HIS DISSECTION OF FISH II5 
heart being above the lungs, the emptiness of the occiput, 
etc,—can hardly be casual slips made by one familiar with 
human dissection. The passage, however, in Nat. Hist., VIL. 3, 
points distinctly to his having to some degree dissected the fetus, 
But this would not conflict with the third and weightiest 
reason, namely the strong repugnance felt by the Greeks to 
any mutilation of the body proper and any neglect of speedy 
burial. The sad appeal of the shade of the unburied Patroclus 
(Il., XXIII. 71 ff.): ‘ Bury me with all speed that I pass the 
gates of Hades. Far off the spirits banish me, nor do the 
phantoms of men outworn suffer me to mingle with them beyond 
the river,” the fervent desire of some of Homer’s Heroes that 
funeral rites should promptly follow their death,! and the 
agony of Antigone, all these and other instances manifest 
Greek sentiment. So strong and widespread was this 
that human dissection would have certainly aroused intense 
bitterness and probably caused the perpetual banishment of 
the perpetrator. The suggestion, resting on no evidence, 
that Aristotle dissected the human body secrefly can neither 
be proved, nor disproved. 
The Japanese, till recently, also refrained from dissection of 
the human body. It was not till the arrival in 1873 of Professor 
W. Donitz to fill the Chair of Anatomy in the newly established 
Academy of Medicine in Tokyo that dissection first came to 
beemployed. This new era of medical science started under the 
happiest circumstances, for frequent hangings, an aftermath 
of internal strife, provided ample material for its prosecution.? 
1 “ The belief, common later, that the soul of the dead was not admitted 
immediately to the realm of Hades, but wandered in loneliness on its confines 
until the body was either burned or buried, is clearly expressed only in this 
(Patroclus) passage, while possibly in only one other can it be assumed, in 
all the Homeric poems. The wish for speedy rites sprang from a simpler 
cause; men did not want to have the bodies of their friends, or of themselves, 
torn by wild beasts or vultures: nor does this even begin to show that they 
had inherited old beliefs with regard to the connection between the soul of 
the dead and the body, which this soul had once inhabited, leading to a certain 
treatment of the body. That in earlier times, and perhaps by many Greeks 
of Homer’s age, the soul was thought to maintain a species of connection with 
the body, and to care for it, cannot be doubted. But caution is necessary 
that it may not be assumed that the Greeks, who maintained certain customs, 
inherited also the beliefs on which those customs were originally based ”’ 
(Seymour, op. cit., p. 462). 
2 Professor G. H. Nuttall, in Parasitology (1913), V. 253. 
