88 EMBRYOLOGY IN ANTIQUITY [pt. ii 



Thus the alterative faculty takes the primitive unformed raw 

 material and changes it into the different forms represented by the 

 different tissues, while the formative faculty, acting teleologically 

 from within, organises these building-stones, as it were, into the 

 various temples which make up the Acropolis of the completed 

 animal. Galen next goes on to speak of the faculty of growth. "Let 

 us first mention", he says, "that this too is present in the foetus 

 in utero as is also the nutritive faculty, but that at that stage these 

 two faculties are, as it were, handmaids to those already mentioned, 

 and do not possess in themselves supreme authority." 



Later on, until full stature is reached, growth is predominant, and 

 finally nutrition assumes the hegemony. 



So much for Galen's embryological theory. But before leaving the 

 treatise On the Natural Faculties, it may be noted that he ascribes a 

 retentive faculty to the uterus as well as to the stomach, and explains 

 birth as being due to a cessation of action on the part of the retentive 

 faculty, "when the object of the uterus has been fulfilled", and a 

 coming into action of a hitherto quiescent propulsive faculty. This 

 wholesale allotting of faculties can obviously be made to explain 

 anything, and is eminently suited to a teleological account such as 

 Galen's. It was not inconvenient as a framework within which all 

 the biological knowledge of antiquity could be crystallised, but it was 

 utterly pernicious to experimental science. Fifteen hundred years later 

 it received what would have been the death-blow to any less virile 

 theory, at the hands of Moliere in his immortal Malade Imaginaire : 



Bachelirius. Mihi a docto doctore 



Demandatur causam et rationem quare 

 Opium facit dormire 

 A quoi respondeo 

 Quia est in eo 

 Virtus dormitiva 

 Cujus est nature 

 Sensus assoupire. 

 Chorus. Bene, bene, bene, bene respondere. 

 Dignus, dignus est entrare 

 In nostro docto corpore. 

 Bene, bene, respondere. 



But to return to Galen. The book on the formation of the embryo 

 opens with a historical account of the views of the Hippocratic writers 



