CHAPTER IX 



ZOOLOGY IN THE TIME OF 

 SHAKESPEARE 



THROUGH the Middle Ages natural science was a 

 study of the written word of ancient writers, 

 whose authority went unquestioned. Processes 

 of observation or experiment were barely known. 

 To this medieval tradition the age of Shakespeare, 

 in its attitude to scientific study, was to a large 

 extent loyal. Authority was still final and definite. 

 What Galen and Hippocrates, Aristotle and Pliny 

 had written was subject-matter for dialectic, 

 for discussion, for argument, but not for direct 

 investigation. In the same way the new light 

 derived from the Arabs, which spread through 

 the learned world at the latter end of the twelfth 

 and at the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, 

 was treated as a matter for dialectics by those 

 who set the written word before actual observa- 

 tion or experiment in Nature. 



Let us consider the books in English at the 



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