Book Reviews : Ancient natural history: histories of nature. By R. French. London, Routledge. 1994. xxii + 362 pp. £50.00, cloth. ISBN 0 415 08880 1

Abstract

This book, by the Director of the unit for the history of medicine at Cambridge, is published as part of a series dedicated to the sciences in antiquity. ’The ways in which people in the ancient world thought about nature’ are here analysed, through the study of various texts by Ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish authors. In Chapter 1 French shows that the Greek word for ’Nature’ ( physis) has not much to do with one of the meanings we today give to this term. Indeed, physis has never meant ’natural world’, understood as a collection of non-artificial liv-