The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

INTRODUCTION

for the first time, of dissection and of vivisection at Alexandria. Men were beginning to pry into the mechanism of these sympathetic creatures so like and yet so unlike themselves. The question whether vivisection was actually performed upon human subjects in Alexandria is still an open one. A little later than the Hellenic spurt came a phase of botanical experimentation, and particularly of experiments in acclimatization and plant-collection under Asoka, in

India. The four centuries before Christ were years of exceptional stir and expansion

in the intellectual Baa ea ~~ world. But as the

vast organization of Rome wasted Sicily, North Africa, Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor, Spain, as it staggered through its brief uneasy centuries of feasts, circuses and general grossness, to collapse at length into barbaric confusion, the impetus of that intellectual dawn died away, and the first harvest of biological knowledge shrank to neglected manuscripts in the libraries of the acquisitive illiterate, and was well-nigh forgotten. The biology of that first phase of scientific activity was not perhaps so remarkable on the whole as its astronomical and mathematical achievements. The dissection undertaken was not sufhciently systematic to leave the world a thorough collection of drawings and traced connections, and no special results seem to have accrued from the vivisection done. It seems to have been a very occasional effort of curiosity. It is remarkable that no resort was had to any magnifying contrivance. ‘The use of a waterflask for magnifying objects may have been known, and probably was known, to the jewellers of ancient Egypt, but it never seems to have got through to the philosophers. Guild barriers and class restrictions may have prevented the necessary intercourse between learning and technical skill.

Fig. 1. One of the Jirst biological microScopes—an instrument made and used by Anthony van Leeuven-

hoek (1632-1723). The magnification (up to

160 diameters) is accomplished by a single lens

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The onset of Christianity and Christian monasticism in the declining Romanized world helped to check the development of biological curiosity. Neither secular art nor secular learning had a place in the Christian scheme of salvation. And concurrently with the spread of Christianity came a deepened sense of sin, an enhanced fear of lurking snares and temptations, which cramped enquiry. This or that knowledge might perhaps prove to be forbidden and unholy knowledge. The Greek mind had attained a fairly free, candid, and experimental attitude towards thought in Athens and Alexandria between the fifth and third centuries B.c., but the mind of the decaying Roman Empire, and still more so that of the confused centuries that followed, was obsessed by a sincere terror of the Tree of Knowledge. The dissection of animals could no longer be thought of as a frank examination of something curiously and fascinatingly hidden; it was a process touched with a quality of monstrosity, a vile prying into entrails for base and evil ends, best done in the dark of the moon. These feelings were not in the least humanitarian ; they did not deter the medieval world from the most liberal use of rack and thumbscrew and every form of torture, nor from the infliction of death in exquisitely painful forms, but they made men recoil from the cool and deliberate investigations of the anatomist’s knife. Why should you cut up a man, unless you hated him and wanted to triumph over his poor remains? ‘That one could understand. To dissect things simply in order to see and know was to defy the powers that had hidden his own interior from man. It was presumption. It was not good, honest cruelty ; it was pride and impiety to do such things.

Let us not suggest that the restriction upon intelligent curiosity, the submergence of the first beginnings of scientific biology in Europe and western Asia by the Roman civilization, was the coming of a new and unprecedented darkness upon the human mind. Still less would we attach any specific blame to the spread of Christian doctrine assuch. Quite outside the Christian movement, the Roman world was pervaded by a géneral drift towards magic and superstitious squalor. The Pagans just as much as the Christians felt the fear and fascination of things forbidden. It was a relapse to a congenial obscurity from which man had for a brief period emerged. The great age of Greece was an exceptional release of intellectual courage in the ancient world.