f the skin
more delicate and softer looking tubes, which do not pulsate, which are
of a bluish colour, and are termed the veins. And every person who has
seen a recently killed animal opened knows that these two kinds of tubes
to which I have just referred, are connected with an apparatus which
is placed in the chest, which apparatus, in recently killed animals,
is still pulsating. And you know that in yourselves you can feel the
pulsation of this organ, the heart, between the fifth and sixth ribs. I
take it that this much of anatomy and physiology has been known from the
oldest times, not only as a matter of curiosity, but because one of the
great objects of men, from their earliest recorded existence, has been
to kill one another, and it was a matter of considerable importance to
know which was the best place for hitting an enemy. I can refer you to
very ancient records for most precise and clear information that one of
the best places is to smite him between the fifth and sixth ribs. Now
that is a very good piece of regional anatomy, for that is the place
where the heart strikes in its pulsations, and the use of smiting there
is that you go straight to the heart. Well, all that must have been
known from time immemorial--at least for 4,000 or 5,000 years before the
commencement of our era--because we know that for as great a period as
that the Egyptians, at any rate, whatever may have been the case with
other people, were in the enjoyment of a highly developed civilisation.
But of what knowledge they may have possessed beyond this we know
nothing; and in tracing back the springs of the origin of everything
that we call "modern science" (which is not merely knowing, but knowing
systematically, and with the intention and endeavour to find out
the causal connection of things)--I say that when we trace back the
different lines of all the modern sciences we come at length to one
epoch and to one country--the epoch being about the fourth and fifth
centuries before Christ, and the country being ancient Greece. It is
there that we find the commencement and the root of every branch of
physical science and of scientific method. If we go back to that time
we have in the works attributed to Aristotle, who flourished between 300
and 400 years before Christ, a sort of encyclopaedia of the scientific
knowledge of that day--and a very marvellous collection of, in many
respects, accurate and precise knowledge it is. But, so far as regar