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What is science? It is a question that cannot be answered easily, nor perhaps answered at all. None of the definitions seem to cover the field exactly; they are either too wide or too narrow. But we can see science in its growth and we can say that being a process it can exist only as growth. Where does the science of biology begin? Again we cannot say, but we can watch its evolution and its progress. Among the Greeks the accurate observation of living forms, which is at least one of the essentials of biological science, goes back very far. The word Biology, used in our sense, would, it is true, have been an impossibility among them, for bios refers to the life of man and could not be applied, except in a strained or metaphorical sense, to that of other living things.ssss1 But the ideas we associate with the word are clearly developed in Greek philosophy and the foundations of biology are of great antiquity.

The Greek people had many roots, racial, cultural, and spiritual, and from them all they inherited various powers and qualities and derived various ideas and traditions. The most suggestive source for our purpose is that of the Minoan race whom they dispossessed and whose lands they occupied. That highly gifted people exhibited in all stages of its development a marvellous power of graphically representing animal forms, of which the famous Cretan friezes, Vaphio cups (ssss1), and Mycenean lions provide well-known examples. It is difficult not to believe that the Minoan element, entering into the mosaic of peoples that we call the Greeks, was in part at least responsible for the like graphic power developed in the Hellenic world, though little contact has yet been demonstrated between Minoan and archaic Greek Art.