OUTLINE OF BIOLOGICAL PROGRESS 9 
world there was no science of biology as such; nevertheless, 
the germ of it was contained in the medicine and the natural 
history of those times. 
There is one matter upon which we should be clear: in 
the time of Aristotle nature was studied by observation and 
experiment. This is the foundation of all scientific ad- 
vancement. Had conditions remained unchanged, there is 
reason to believe that science would have developed steadily 
on the basis of the Greek foundation, but circumstances, to 
be spoken of later, arose which led not only to the complete 
arrest of inquiry, but also, the mind of man being turned 
away from nature, to the decay of science. 
Aristotle the Founder of Natural History.—The Greeks 
represented the fullest measure of culture in the ancient 
world, and, naturally, we find among them the best-developed 
science. All the knowledge of natural phenomena centered 
in Aristotle (384-322 B.c.), and for twenty centuries he 
represented the highest level which that kind of knowledge 
had attained. 
It is uncertain how long it took the ancient observers to 
lift science to the level which it had at the beginning of 
Aristotle’s period, but it is obvious that he must have had 
a long line of predecessors, who had accumulated facts of 
observation and had molded them into a system before he 
perfected and developed that system. We are reminded 
that all things are relative when we find Aristotle referring 
to the ancients; and well he might, for we have indubitable 
evidence that much of the scientific work of antiquity has 
been lost. One of the most striking discoveries pointing 
in that direction is the now famous papyrus which was found 
by Georg Ebers in Egypt about 1860. The recent trans- 
lation of this ancient document shows that it was a treatise 
on medicine, dating from the fifteenth century B.c. At this 
time the science of medicine had attained an astonishingly 
