April 8, 1922J 



NA TURE 



439 



I ord of Greek antiquity. He brings to this volume, 



* the title of which gives but an inadequate idea of its 



range, an extent of combined knowledge and experience 



in these departments that is probably unsurpassed 



by any other man living. 



About half of the book, and this probably the 

 more valuable half, deals with the period of creative 

 activity of the Greek genius. Sir Clifford Allbutt 

 pictures, as perhaps only one of his attainments 

 could, the rise of scientific medicine among the 

 Ionian philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries 

 before the Christian era, and that process of 

 " separation of medicine from philosophy " which 

 made " science " possible. The earlier philosophers 

 set out to give a picture of the universe both internal 

 and external. They failed because they had not as 

 yet concentrated on the parts which go to make the 

 whole. But their attempt corresponded to an eternal 

 necessity of the human mind. Two and a half mil- 

 lennia have passed. Mankind is now overwhelmed 

 with a vast record in which the details of the parts 

 prevent any vision of the whole. Science, philosophy, 

 and history are each spUt into a hundred special 

 departments, most of them without adequate relation 

 to the others. Eternal necessity asserts itself again, 

 and the human mind calls for attempts at synthesis. 

 The wheel has turned full circle, and the philosophical, 

 the educational, and the scientific demands of the day 

 echo those needs that Thales sought to satisfy six 

 hundred years before the Christian era. 



Sir Clifford Allbutt paints on a big canvas and with 

 the great, sure, sweeping lines that come only to those 

 who have lived a long, full life. His work stands alone 

 in the English language as an attempt to portray, 

 both in outline and detail, the development as a 

 continuous whole of Greek biological and medical 

 thought from its early beginnings to its spread to the 

 confines of the Roman Empire, and to its strange 

 transformation by the new point of view introduced 

 by the decay of the pagan political system and the 

 rise of Christian theology. 



This is a high theme which can no more be ab- 

 stracted by the reviewer than can that of a great epic. 

 The work, like every epic, contains inequalities on 

 which it would be alike ungracious and unnecessary 

 to dwell. But it also contains characteristic and 

 inspiring flashes that often raise it to the level of 

 poetry and make it a real addition to English literature. 

 Not the least characteristic and inspiring of these is 

 Sir Clifford Allbutt's treatment of the idea of inspira- 

 tion itself and its relation to the ancient doctrine of 

 the pneuma. 



" To-day," says the author, " as we utter the word 

 inspiration we still feel the glow of the spirit which, 



NO. 2736, VOL. 109] 



from the ancient legends of the creation of life to the 

 passages of our modern ethereal telegraphy, from the 

 hauntings of the Great Spirit in primeval man, through 

 the storms of superstition, to the haven of the soul in 

 its purest communion with the Divine, has moulded 

 the whole story of man and embedded itself in his 

 tongue. Yet we shall observe again nevertheless in 

 the history of this, as of all spheres of thought, how a 

 living idea gradually becomes so imprisoned in the 

 letter that its liberty is enthralled in its own formulas. 

 Thus as the brilliant Ionian atomic hypothesis dried 

 up into the arid formulas of the Methodists, as Hippo- 

 cratean wisdom into Dogmatism, as Empiricism into 

 mere rule of thumb, rational scepticism into Pyrrhon- 

 ism, so the idea of the pneuma was cribbed in the 

 sectarian Pneumatism." 



Sir Clifford will soon be entering his eighty-seventh 

 year, but the vigour of this and many other passages 

 in his remarkable book gives good hope that we may 

 expect much further material from his pen, on topics 

 which he, more than any other living man, is capable 

 of treating with full adequacy. 



(2) The learned Sir Thomas Adams professor of 

 Arabic in the University of Cambridge takes up the 

 tale where Sir Clifford Allbutt leaves off. With the 

 fall of the Western Empire Greek science remained in 

 the keeping of the East, and it became progressively 

 orientalised with those changes in the outlook of the 

 Eastern world that may be described as Byzantinisa- 

 tion. With the spread of Christianity, and with the 

 advent of schism within the Christian Church, Greek 

 science moved yet further east, and, in its medical 

 aspects, at any rate, was cultivated especially by 

 teachers of the Nestorian sect, by whom much Greek 

 material was turned into Syriac. It was through 

 such oriental versions that Greek medicine passed to 

 the keeping of the Arab-speaking world. The over- 

 flow from the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century, 

 and the conquest by the Arabs of the whole of the 

 Near East and the whole of North Africa, the Medi- 

 terranean islands, Spain and Southern Italy in the 

 centuries which followed, form one of the most dramatic 

 chapters in world history. The Arabs, great as con- 

 querors and organisers, did not, however, excel in 

 science, and nearly all " Arabian " medical works are 

 the products of men of non-Arab race, Persians, Moors, 

 Jews, and others. 



The golden age of Arabian learning culminated 

 between a.d. 750 and 850, the century succeeding the 

 establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate with its 

 metropolis at Bagdad. In the thirteenth century 

 Islamic civilisation suffered an injury from which it 

 never recovered, through Tartar invasion, which 

 destroyed for ever the Caliphate, the unity of the 

 Arabian Empire, and the pre-eminence of Bagdad 

 as a centre of learning. With this fall the hegemony 



