A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



synonym for scepticism in recognition of the leader- 

 ship of a master doubter. The entire school of 

 Alexandrians must have been relatively free from 

 superstition, else they could not have reasoned with 

 such effective logicality from their observations of 

 nature. It is almost inconceivable that men like 

 Euclid and Archimedes, and Aristarchus and Era- 

 tosthenes, and Hipparchus and Hero, could have been 

 the victims of such illusions regarding occult forces 

 of nature as were constantly postulated by Orien- 

 tal science. Herophilus and Erasistratus and Galen 

 would hardly have pursued their anatomical studies 

 with equanimity had they believed that ghostly ap- 

 paritions watched over living and dead alike, and 

 exercised at will a malign influence. 



Doubtless the Egyptian of the period considered 

 the work of the Ptolemaic anatomists an unspeakable 

 profanation, and, indeed, it was nothing less than rev- 

 olutionary so revolutionary that it could not be 

 sustained in subsequent generations. We have seen 

 that the great Galen, at Rome, five centuries after 

 the time of Herophilus, was prohibited from dissecting 

 the human subject. The fact speaks volumes for the 

 attitude of the Roman mind towards science. Vast 

 audiences made up of every stratum of society thronged 

 the amphitheatre, and watched exultingly while man 

 slew his fellow-man in single or in multiple combat. 

 Shouts of frenzied joy burst from a hundred thou- 

 sand throats when the death-stroke was given to a new 

 victim. The bodies of the slain, by scores, even by 

 hundreds, were dragged ruthlessly from the arena and 

 hurled into a ditch as contemptuously as if pity were 



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