OUR BODILY FRAME. 23 



find more exact observations, founded on the dissec- 

 tion of mammals, and applied, by analogy, to the 

 human frame, until we come to the Greek scientists 

 of the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ — 

 Empedocles (of Agrigentum) and Democritus (of 

 Abdera), and especially the most famous physician of 

 classic antiquity, Hippocrates (of Cos). It was from 

 these and other sources that the great Aristotle, the 

 renowned " Father of natural history," equally com- 

 prehensive as investigator and philosopher, derived 

 his first knowledge. After him only one anatomist of 

 any consequence is found in antiquity, the Greek 

 physician, Claudius Galenus (of Pergamus), who 

 developed a wealthy practice in Rome in . the second 

 century after Christ, under the Emperor Marcus 

 Aurelius. All these ancient anatomists acquired their 

 knowledge, as a rule, not by the dissection of the 

 human body itself — which was then sternly forbidden 

 — but by a study of the bodies of the animals which 

 most closely resembled man, especially the apes ; they 

 were all, indeed, comparative anatomists. 



The triumph of Christianity and its mystic theories 

 meant retrogression to anatomy, as it did to all the 

 other sciences. The popes were resolved above all 

 things to detain humanity in ignorance ; they rightly 

 deemed a knowledge of the human organism to be a 

 dangerous source of enlightenment as to our true 

 nature. During the long period of thirteen centuries 

 the writings of Galen were almost the only source of 

 human anatomy, just as the works of Aristotle were 

 for the whole of natural history. It was not until the 

 sixteenth century, when the spiritual tyranny of the 

 Papacy was broken by the Reformation, and the geo- 

 centric theory, so intimately connected with Papal 



