NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1889
The most obvious and the most distinctive features of the History ofCivilisation, during the last fifty years, is the wonderful increaseof industrial production by the application of machinery, theimprovement of old technical processes and the invention of new ones,accompanied by an even more remarkable development of old and newmeans of locomotion and intercommunication. By this rapid and vastmultiplication of the commodities and conveniences of existence, thegeneral standard of comfort has been raised, the ravages of pestilenceand famine have been checked, and the natural obstacles, which timeand space offer to mutual intercourse, have been reduced in a manner,and to an extent, unknown to former ages. The diminution or removal oflocal ignorance and prejudice, the creation of common interests amongthe most widely separated peoples, and the strengthening of the forcesof the organisation of the commonwealth against those of political orsocial anarchy, thus effected, have exerted an influence on thepresent and future fortunes of mankind the full significance of whichmay be divined, but cannot, as yet, be estimated at its full value.
This revolution—for it is nothing less—in the political and socialaspects of modern civilisation has been preceded, accompanied, and ingreat measure caused, by a less obvious, but no less marvellous,increase of natural knowledge, and especially of that part of it whichis known as Physical Science, in consequence of the application ofscientific method to the investigation of the phenomena of thematerial world. Not that the growth of physical science is anexclusive prerogative of the Victorian age. Its present strength andvolume merely indicate the highest level of a stream which took itsrise, alongside of the primal founts of Philosophy, Literature, andArt, in ancient Greece; and, after being dammed up for a thousandyears, once more began to flow three centuries ago.
It may be doubted if even-handed justice, as free from fulsomepanegyric as from captious depreciation, has ever yet been dealt outto the sages of antiquity who, for eight centuries, from the time ofThales to that of Galen, toiled at the foundations of physicalscience. But, without entering into the discussion of that largequestion, it is certain that the labors of these early workers in thefield of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decayand disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation ofsociety, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters tothe problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma inthe Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall mento the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until thefifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a newstart, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had beendone by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of theRenaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers,were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners haddone.
The first serious attempts to carry further the unfinished work ofArchimedes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, of Aristotle and of Galen,naturally enough arose among the astronomers and the physicians. Forthe imperious necessity of seeking some remedy