History of biology / by L.C. Miall....

  • Louis Compton Miall
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: History of biology / by L.C. Miall...<Issued for the Rationalist press association, limited.>. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    15/168 page 3
    THE BIOLOGY OF THE ANCIENTS feet and a complex, ruminatingf stomach, and lack the upper incisor teeth ; hollow horns, supported by bony horn-cores, are not shed, but solid horns are shed every year; birds which are armed with spurs are never armed with lacerating claws ; insects which bear a sting in the head are always two-winged, but insects which bear their sting behind are four-winged. He traces analogies between things which are superficially unlike, such as plants and animals—the mouth of the animal and the root of the plant. The systematic naturalist is prone to attend chiefly to the differences between species ; Aristotle is equally interested in their resem- blances. The systematic naturalist arranges his descriptions under species, Aristotle under organs or functions; he is the first of the comparative anatomists. His conception of biology (the word but not the thing is modern) embraces both animals and plants, ana- tomy, physiology, and system. That he possessed a zoological system whose primary divisions were nearly as good as those of Linnaeus is clear from the names and distinctions which he employs ; but no formal system is set forth in his extant writings. His treatise on plants has unfortunately been lost. Aristotle, like all the Greeks, was unpractised in experiment. It had not yet been discovered that an experiment may quickly and certainly decide questions which might be argued at great length without result, nor that an experiment devised to answer one question may suggest others possibly more important than the first. Deliberate scientific experiments are so rare among the Greeks that we can hardly point to more than two those on refraction of light, commonly attributed to Ptolemy, and those by which Pythagoras is supposed to have ascertained the numerical relations
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