632 



NATURE 



[October 25, 1900 



therapeutical experiments which are manifest on the outside of 

 the body. Yet surgery fell under the proscription of a handi- 

 craft, and as such was eliminated from the colleges of physicians 

 both in London and Paris. Thus the genuine work of such men 

 as Pare and Gale were without influence upon medicine, and 

 thus it came about that Francis Bacon said of the physicians of 

 Harvey's day that they saw things from afar off, as if from a 

 high tower. From Erasistratus to Celsus, physicians practised 

 medicine as one art. Galen taught, not the simplicity, but the 

 unity of medicine ; and Littre points out that this unity is con- 

 sistent in the Hippocratic writings. Surgery, by virtue of its 

 imperative methods, was kept clear of philosophy on the one 

 hand and of humanism on the other. Fortunately for Harvey, 

 his master, Fabricius, was as great a surgeon as anatomist ; and 

 such was Fallopius. Thus it was that medicine, at the end of 

 the Middle Ages, had not recovered the standard of Alexandria. 

 And against this adversity, also, had the founder of physiology 

 to contend. 



Happily the Arabian scholastic philosophy took its root in 

 Alexandria when neo-platonism had veered towards Aristotle, 

 and it was therefore more uniformly peripatetic than the Christian 

 scholasticism. It is one of the signs of the greatness of 

 Aristotle that, thus garbled and glossed, his power made itself 

 felt in the thirteenth century, chiefly by the great Franciscans 

 Alexander Hales, Roger Bacon, and William Ockham — Roger 

 Bacon, whom we may call the first of the natural philosophers 

 of the West. This former renascence determined the second 

 period of the Middle Ages : the period distinguished by the 

 Arabian version of Aristotle, by a check to the chimseras of 

 realism, by some liberty of secular knowledge — for even bishops 

 came out of the school of Toledo — and again by the coming of 

 the Friars, whose influence upon the thought of the Middle 

 Ages was a curious proof that, as all ways are said to lead to 

 Rome, so all systems of thought, in spite of the thinkers, led to 

 natural science. The logic and rhetoric of the Dominicans, 

 by their rationalism, defined, and in defining restricted, the 

 dominion of the Faith. Men got used to reason, and made a 

 language for thought. And in the history of the unlearned 

 Friars Minors we find, as elsewhere in history, that mysticism is 

 more favourable to natural knowledge than the passionate dog- 

 matism of Clairvaux or the dogmatic rationalism of St. Thomas. 

 The Victorians, as Gerson after them, despised reason rather 

 than feared it ; mysticism makes for individual religion, as in 

 Glisson and Newton, rather than for the Church. Hence it 

 may have been that independent thinkers, like Hales and 

 Bacon and Ockham, entered the Franciscan Order. The 

 former renascence bred also a more tolerant spirit. Albert 

 of Cologne owed as much to Avicenna as St. Thomas 

 to Averroes : sages technically damnable, yet " mighty spirits," 

 worthy of reverence. Dante put in hell, but on green 

 meadows, in an open place, lofty and luminous, not only 

 Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, but also Euclid, Ptolemy, Hip- 

 pocrates, Avicenna, Galen and "Averroes who made the great 

 commentary." Universities were founded in France, England 

 and Italy. But the natural science which made the second re- 

 nascence irresistible was absent from the former ; and at the 

 end of the century a reaction set in. During the two following 

 centuries in Spain freedom of thought was crushed out by the 

 Church ; but in the conflagration of books of philosophy, medical 

 works, such as the "Colliget" and the Commentary on Galen 

 of Averroes, were largely spared ; yet in the fourteenth and 

 fifteenth centuries the very name of Averroes, ' ' the mad dog 

 that barked against the Christ," not only became ecclesiastically 

 accursed, but also began to signify loose life as well as free 

 thought ; a resentment of which there was no trace in Albert or 

 Aquinas. 



Averroism, however, held its ground at Padua, which had 

 become celebrated for medicine as Bologna for law ; and 

 although Averroism, like any other philosophy taught as a 

 separate study, decayed, yet, effetevas it was, it kept the ground 

 open at a time when the tide was turning against free thought ; 

 when the commercial supremacy of Venice was declining, when 

 the Spanish Inquisition was established in Rome, and when even 

 the influence of the Florentine humanists was rather against 

 natural knowledge than for it. No doubt the coarse and dis- 

 ingenuous scepticism of the physicians of North Italy and their 

 pretentious manners alienated the humanists, not only from 

 themselves, but also from natural philosophers such as Tfelesius 

 and Galileo ; and Averroists and humanists alike stood by at the 

 burning of Bruno. Harvey entered Padua at a fortunate time ; 



NO. 16 1 7, VOL. 62] 



he found Galileo engaged in teaching, and also in methodical 

 research ; and Galileo -was not only a great discoverer, but 

 was the first to formulate fully and clearly that method which 

 we know under the name of the inductive method. The dis- 

 covery of Greek texts had destroyed the conventional Aristotle 

 and the conventional Galen ; Gregory, by the reform of the 

 calendar, had put the axe to the root of astrology ; Newton was 

 soon to carry terrestrial physics into celestial spheres ; and 

 Boyle was soon to create chemistry ; while anatomy was fully 

 awake already. In England, moreover, with the accession of 

 Elizabeth more spacious times were assured, and Charles pro- 

 tected Harvey. Clinical teaching had been established at Padua 

 by Fracastorius and Montanus, to be pursued in Heidelberg, 

 Leyden and Vienna. Physiology, however, awaited Harvey. 

 Seryeius had buried his conception of the lesser circulation under 

 a pile of theology ; Columbo and Fabricius had prepared 

 the way, not so much by the value of their discoveries as 

 by their practice of the experimental method in this science ; 

 for the anatomists, Galenists to a man, had done next to nothing 

 for physiology. 



The genius and courage required to make discoveries like that 

 of the circulation of the blood cannot be measured directly ; 

 there is no method of determining the specific gravity of such 

 adventures ; I have tried, however, to shadow forth the weight 

 of the social systems, opinions, prejudices and habits against 

 which Harvey's gigantic effort was made. Almost in the year 

 of the puljlication of the " De Motu Cordis" (a.d. 1628), the 

 Parliament of Paris issued an edict that no teacher shall promul- 

 gate anything contrary to the accepted doctrines of the ancients. 

 Under such conventions Harvey's discovery burst like an earth- 

 quake ; under corrupt Galenism, venerable sophistries, current 

 abstractions bequeathed by realism, and long-winded dialectics on 

 critical days, coctions, derivatives or revulsives, and dogmas 

 based on uncritical subservience to texts. His work stood out 

 even more ascendant against a lurid background of folk super- 

 stitions — of vampyres, witch-burning, magic, cabbalism, astro- 

 logy, alchemy, chiromancy and water -casting. In terrestrial and 

 celestial physics, Galileo, persecuted as he was, had some strong 

 current with him ; Copernicus was before him, Kepler was 

 beside him : but in physiology upon the path of Galen the 

 waters had closed as upon the track of a great ship, and among 

 Harvey's contemporaries and immediate forerunners there was 

 none to claim a share with him in the discovery of the central 

 fact of physiology, or in his application of the method which 

 opened the way to Pecquet, Glisson, Steno, Wharton, Willis, 

 Haller and Bernard. 



THE ANNUAL CONGRESS OF THE GERMAN 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 

 "T^HE thirty-first Congress of the German Anthropological 

 Society was held in the University town of Halle from 

 September 24-27. In addition to its rich University collec- 

 tions, a special interest is attached to Halle as being the seat 

 of the oldest German society for encouraging the study of 

 natural science, viz. the Leopoldina- Carolina Academy, which 

 is thus comparable to the Royal Society in this country. To 

 students of prehistoric archeology, the Prussian province of 

 Saxony is chiefly interesting from the fact of the existence 

 of copper-mines at Eisleben, some little distance from Halle. 

 The meetings were hefd under the presidency of Prof. Virchow, 

 assisted by Prof. Ranke. At the opening session on Monday, 

 September 24, the presidential address (dealing with the 

 general progress of anthropological study and teaching) was 

 followed by a series of addresses from representatives of the 

 University and town of Halle, of which that of the local secre- 

 tary. Dr. Fortsch, is particularly noteworthy as containing a 

 sketch of local prehistoric archaeology, a field of research in 

 which Dr. Fortsch has been particularly active, and which he has 

 popularised with evident success. Of the subsequent communi- 

 cations to the Congress, the majority of which dealt with archae- 

 ology, there appear to us most worthy of mention the discussion 

 opened by Prof. Virchow on the "Earliest appearance of the 

 Slavs in Germany," and the account (illustrated with excellent 

 lantern slides) given by Dr. Birkner (Munich) of the investiga- 

 tion of the graves of the German Emperors in Speyer. Prof. 

 V. Fritzsch (Halle) and Dr. Lehmann-Nitzsche (La Plata) ren- 

 dered interesting accounts of discoveries of prehistoric man in 

 Thiiringia and in the Argentine respectively, the latter record 



