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Previous Volume 340:1051 April 1, 1999 Number 13 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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Edited by Ante Lundberg. 233 pp. Mahwah, N.J., Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. $59.95. ISBN 0-8058-2907-5.

"The elements are simple bodies. They are the primary components of the human being throughout all its parts, as well as of other bodies in their varied and diverse forms. The various orders of beings depend for their existence on the intermixture of the elements." Thus wrote the Arabian philosopher Avicenna, author of The Canon, a textbook of medicine widely used in the Middle Ages throughout Europe and the Middle East. The elements were fire and air, earth and water.

Modern science has a different concept of the elements but perhaps not of the philosophical abstraction by which all bodies . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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