Archimedes, and Aristarchus and Eratosthenes,
and Hipparchus and Hero, could have been the victims of such illusions
regarding occult forces of nature as were constantly postulated by
Oriental science. Herophilus and Erasistratus and Galen would hardly
have pursued their anatomical studies with equanimity had they believed
that ghostly apparitions watched over living and dead alike, and
exercised at will a malign influence.

Doubtless the Egyptian of the period considered the work, of the
Ptolemaic anatomists an unspeakable profanation, and, indeed, it was
nothing less than revolutionary--so revolutionary that it could not be
sustained in subsequent generations. We have seen that the great Galen,
at Rome, five centuries after the time of Herophilus, was prohibited
from dissecting the human subject. The fact speaks volumes for the
attitude of the Roman mind towards science. Vast audiences made up
of every stratum of society thronged the amphitheatre, and watched
exultingly while man slew his fellow-man in single or in multiple
combat. Shouts of frenzied joy burst from a hundred thousand throats
when the death-stroke was given to a new victim. The bodies of the
slain, by scores, even by hundreds, were dragged ruthlessly from the
arena and hurled into a ditch as contemptuously as if pity were
yet unborn and human life the merest bauble. Yet the same eyes that
witnessed these scenes with ecstatic approval would have been averted
in pious horror had an anatomist dared to approach one of the mutilated
bodies with the scalpel of science. It was sport to see the blade of the
gladiator enter the quivering, living flesh of his fellow-gladiator; it
was joy to see the warm blood spurt forth from the writhing victim while
he still lived; but it were sacrilegious to approach that body with the
knife of the anatomist, once it had ceased to pulsate with life. Life
itself was held utterly in contempt, but about the realm of death
hovered the threatening ghosts of superstition. And such, be it
understood, was the attitude of the Roman populace in the early and the
most brilliant epoch of the empire, before the Western world came
under the influence of that Oriental philosophy which was presently to
encompass it.

In this regard the Alexandrian world was, as just intimated, far more
advanced than the Roman, yet even there we must suppose that the leaders
of thought were widely at variance with the popular conceptions. A few
illustration