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A History of Science, Volume I, the Beginnings of Science

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A History of Science, Volume I, the Beginnings of Science A History of Science, Volume I, The Beginnings of Science Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D., assisted by Edward H. Williams, M.D. This public domain (U.S.) text was scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software. The Project Gutenberg edition (“1hsci10”) was subsequently converted to LATEX by means of GutenMark software (ver- sion Jan 5 2003), and modified (principally to correct formatting problems) by Ron Burkey. Numbered endnotes have been replaced with footnotes, to conform to the style of other books at sandroid.org. Greek text, which had been transliterated into latin characters, has been transliterated back into greek charac- ters; the result of the double transliteration, I am sure, is highly inaccurate. Report errors to [email protected]. Rev. A, 02/16/03. Proofing completed. Rev. B, 02/22/03. Various formatting correc- tions were made. Missing illustrations were added from independent online sources. Illustrations (possibly) scanned by S. A. Cohen. Rev. C, 03/01/03. Some illustrations were ro- tated to correct for scanning errors, and one was redrawn. Many ligatures were corrected. Contents FOREWORD 1 I. PREHISTORIC SCIENCE 5 II. EGYPTIAN SCIENCE 35 ASTRONOMICAL SCIENCE . 46 IDEAS OF COSMOLOGY . 57 CHARMS AND INCANTATIONS . 64 ABSTRACT SCIENCE . 73 III. SCIENCE OF BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA 79 BABYLONIAN ASTRONOMY . 87 ASTROLOGY . 95 CHALDEAN MAGIC . 101 BABYLONIAN MEDICINE . 109 ESTIMATES OF BABYLONIAN SCIENCE . 112 IV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALPHABET 127 FIRST STEPS . 133 i ii EGYPTIAN WRITING . 136 BABYLONIAN WRITING . 140 THE ALPHABET ACHIEVED . 147 V. THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCIENCE 153 VI. THE EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN ITALY 165 XENOPHANES AND PARMENIDES . 187 EMPEDOCLES . 194 VII. GREEK SCIENCE IN THE EARLY ATTIC PERIOD 203 ANAXAGORAS . 205 Anaxagoras as Meteorologist . 218 Biological Speculations . 220 Physical Speculations . 222 LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS . 231 HIPPOCRATES AND GREEK MEDICINE . 243 VIII. POST-SOCRATIC SCIENCE AT ATHENS—PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND THEOPHRASTUS 253 ARISTOTLE (384-322 B.C.) . 260 IX. GREEK SCIENCE OF THE ALEXANDRIAN OR HELLENISTIC PERIOD 269 EUCLID (ABOUT 300 B.C.) . 274 HEROPHILUS AND ERASISTRATUS . 275 iii ARCHIMEDES OF SYRACUSE AND THE FOUNDATION OF MECHANICS . 279 ARISTARCHUS OF SAMOS, THE COPERNICUS OF ANTIQUITY . 303 ERATOSTHENES, “THE SURVEYOR OF THE WORLD” . 321 HIPPARCHUS, “THE LOVER OF TRUTH” . 331 CTESIBIUS AND HERO: MAGICIANS OF ALEXANDRIA . 344 X. SCIENCE OF THE ROMAN PERIOD 361 STRABO THE GEOGRAPHER . 365 TWO FAMOUS EXPOSITORS— PLINY AND PTOLEMY . 378 PTOLEMY, THE LAST GREAT ASTRONOMER OF ANTIQUITY . 382 GALEN—THE LAST GREAT ALEXANDRIAN . 389 XI. A RETROSPECTIVE GLANCE AT CLASSICAL SCIENCE 407 APPENDIX: NOTES 427 iv FOREWORD 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 in- stinct with human interest, vital with mean- ing for our race; fundamental in their influ- ence 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 princi- ples” may seem at first thought a hard saying, but the idea it implies is less repellent than the phrase itself, for the fundamental prin- ciples 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 1 2 A HISTORY OF SCIENCE, BOOK I stepping-stones to culture, the prerequisites of knowledge—they are, in themselves, an es- sential part of the knowledge of every culti- vated 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 for- mulated, was found to be a stepping-stone to other truths. We shall see that there are no isolated facts, no isolated principles, in na- ture; that each part of our story is linked by indissoluble bands with that which goes be- fore, 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 re- flect that the entire structure of modern civ- FOREWORD 3 ilization would be different from what it is, and less perfect than it is, had not that par- ticular 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 Sci- ence. The story of the building of this wonder- ful structure is in itself fascinating and beau- tiful. 4 A HISTORY OF SCIENCE, BOOK I I. PREHISTORIC SCIENCE To speak of a prehistoric science may seem like a contradiction of terms. The word pre- historic seems to imply barbarism, while sci- ence, 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 be- ginning 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 habit- ually ask themselves just what it means. Yet the answer is not difficult. A little attention will show that science, as the word is com- monly used, implies these things: first, the 5 6 A HISTORY OF SCIENCE, BOOK I gathering of knowledge through observation; second, the classification of such knowledge, and through this classification, the elabora- tion of general ideas or principles. In the fa- miliar definition of Herbert Spencer, science is organized knowledge. Now it is patent enough, at first glance, that the veriest savage must have been an ob- server 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 phenom- ena is not more inherent in the nature of the mind than to draw inferences from these phe- nomena. 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 di- rect observation in the present with the appli- cation of a general principle based on past ex- perience, the deer reaches the very logical con- I. PREHISTORIC SCIENCE 7 clusion that it may wisely turn about and run in another direction. All this implies, essen- tially, 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 state- ment. The deer does possess scientific knowl- edge; knowledge differing in degree only, not in kind, from the knowledge of a Newton. Nor is the animal, within the range of its intel- ligence, less logical, less scientific in the ap- plication of that knowledge, than is the man. The animal that could not make accurate sci- entific 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 an- imal 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 so- cial being, he had developed all the elements of a primitive civilization. If, for convenience of classification, we speak of his state as sav- age, or barbaric, we use terms which, after all, are relative, and which do not shut off our primitive ancestors from a tolerably close as- 8 A HISTORY OF SCIENCE, BOOK I sociation with our own ideals. We know that, even in the Stone Age, man had learned how to domesticate animals and make them use- ful to him, and that he had also learned to cultivate the soil.
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