Biology -- Greece -- History; Medicine, Greek and Roman
But there was another department in which the legacy of Greece found
an even earlier appreciation. For centuries the illustrations to
herbals and bestiaries had been copied from hand to hand, continuing
a tradition that had its rise with Greek artists of the first century
B. C. But their work, copied at each stage without reference to the
object, moved constantly farther from resemblance to the original. At
last the illustrations became little but formal patterns, a state in
which they remained in some late copies prepared as recently as the
sixteenth century. But at a certain period a change set in, and the
artist, no longer content to rely on tradition, appeals at last to
nature. This new stirring in art corresponds with the new stirring in
letters, the Arabian revival—itself a legacy of Greece, though sadly
deteriorated in transit—that gave rise to scholasticism. In much of the
beautiful carved and sculptured work of the French cathedrals the new
movement appears in the earlier part of the thirteenth century. At such
a place as Chartres we see the attempt to render plants and animals
faithfully in stone as early as 1240 or before. In the easier medium of
parchment the same tendency appears even earlier. When once it begins
the process progresses slowly until the great recovery of the Greek
texts in the fifteenth century, when it is again accelerated.
During the sixteenth century the energy of botanists and zoologists was
largely absorbed in producing most carefully annotated and illustrated
editions of Dioscorides and Theophrastus and accounts of animals,
habits, and structure that were intended to illustrate the writings of
Aristotle, while the anatomists explored the bodies of man and beast
to confirm or refute Galen. The great monographs on birds, fishes, and
plants of this period, ostensibly little but commentaries on Pliny,
Aristotle, and Dioscorides, represent really the first important
efforts of modern times at a natural history. They pass naturally into
the encyclopaedias of the later sixteenth century, and these into the
physiological works of the seventeenth. Aristotle was never a dead hand
in Biology as he was in Physics, and this for the reason that he was a
great biologist but was not a great physicist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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