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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt:... III. ARISTOTLE'S BIOLOGY UR DEBT to Greek biology is not to be appraised through any attempt to trace a causal continuity between Greece and the modern world in the development of this science, or group of sciences. The continuity is problematical and lacking in causality. Modern biological science sprang from the direct investigation of the natural objects forming its provinces. Modern anatomy for instance, arose with Leonardo and Vesalius from dissections of human bodies and not from study of books. It is not to be regarded as a graft upon the ancient stock. The fundamental aim of biology, with the Greeks and with ourselves, has been to learn about living organisms. Nevertheless, Greek biology differed from the modern biological sciences in origins and associations, in method and in temperament. Our present debt to the ancient time is owing not a little to these differences. Let us see. In origins;--Greek science began in the large unity of the grand desire to know the As constituents and processes of the world. It was pursued by men whom we have been taught to call philosophers; and in fact only gradually did philosophy, more properly speaking, differentiate itself from physics, that is, from the elemental attempt to observe and know the physical world. Greek philosophy was to consist of logical and metaphysical conceptions; Greek physical, or let us say specifically biological, science was to continue as observation and induction. Yet it did not part company from philosophy, and occasionally employed the same processes of logic and even metaphysics. The same men might still be both scientists and philosophers--or metaphysicians. The greatest of Greek biologists was very nearly the greatest of Greek philosophers; and Aristotle the...