Problems, Concepts and Their History 



contributions of those who did. It will have 

 to be sufficient here to name a few, and the 

 interested reader is referred to Balss ('36) 

 for additional details. Suffice it here to com- 

 ment that theirs was the task of the first early 

 and perhaps random collection of data, 

 which must precede even the primitive 

 classification which many consider to repre- 

 sent the first stage of scientific inquiry. 



Of some, we know only from the meager 

 extant fragments, that they recorded what 

 they thought to be observed fact; for in- 

 stance, from Parmenides a fragment remains 

 implying that males are generated on the 

 right and females on the left. In the case of 

 others, even before Aristotle, it is clear that 

 they believed that around the observed facts 

 they could elaborate theory. Empedokles, for 

 example, believed the fetus to arise partly 

 from male and partly from female semen, 

 the children resembling most the parent who 

 contributed most to the offspring; he spoke 

 of the influence of pictures, statues and so 

 forth in modifying the appearance of the off- 

 spring, of twins and triplets as due to "super- 

 abundance and division of the semen" (Bur- 

 net, '30, p. 244) ; he knew there was a regular 

 sequence of events in development and spoke 

 of the heart as formed first in development, 

 the nails last, sowing seeds of concepts, 

 which, right or wrong, were destined often 

 to recrudesce in subsequent ages. 



A Hippocratic treatise on generation went 

 further in developing theories, formulating 

 an early expression of the doctrine of pan- 

 genesis, and, relating to it, what seems to be 

 on post hoc reasoning a doctrine of the in- 

 heritance of acquired characters. This trea- 

 tise, before Aristotle, recognized the impor- 

 tance of methodology, and advocated sys- 

 tematic daily observation of chicken eggs: 

 "Take twenty or more eggs and let them be 

 incubated by two or more hens. Then each 

 day from the second to that of hatching re- 

 move an egg, break it, and examine it. You 

 will find," continues the writer, illustrating 

 an apparent dependence of concept on 

 method and inferring the great generaliza- 

 tion, "exactly as I say, for the nature of the 

 bird can be likened to that of man" (Singer, 

 '22, p. 15). 



Aristotle's own accomplishment was none 

 the less impressive, for all he drew on his 

 predecessors and contemporaries. "There was 

 a wealth of natural history before his time; 

 but it belonged to the farmer, the huntsman, 

 and the fisherman — with something over 

 (doubtless) for the schoolboy, the idler and 

 the poet. But Aristotle made it a science. 



and won a place for it in Philosophy" 

 (Thompson, '40, p. 47). And in establishing 

 it as scientific, he set its standards higher 

 than hitherto by far. 



He followed, in embryology, the method 

 of the Hippocratic writer On Generation, to 

 perform and record most of the available ob- 

 servations, many in error but also many cor- 

 rect, thus to constitute a collection of knowl- 

 edge on the development of the chick which 

 became the foundation on which all embry- 

 ology was to build; and it has been said, 

 with much justice, of his account that "al- 

 most two thousand years were to roll by 

 before it was to be equaled or surpassed" 

 (Adelmann, ed., in Fabricius, 1942 edition, 

 p. 38). He concerned himself not only with 

 the development of the chick but also with 

 the generation of many other forms, and 

 elaborated a kind of classification (though 

 not in the modern sense; cf. Thompson, '40) 

 of animal forms according to their mode of 

 reproduction. By so doing, he both estab- 

 lished embryology as an independent sci- 

 ence, and he fitted embryological knowl- 

 edge into a pattern larger than its own, with 

 great clarity of vision and imagination. 



On the theoretical side, he followed his 

 predecessors by adopting a modified view of 

 pangenesis, and concurred with them in sup- 

 porting the doctrine of the inheritance of 

 acquired characters. He broke away from 

 his predecessors, however, in developing a 

 new and erroneous yet highly influential 

 concept of the relative roles of male and fe- 

 male in development, postulating the former 

 as providing the form, at once formal, effi- 

 cient and final cause, and the latter the sub- 

 stance, the material cause, for the new 

 organism. 



By thus undervaluing the egg, he paid 

 embryology the obvious immediate disserv- 

 ice; but in formulating his conception of 

 biological form as inseparable from matter 

 he laid the way open for ultimate progress 

 in biological science. The argument is meta- 

 physical to the taste of the modern scientist; 

 but Aristotle will be found not to be the last 

 embryologist to be so tainted. We concur with 

 his intent, after all, every time we speak of 

 "animal forms" as a euphemism for "animal 

 species." And Aristotle, with the natural 

 historian's innate feeling for natural form, 

 by envisioning form as a part of actuality 

 rather than something above it, brought bio- 

 logical material to be directly investigable 

 by the sense organs. 



His theories concerning special develop- 

 mental phenomena, related to his primary 



