HIS DISSECTION OF FISH 115 



heart being above the lungs, the emptiness of the occiput, 

 etc. — can hardly be casual slips made by one famihar with 

 human dissection. The passage, however, in Nat. Hist., VII. 3, 

 points distinctly to his having to some degree dissected the fcetus. 



But this would not conflict with the third and weightiest 

 reason, namely the strong repugnance felt by the Greeks to 

 any mutilation of the body proper and any neglect of speedy 

 burial. The sad appeal of the shade of the unburied Patroclus 

 (//., XXIII. 71 ff.) : " Bury me with all speed that I pass the 

 gates of Hades. Far off the spirits banish me, nor do the 

 phantoms of men outworn suffer me to mingle with them beyond 

 the river," the fervent desire of some of Homer's Heroes that 

 funeral rites should promptly follow their death, 1 and the 

 agony of Antigone, all these and other instances manifest 

 Greek sentiment. So strong and widespread was this 

 that human dissection would have certainly aroused intense 

 bitterness and probably caused the perpetual banishment of 

 the perpetrator. The suggestion, resting on no evidence, 

 that Aristotle dissected the human body secretly can neither 

 be proved, nor disproved. 



The Japanese, till recently, also refrained from dissection of 

 the human body. It was not till the arrival in 1873 of Professor 

 W. Donitz to fill the Chair of Anatomy in the newly estabUshed 

 Academy of Medicine in Tokyo that dissection first came to 

 be employed. This new era of medical science started under the 

 happiest circumstances, for frequent hangings, an aftermath 

 of internal strife, provided ample material for its prosecution. 2 



1 " The belief, common later, that the soul of the dead was not admitted 

 immediately to the realm of Hades, but wandered in loneliness on its confines 

 until the body was either burned or buried, is clearly expressed only in this 

 (Patroclus) passage, while possibly in only one other can it be assumed, in 

 all the Homeric poems. The wish for speedy rites sprang from a simpler 

 cause ; men did not want to have the bodies of their friends, or of themselves, 

 torn by wild beasts or vultures : nor does this even begin to show that they 

 had inherited old beliefs with regard to the connection between the soul of 

 the dead and the body, which this soul had once inhabited, leading to a certain 

 treatment of the body. That in earlier times, and perhaps by many Greeks 

 of Homer's age, the soul was thought to maintain a species of connection with 

 the body, and to care for it, cannot be doubted. But caution is necessary 

 that it may not be assumed that the Greeks, who maintained certain customs, 

 inherited also the beliefs on which those customs were originally based " 

 (Seymour, op. cit., p. 462). 



2 Professor G. H. Nuttall, in Parasitology (1913). V. 253. 



