thing becomes all the more 

 remarkable for the fact that again and again at night the departed one ap- 

 pears in dreams to those who have survived him. These dreams have given 

 rise to a belief in ghosts, spectres, and spiritual powers of various kinds, both 

 friendly and evil, and this belief has in its turn called forth measures with a 

 view to deriving advantage from the well-disposed and avoiding the snares 

 of the wicked. Thus measures of many and various kinds were adopted in 

 regard to the bodies of the dead, which were either cremated or otherwise 

 destroyed in order to render it impossible for them to return amongst the liv- 

 ing, or else, on the other hand, they were elaborately cared for by the preser- 

 vation of the skeleton or by embalming, which was intended to make the 

 dead well-disposed towards their survivors. From these manipulations arose 

 the first knowledge of the anatomy of the human body, while observations 

 of the actual course of death created certain physiological ideas. Men learnt 



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