A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



of his "miracles" consisted of the preservation of a 

 dead body without putrefaction for some weeks after 

 death. We may assume from this that he had gained 

 in some way a knowledge of embalming. As he was 

 notoriously fond of experiment, and as the body in 

 question (assuming for the moment the authenticity 

 of the legend) must have been preserved without dis- 

 figurement, it is conceivable even that he had hit upon 

 the idea of injecting the arteries. This, of course, is 

 pure conjecture ; yet it finds a certain warrant, both in 

 the fact that the words of Pythagoras lead us to be- 

 lieve that the arteries were known and studied, and in 

 the fact that Empedocles' own words reveal him also 

 as a student of the vascular system. Thus Plutarch 

 cites Empedocles as believing "that the ruling part is 

 not in the head or in the breast, but in the blood; 

 wherefore in whatever part of the body the more of 

 this is spread in that part men excel." 13 And Em- 

 pedocles' own words, as preserved by Stobaeus, assert 

 " (the heart) lies in seas of blood which dart in opposite 

 directions, and there most of all intelligence centres for 

 men ; for blood about the heart is intelligence in the case 

 of man." All this implies a really remarkable apprecia- 

 tion of the dependence of vital activities upon the blood. 

 This correct physiological conception, however, was 

 by no means the most remarkable of the ideas to which 

 Empedocles was led by his anatomical studies. His 

 greatest accomplishment was to have conceived and 

 clearly expressed an idea which the modern evolution- 

 ist connotes when he speaks of homologous parts an 

 idea which found a famous modern expositor in Goethe, 

 as we shall see when we come to deal with eighteenth- 



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