424 HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY. 



it was, probably, not at first discerned. It is ob- 

 served that Homer, who describes the wounds which 

 are inflicted in his battles with so much apparent 

 anatomical precision, nowhere employs the word 

 muscle. And even Hippocrates of Cos, the most 

 celebrated physician of antiquity, is held to have 

 had no distinct conception of such an organ 1 . He 

 always employs the word flesh when he means 

 muscle, and the first explanation of the latter word 

 (iws) occurs in a spurious work ascribed to him. 

 For nerves, sinews, ligaments 2 , he uses indiscrimi- 

 nately the same terms ; (roVos or vevpov ;) and of 

 these nerves (vevpa) he asserts that they contract 

 the limbs. Nor do we find much more distinctness 

 on this subject even in Aristotle, a generation or 

 two later. " The origin of the vevpa" he says 3 , " is 

 from the heart; they connect the bones, and sur- 

 round the joints." It is clear that he means here 

 the muscles, and therefore it is with injustice that 

 he has been accused of the gross errour of deriving 

 the nerves from the heart. And he is held to have 

 really had the merit 4 of discovering the nerves of 

 sensation, which he calls the "canals of the brain" 

 (iropoi rov eyKe(f)a\ov) ; but the analysis of the me- 

 chanism of motion is left by him almost untouched. 

 Perhaps his want of sound mechanical notions, and 

 his constant straining after verbal generalities, and 



1 Sprengel, Geschichle der Arzneikunde, i. 382. 



2 Ib. i. 385. 3 Hist. Anim. iii. 5. 

 4 Sprengel, Gesch Arz. i. 456. 



