Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/70

 64 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

aments^ the choleric^ melancholic^ sanguine and lymphatic. He also first gave the so-called four cardinal signs of inflammation : heat^ swel- ling, redness and pain (calor, tumor, rubor and dolor). It is inter- esting to know that inflammation is possible without any of these four being present. Galen is less of the clinician and more of the systematist than Hippocrates; he is more of the anatomist and physiologist and less of the physician. His writings are very voluminous, for, besides on medical subjects he wrote on philosophical, grammatical, mathematical and legal topics. Forty-eight medical works alone are lost.

There is in Dalhousie University a Latin translation of the works of Galen by a Spaniard, Andreas Lacuna or Laguna, published at Strass- burg in 1604, which edition is not in the British Museum.

In a sense it is a fact, then, that all the conceptions which were the intellectual working ideas of the Middle Ages were given to us by the Greeks. The Somans contributed practically nothing to the body of knowledge called science or to that called medicine: Pliny tells us it was beneath the dignity of a Boman to be a physician. Action, not con- templation, was characteristic of the Boman temper.

The fundamental concepts in astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, the entire sciences of logic and ethics ; the speculations that were metar physical, the notion of species, of evolution and yet of the oneness of living matter, the doctrines of the indestructibility of matter, of energy as inherent in matter, of the ultimate atomic constitution of matter were all products of Greek thinking.

The mind of Hellas supplied the materials of thought for subsequent speculation; and in very truth it touched nothing which it did not adorn. From the Greeks we inherit mental subtlety and the analytical aspect of the intellect. The Middle Ages added surprisingly little to this mass of mental currency, though some of the Hellenic coins were sadly defaced by excessive handling. Christianity did indeed introduce certain conceptions far enough removed from anything that the classical ages had attained to, but these were chiefly in the sphere of morals; they were not in objective science. The thinkers of the Ages of Faith made it their concern to mix the philosophy of Plato and the metaphysics of Aristotle with as much of the teaching of the Nazarene as they felt inclined. But with this aspect of things we have no concern to-day, for in " science *' I do not for our present purpose include theology. The Middle Ages added no conceptions in regard to the universe or to life as fundamental or as comprehensive as those they inherited from pre- christian times. There were, of course, workers like Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon ; but how little encouragement or approval the latter, at any rate, received from his ecclesiastical contemporaries is very well known. Until that awakening of the mind of man known as the Sen- aissance, not only had thinkers not added anything essential to the body of natural knowledge handed down from antiquity, but a very great deal that the ancients had taught was either distorted or totally forgot-

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