352 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES AND MEDICINE xiv 



seek for them now. The anger of a god was a 

 sufficient reason for the existence of a malady, and 

 a dream ample warranty for therapeutic measures ; 

 that a physical phenomenon must needs have a 

 physical cause was not the implied or expressed 

 axiom that it is to us moderns. 



The great man whose name is inseparably 

 connected with the foundation of medicine, Hip- 

 pocrates, certainly knew very little, indeed prac- 

 tically nothing, of anatomy or physiology ; and he 

 would, probably, have been perplexed even to 

 imagine the possibility of a connection between 

 the zoological studies of his contemporary 

 Democritus and medicine. Nevertheless, in so 

 far as he, and those who worked before and 

 after him, in the same spirit, ascertained, as 

 matters of experience, that a wound, or a luxa- 

 tion, or a fever, presented such and such symptoms, 

 and that the return of the patient to health was 

 facilitated by such and such measures, they es- 

 tablished laws of nature, and began the construc- 

 tion of the science of pathology. All true science 

 begins with empiricism though all true science 

 is such exactly, in so far as it strives to pass out 

 of the empirical stage into that of the deduction 

 of empirical from more general truths. Thus, it is 

 not wonderful, that the early physicians had little 

 or nothing to do with the development of bio- 

 logical science ; and, on the other hand, that the 

 early biologists did not much concern themselves 



