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