Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/143

Rh in view of its activity our predecessors were obliged to call retentive."$73$

The latter part of the third book is largely devoted to an exposition of the genesis and action of the four humors, which (Galen maintains) Hippocrates, Aristotle and others of the ancients, correctly and sufficiently set forth. He professes no one could "offer anything wiser than what has been said" by them. Yet even here, and still more palpably through other portions of this work, and indeed throughout all his writings, he does not follow Hippocrates and Aristotle as implicitly as he professes. He had learned more than either of them knew of the conduct of the body in health and disease. Yet, had he kept closer to the principles of sage Hippocrates, his writings would have shown a wiser reticence, and more respect for the actual boundaries of the writer's knowledge.

But Galen built his system out of his intellectual inheritance. His treatment of the old materials was affected by the mentality of the second century, in which he shared. He contributed personally the fruits of his own acute observation and experiment, and brought to bear upon the whole his extraordinary