go EMBRYOLOGY IN ANTIQUITY [pt. ii 



structure and function in the human and animal body, and to show 

 that, being perfectly adapted to its end, it could not possibly be other in 

 shape or nature than what it is. At the conclusion of this massive work 

 with all its extraordinary ingenuity and labour, he says, "Such then 

 and so great being the value of the argument now completed, this 

 section makes it all plain and clear like a good epode — I say an epode, 

 but not in the sense of one who uses enchantments (eVwSat?) but as 

 in the melic poets whom some call lyric, there is as well as strophe 

 and antistrophe, an epode, which, so it is said, they used to sing 

 standing before the altar as a hymn to the Gods. To this then I 

 compare this final section and therefore I have called it by that 

 name". This is one of the half-dozen most striking paragraphs in 

 the history of biology ; worthy to rank with the remarks of Hippo- 

 crates on the " Sacred Disease". Galen, as he wrote the words, must 

 have thought of the altar of Dionysus in the Athenian or Pergamene 

 theatre, made of marble and hung about with a garland, but they 

 were equally applicable to the altar of a basilica of the Christian 

 Church with the bishop and his priests celebrating the liturgy at it. 

 What could be more charged with significance than this? At the 

 end of the antique epoch the biology of all the schools, Croton, 

 Akragas, Cos, Cnidus, Athens, Alexandria, Rome, is welded together 

 and as it were deposited at the entrance into the sanctuary of 

 Christendom. It was the turning-point, in Spengler's terminology, 

 between ApoUinian civilisation and Faustian culture. Galen's words 

 are the more extraordinary, for he himself can hardly have foreseen 

 that the long line of experimentalists which had arisen in the sixth 

 century B.C. would come to an end with him. But so it was to be, 

 and thenceforward experimental research and biological speculation 

 were alike to cease, except for a few stray mutations, born out of 

 due time, until in 1453 the city of Byzantium should burst like .a 

 ripe pod and, distributing her scholars all over the West, as if by 

 a fertilising process, bring all the fruits of the Renaissance into being. 



