



Produced by Charles Keller





A HISTORY OF SCIENCE

BY HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, M.D., LL.D.

ASSISTED BY EDWARD H. WILLIAMS, M.D.

IN FIVE VOLUMES


VOLUME I. THE BEGINNINGS OF SCIENCE




   BOOK I.

   CONTENTS

   CHAPTER I. PREHISTORIC SCIENCE

   CHAPTER II. EGYPTIAN SCIENCE

   CHAPTER III. SCIENCE OF BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA

   CHAPTER IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALPHABET

   CHAPTER V. THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCIENCE

   CHAPTER VI. THE EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN ITALY

   CHAPTER VII. GREEK SCIENCE IN THE EARLY ATTIC PERIOD

   CHAPTER VIII. POST-SOCRATIC SCIENCE AT ATHENS

   CHAPTER IX. GREEK SCIENCE OF THE ALEXANDRIAN OR HELLENISTIC PERIOD

   CHAPTER X. SCIENCE OF THE ROMAN PERIOD

   CHAPTER XI. A RETROSPECTIVE GLANCE AT CLASSICAL SCIENCE

   APPENDIX




A HISTORY OF SCIENCE




BOOK I

Should the story that is about to be unfolded be found to lack interest,
the writers must stand convicted of unpardonable lack of art. Nothing
but dulness in the telling could mar the story, for in itself it is
the record of the growth of those ideas that have made our race and its
civilization what they are; of ideas instinct with human interest,
vital with meaning for our race; fundamental in their influence on human
development; part and parcel of the mechanism of human thought on the
one hand, and of practical civilization on the other. Such a phrase as
"fundamental principles" may seem at first thought a hard saying, but
the idea it implies is less repellent than the phrase itself, for
the fundamental principles in question are so closely linked with the
present interests of every one of us that they lie within the grasp of
every average man and woman--nay, of every well-developed boy and girl.
These principles are not merely the stepping-stones to culture, the
prerequisites of knowledge--they are, in themselves, an essential part
of the knowledge of every cultivated person.

It is our task, not merely to show what these principles are, but to
point out how they have been discovered by our predecessors. We shall
trace the growth of these ideas from their first vague beginnings. We
shall see how vagueness of thought gave way to precision; how a general
truth, once grasped and formulated, was found to be a stepping-stone to
other truths. We shall see that there are no isolated facts, no
isolated principles, in nature; that each part of our story is linked
by indissoluble bands with that which goes before, and with that which
comes after. For the most part the discovery of this principle or that
in a given sequence is no accident. Galileo and Keppler must precede
Newton. Cuvier and Lyall must come before Darwin;--Which, after all, is
no more than saying that in our Temple of Science, as in any other piece
of architecture, the foundation must precede the superstructure.

We shall best understand our story of the growth of science if we think
of each new principle as a stepping-stone which must fit into its own
particular niche; and if we reflect that the entire structure of modern
civilization would be different from what it is, and less perfect than
it is, had not that particular stepping-stone been found and shaped and
placed in position. Taken as a whole, our stepping-stones lead us up and
up towards the alluring heights of an acropolis of knowledge, on which
stands the Temple of Modern Science. The story of the building of this
wonderful structure is in itself fascinating and beautiful.




I. PREHISTORIC SCIENCE

To speak of a prehistoric science may seem like a contradiction of
terms. The word prehistoric seems to imply barbarism, while science,
clearly enough, seems the outgrowth of civilization; but rightly
considered, there is no contradiction. For, on the one hand, man had
ceased to be a barbarian long before the beginning of what we call the
historical period; and, on the other hand, science, of a kind, is no
less a precursor and a cause of civilization than it is a consequent. To
get this clearly in mind, we must ask ourselves: What, then, is science?
The word runs glibly enough upon the tongue of our every-day speech, but
it is not often, perhaps, that they who use it habitually ask themselves
just what it means. Yet the answer is not difficult. A little attention
will show that science, as the word is commonly used, implies these
things: first, the gathering of knowledge through observation; second,
the classification of such knowledge, and through this classification,
the elaboration of general ideas or principles. In the familiar
definition of Herbert Spencer, science is organized knowledge.

Now it is patent enough, at first glance, that the veriest savage must
have been an observer of the phenomena of nature. But it may not be so
obvious that he must also have been a classifier of his observations--an
organizer of knowledge. Yet the more we consider the case, the more
clear it will become that the two methods are too closely linked
together to be dissevered. To observe outside phenomena is not more
inherent in the nature of the mind than to draw inferences from these
phenomena. A deer passing through the forest scents the ground and
detects a certain odor. A sequence of ideas is generated in the mind of
the deer. Nothing in the deer's experience can produce that odor but
a wolf; therefore the scientific inference is drawn that wolves have
passed that way. But it is a part of the deer's scientific knowledge,
based on previous experience, individual and racial; that wolves are
dangerous beasts, and so, combining direct observation in the present
with the application of a general principle based on past experience,
the deer reaches the very logical conclusion that it may wisely turn
about and run in another direction. All this implies, essentially, a
comprehension and use of scientific principles; and, strange as it seems
to speak of a deer as possessing scientific knowledge, yet there is
really no absurdity in the statement. The deer does possess scientific
knowledge; knowledge differing in degree only, not in kind, from the
knowledge of a Newton. Nor is the animal, within the range of its
intelligence, less logical, less scientific in the application of that
knowledge, than is the man. The animal that could not make accurate
scientific observations of its surroundings, and deduce accurate
scientific conclusions from them, would soon pay the penalty of its lack
of logic.

What is true of man's precursors in the animal scale is, of course, true
in a wider and fuller sense of man himself at the very lowest stage
of his development. Ages before the time which the limitations of our
knowledge force us to speak of as the dawn of history, man had reached
a high stage of development. As a social being, he had developed all
the elements of a primitive civilization. If, for convenience of
classification, we speak of his state as savage, or barbaric, we use
terms which, after all, are relative, and which do not shut off our
primitive ancestors from a tolerably close association with our own
ideals. We know that, even in the Stone Age, man had learned how to
domesticate animals and make them useful to him, and that he had also
learned to cultivate the soil. Later on, doubtless by slow and painful
stages, he attained those wonderful elements of knowledge that enabled
him to smelt metals and to produce implements of bronze, and then of
iron. Even in the Stone Age he was a mechanic of marvellous skill, as
any one of to-day may satisfy himself by attempting to duplicate such an
implement as a chipped arrow-head. And a barbarian who could fashion
an axe or a knife of bronze had certainly gone far in his knowledge of
scientific principles and their practical application. The practical
application was, doubtless, the only thought that our primitive ancestor
had in mind; quite probably the question as to principles that might
be involved troubled him not at all. Yet, in spite of himself, he
knew certain rudimentary principles of science, even though he did not
formulate them.

Let us inquire what some of these principles are. Such an inquiry will,
as it were, clear the ground for our structure of science. It will
show the plane of knowledge on which historical investigation begins.
Incidentally, perhaps, it will reveal to us unsuspected affinities
between ourselves and our remote ancestor. Without attempting anything
like a full analysis, we may note in passing, not merely what primitive
man knew, but what he did not know; that at least a vague notion may be
gained of the field for scientific research that lay open for historic
man to cultivate.


It must be understood that the knowledge of primitive man, as we are
about to outline it, is inferential. We cannot trace the development
of these principles, much less can we say who discovered them. Some of
them, as already suggested, are man's heritage from non-human ancestors.
Others can only have been grasped by him after he had reached a
relatively high stage of human development. But all the principles here
listed must surely have been parts of our primitive ancestor's knowledge
before those earliest days of Egyptian and Babylonian civilization,
the records of which constitute our first introduction to the so-called
historical period. Taken somewhat in the order of their probable
discovery, the scientific ideas of primitive man may be roughly listed
as follows:

1. Primitive man must have conceived that the earth is flat and of
limitless extent. By this it is not meant to imply that he had a
distinct conception of infinity, but, for that matter, it cannot be said
that any one to-day has a conception of infinity that could be called
definite. But, reasoning from experience and the reports of travellers,
there was nothing to suggest to early man the limit of the earth. He
did, indeed, find in his wanderings, that changed climatic conditions
barred him from farther progress; but beyond the farthest reaches of
his migrations, the seemingly flat land-surfaces and water-surfaces