History of Comparative Anatomy 



PRESCIENTIFIC ANATOMY 



The beginnings of a knowledge of anatomy can be traced into the 

 indefinite past. Prehistoric inhabitants of Europe left, on the walls of 

 their cave-dwellings, drawings which indicate much appreciation of 

 animal form and some crude knowledge of anatomy (Fig. 608). They 

 knew the location of the heart of the elephant and bison — important 

 to know in the business of hunting. Documents dating from 15 cen- 

 turies B.C. show that the Egyptians then possessed a considerable 

 knowledge of human anatomy and a primitive system of medicine and 

 surgery. In Mesopotamia, too, even several centuries earlier, anatomy, 

 medicine, and surgery were a part of the culture of the period. Natu- 

 rally many of these early ideas of animal structure were distorted, 

 even to the point of grotesqueness. 



The early Greeks doubtless derived something from Egyptian and 

 Babylonian sources, but by nature they were philosophers rather than 

 investigators, and what they added to it prior to the fourth century 

 B.C. became an inverted pyramid of speculative thinking resting in- 

 securely on its apex of observed fact. Especially prominent in this pre- 

 scientific period were Empedocles, Hippocrates, and Heracleitus, all 

 about the fifth century B.C. It is noteworthy that in many instances 

 the speculations of these early Greeks anticipated the essence of what, 

 centuries later, came to be established as scientific fact. 



ARISTOTLE 



The beginning of a science — in the modern sense — of natural phe- 

 nomena is accredited, by common consent, to the Greek naturalist and 

 philosopher Aristotle (384 322 B.C.), a pupil of Plato. Son of a physi- 

 cian, Aristotle was destined by both heredity and environment to be 

 interested mainly in living things. His intellectual influence, however, 



333 



9 



