SECT, i] EMBRYOLOGY IN ANTIQUITY 8i 



in natural phenomena is clearly to be seen. There are two passages 

 of embryological importance. Firstly, in the book of Job (x, 9-1 1), 

 Job is made to say, "Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast 

 fashioned me as clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again? 

 Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese? 

 Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with 

 bones and sinews". This comparison of embryogeny with the making 

 of cheese is interesting in view of the fact that precisely the same 

 comparison occurs in Aristotle's book On the Generation of Animals, as 

 we have already seen. Still more extraordinary, the only other 

 embryological reference in the Wisdom Literature, which occurs in 

 the Wisdom of Solomon (vii, 2), also copies an Aristotelian theory, 

 namely, that the embryo is formed from (menstrual) blood. There 

 the speaker says, "In the womb of a mother was I moulded into 

 flesh in the time of ten months, being compacted in blood of the 

 seed of man and the pleasure that came with sleep". Perhaps 

 it is no coincidence that both these citations can be referred back 

 to Aristotle, and, in the second case, even to Hippocrates; perhaps 

 the Alexandrian Jews of the third century B.C. were studying Aristotle 

 as attentively as Philo Judaeus studied Plato a couple of hundred 

 years later. 



The Alexandrian school was directly responsible for the introduc- 

 tion of Greek medicine and biology into Rome, through the physician 

 Cleophantus, who seems to have been particularly interested in 

 gynaecology. At the end of the second century B.C. and the beginning 

 of the first, Rome received the first and greatest of her Greek 

 physicians, Asclepiades of Parion, who brought atomism with him. 

 He was thus the Hnk between Epicurus and the methodistic school 

 of physicians, and may have been a potent influence upon Lucretius. 

 Again, Alexander Philalethes provides the link between Cleophantus 

 and Soranus. Soranus lived in Rome from about a.d. 30 tifl just 

 after the end of the first century, and so twenty years before the 

 birth of Galen. 



Of aU the ancient writers on embryology, Soranus is the one whose 

 works were in later times most widely appropriated, mutilated, 

 furbished up, quoted from rightly and wrongly, and generally upset. 

 Allbutt, Barbour and Singer give accounts of the way in which this 

 process went on, and the whole question has given rise to a con- 

 siderable literature. (See Lachs, Ilberg, Sudhov, etc.) It lasted 



