OUTLINE OF BIOLOGICAL PROGRESS 9 



world there was no science of biology as such; nevertheless, 

 the germ of it was contained in the medicine and the natural 

 history of those times. 



There is one matter upon which we should be clear: in 

 the time of Aristotle nature was studied by observation and 

 experiment. This is the foundation of all scientific ad- 

 vancement. Had conditions remained unchanged, there is 

 reason to believe that science would have developed steadily 

 on the basis of the Greek foundation, but circumstances, to 

 be spoken of later, arose which led not only to the complete 

 arrest of inquiry, but also, the mind of man being turned 

 away from nature, to the decay of science. 



Aristotle the Founder of Natural History. The Greeks 

 represented the fullest measure of culture in the ancient 

 world, and, naturally, we find among them the best-developed 

 science. All the knowledge of natural phenomena centered 

 in Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), and for twenty centuries he 

 represented the highest level which that kind of knowledge 

 had attained. 



It is uncertain how long it took the ancient observers to 

 lift science to the level which it had at the beginning of 

 Aristotle's period, but it is obvious that he must have had 

 a long line of predecessors, who had accumulated facts of 

 observation and had molded them into a system before he 

 perfected and developed that system. We are reminded 

 that all things are relative when we find Aristotle referring 

 to the ancients ; and well he might, for we have indubitable 

 evidence that much of the scientific work of antiquity has 

 been lost. One of the most striking discoveries pointing 

 in that direction is the now famous papyrus which was found 

 by Georg Ebers in Egypt about 1860. The recent trans- 

 lation of this ancient document shows that it was a treatise 

 on medicine, dating from the fifteenth century B.C. At this 

 time the science of medicine had attained an astonishingly 



