CH. v. CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



35 



in our brain that we feel ; Galen proved this by many ex- 

 periments, though he did not understand clearly the whole 

 action of the nerves. He also proved that the veins of our 

 body contain blood, and he described the two muscles 

 which by their contraction pull down the lower jaw as we 

 open and pull it up as we shut our mouths. Besides these 

 and many other discoveries, Galen worked out a whole 

 theory of medicine, and how doctors were to treat their 

 patients, and his rules were the guide of physicians for 

 many hundred years. 



Concluding Remarks on Greek Science. We have 

 now come to an end of the science of the Greeks. You 

 will read in Grecian history how Greece and the Greek 

 colonies were conquered by the Romans more than a 

 hundred years before Christ was born ; and when the 

 Greeks ceased to be a free people they gradually lost their 

 love of discovery and of science. The school at Alexandria 

 continued to be famous for many centuries after Christ, 

 but the professors who taught there only repeated the say- 

 ings of Ptolemy, Aristotle, Galen, and the other great dis- 

 coverers, and did not find out new facts for themselves ; 

 and at last, in the year 640 after Christ, the Arabs took 

 possession of the city, and it soon ceased altogether to be 

 Greek. 



You must remember that in these five chapters we have 

 only been able to speak of some of the greatest men, and 

 then only of a few of the discoveries they made. You will 

 hear of many celebrated Greek philosophers, as, for example, 

 Socrates and Plato, whose names are not mentioned here 

 because they taught on subjects such as the mind and the 

 soul, which belong to higher philosophy, and not to Natural 

 Science. You will also hear of many strange and absurd 

 notions about the causes of things which in those early 

 5 



