1879 ARISTOTLE AS A PHYSIOLOGIST 263 



Respecting the Structure of the Heart, attributed to 

 Aristotle." 



Great interest attaches to this paper. He had 

 always wondered how Aristotle, in dissecting a heart, 

 had come to assert that it contained only three 

 chambers; and the desire to see for himself what 

 stood in the original, uncommented on by translators 

 who were not themselves anatomists, was one of the 

 chief reasons (I think the wish to read the Greek 

 Testament in the original was another) which 

 operated in making him take up the study of Greek 

 late in middle life. His practice was to read in his 

 book until he had come to ten new words ; these he 

 looked out, parsed, and wrote down together with 

 their chief derivatives. This was his daily portion. 



When at last he grappled with the passage in 

 question, he found that Aristotle had correctly 

 described what he saw under the special conditions 

 of his dissection, when the right auricle actually 

 appears as he described it, an enlargement of the 

 "great vein." So that this, at least, ought to be 

 removed from the list of Aristotle's errors. The same 

 is shown to be the case with his statements about 

 respiration. His own estimate of Aristotle as a 

 physiologist is between the panegyric of Cuvier and 

 the depreciation of Lewes : " he carried science a step 

 beyond the point at which he found it ; a meritorious, 

 but not a miraculous, achievement." And it will 

 interest scholars to know that from his own experience 

 as a lecturer, Huxley was inclined to favour the 



