Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/129

Rh adds (that is, because we do not possess genera and generic names of this kind), "we must take the species separately and study the nature of each." "These passages," Whewell continues, "afford us sufficient ground for placing Aristotle at the head of those naturalists to whom the first views of the necessity of a zoological system are due '" (op cit., p. 352).

It is not necessary to dwell on the fact that from the time of Aristotle and his classical successors to the, close of the middle ages Europe thought itself too much preoccupied to pay particular attention to natural history; on the one hand with world-wide displacements and readjustments of peoples and of institutions, and on the other hand with the development of the great body of religious and metaphysical doctrines. Even the next epoch requiring our attention, the scholastic epoch in the history of science, so far as natural history is concerned, is perhaps rather a further interregnum than an epoch, rather an era or lapse of uneventful time, than a time of the slow ascension of some great illuminative idea. The anthropocentric idea dominated in natural history as the geocentric idea dominated in astronomy and hence a knowledge of the real or supposed properties of animals, and especially of plants, was chiefly cultivated in connection with alchemy, magic, materia medica, etc. The medieval imagination, full of mysticism, eager for the uncanny and fantastic and teeming with images of the ubiquitous devils, flourished on the marvelous tales of a "Sir John Mandeville," and peopled the earth with the monsters which so long survived and ramped in the Terræ Incognitæ of world maps. In the schools citations from authorities were accepted in lieu of proof, and the simple zoology of Aristotle and the scriptures was deeply covered by the accretions of learned exegesis.

However, it must be remembered that scholasticism had reached its prime as far back as the thirteenth century, in the system of the illustrious St. Thomas Aquinas, and that while the renaissance movement was discovering new worlds in all directions, scholasticism in general (but with some brilliant exceptions) had reached the phylo-gerontic stage, and was producing all sorts of bizarre specializations in terminology and in dialectic.

Nevertheless, it can not be doubted that the very excesses of scholasticism stimulated the reactive return to experience, which gave rise incidentally to biological science. Furthermore, the schoolmen perpetuated and aroused interest in Aristotle's analyses, and gave currency to many methods of analysis and description. Among these we may cite the dichotomous method of division, which is a forerunner of modern classifications, and the logical concepts of genus and species. Especially noteworthy was the expansion of classical Latin into a highly specialized language of philosophy and science.