A History of Science; Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. byGeorge SartonReview by: S. SamburskyIsis, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Dec., 1960), pp. 590-591Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/228631 .

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590 BOOK REVIEWS

est a bontanist much more than a classi- cal philologist, since even after a hundred years the sharp observations of Daubeny have not lost their value.

The print in Gunther's edition is exe- cuted with the same care as the repro- ductions of the Byzantine illustrations, many of which are page-sized. (Here it is necessary particularly to emphasize the carefulness of the Hafner Publishing Co., New York, and of the personnel of the Noble Offset Printers, Inc., New York.) The illustration on page 662, appropriately representing the impor- tance of the mysterious plant mandrake, is sure to captivate all historians of medicine.

Gunther's edition of the work of Di- oscorides is a unique scientific work, a prominent work deserving of high praise. It should be studied by the widest circle of scientists, physicians, pharmaceutics, historians, and classical philologists. Gunther's edition brings close to all of them the great legacy of Dioscorides to our century.

(I thank my friend V. Zelezny for the careful translation of this review into English.)

JAROSLAV LEVY Plzen, Czechoslovakia

GEORGE SARTON: A History of Science; Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. xvii + 554 pp., illus., bibl. Cambridge, Mass.: Har- vard University Press, 1959. $11.00.

George Sarton's last book, on Hellen- istic science and culture in the last three centuries B.C., clearly shows the defects of its author's virtues. He was a poly- histor of considerable dimensions, and the picture he draws dissolves into a perplexing mosaic of variegated details. He was one of the great bibliographers of our time, and the book could be char- acterized as a collection of biographic and bibliographic essays rather than as an integrated story of the period. He was a great synthesizer of science and the humanities, and in his endeavour for a synthesis he overshot the mark and, by dwelling too much on culture in general, he did not give science its due.

Throughout this volume Sarton accu-

mulates an astonishing wealth of mate- rial, in the text as well as in footnotes, invaluable for all students of Hellenism. Among the subjects treated, apart from science, is such a variety of items as the lighthouse of Alexandria (the "Pharos"), ancient libraries, statues of Aphrodite in the Hellenistic age, Greek and Roman historians, Asoka and Bud- dhism, Hebrew literature and Hellenism, the Dead Sea scrolls, Virgil's poems and their earliest printed translations-to mention only a few topics picked at ran- dom. Most welcome are Sarton's care- ful and detailed accounts of the trans- mission of the great classical works (Euclid, Archimedes, Lucretius, etc.) and their translations during the follow- ing centuries until the beginning of the modern era. These records will espe- cially be appreciated by all students of the parentage of modern science in an- tiquity.

Sarton emphasizes in his preface that his aim was to cover as many facts as possible of Hellenistic science and cul- ture without doing injustice to one part by entering into too great detail of an- other. This kind of balance is apt to lead to a blurring of the picture. "The main difficulty of a synthesis lies in the choice of subjects" (p. xii). Such a choice, should it lead to an integrated picture, must necessarily be combined with an outspoken preference given to a few sub- jects over others. In a volume of more than 520 pages of text, only about 60 altogether are devoted to the works of such men as Euclid, Archimedes, Apol- lonios, Eratosthenes and Hipparchos, and these pages include accounts of their subsequent tradition and reproductions from early editions. As against this, Hellenistic literature, art and philology are given more than 100 pages.

Hellenistic civilization is characterized by the formation of systems of scientific thought incorporated in philosophical doctrines. Very little of this can be found in the book. Surely atomism and its magnificent attempt at an inference from the visible to the invisible deserved more than a few lines. Sarton's remark that, although the experimental basis of Epicurean atomism was too small, it "was not an irresponsible theory" (p. 271), seems oddly apologetic. The let-

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BOOK REVIEWS 591

ters of Epicuros are not mentioned at all, as far as I am aware. Still more neglected are the Stoics and their con- tinuum physics. No mention is made of the pneuma and the pneumatic tension and their physical and cosmological sig- nificance-the counterpart of Stoic cos- mopolitism. Stoic determinism and its implications, so important in later dis- cussions, surely should have been given some consideration. The same applies to the highly significant Stoic innovations in logic which represent such a decisive step beyond Aristotelian logic.

The whole philosophical climate of the Hellenistic era is characterized by a trend away from the rigid framework of Aristotelian physics. This is a most im- portant feature in the history of ideas, because it shows the impact of later sci- entific discoveries and technological de- velopments on a doctrine which aspired to a certain conclusiveness. This is true already of Straton whose physics was more than "an adaptation of Aristotelian physics to more detailed knowledge" (p. 33). Sarton mentions only briefly Xenarchos of Seleuceia and his treatise against the Aristotelian aether. It would have been worth while to quote some of Xenarchos' statements and his argu- ments against Aristotle's dynamics, as well as Hipparchos' interesting anti- Aristotelian views on weight and natural motion and the first ideas of the impetus developed by him.

As to the presentation of the material, arguments can be adduced both in favour and against the arrangement chosen by Sarton. A division into subjects like mathematics, astronomy, etc., is of course essential, but the separate treat- ment of the third century and the follow- ing two centuries seems not to be con- ducive to the coherence of the whole story. Moreover, would a history of Hellenistic science not gain in clarity and consistency when continued up to the second half of the second century A.D.? One could easily plead even for a later date, say the closure of the Acad- emy by Justinian. However, that prob- ably would have added too much to the bulk of the book. But certainly Plutarch, Ptolemy and Galen should be included in a volume that treats of Cicero, Hip- parchos and Erasistratos. Their works

and teachings are a natural continuation of those of the last centuries B.C. and they still lived in a cultural climate that was largely unaffected by the great spir- itual movements of early Christianity and Neo-Platonism.

The whole of Hellemnstic culture, in- cluding science and technology, is per- haps too complex a subject to be treated satisfactorily in a single work, or even by a single author. Seneca's words re- lating to the progress of science ("a single generation is not enough for the solution of such great problems") can be applied also to the writing of the his- tory of science. New attempts at the history of Hellenistic science may be made, and should they prove more suc- cessful than Sarton's, they will certainly owe this in no small measure to Sarton's great "Introduction" and to his other admirable achievements, the fruits of a life of tireless devotion to scholarship.

S. SAMBURSKY Hebrew University, Jerusalem

A. C. CROMBIE: Medieval and Early Modern Science. Vol. I. Science in the Middle Ages: V-XIII Centuries. xxii + 296 pp. Vol. II. Science in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: XIII-XVII Centuries. xvii + 380 pp., illus., bibl. Garden City, N.Y.: Double- day and Company, Inc., 1959. 950 per volume.

This second edition of Crombie's Augustine to Galileo; The History of Science A.D. 400-1650 (London: Fal- con Educational Books, 1952; Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953) will undoubtedly intensify admiration for a book which has already done so much to provide students and scholars with a deep insight into the sig- nificant currents of medieval and early modern science.

Since an excellent detailed and pene- trating chapter-by-chapter review of the first edition was written by Professor Marshall Clagett in Isis, 1953, 44: 398- 403, it will only be necessary to compare the editions and comment upon a few of Mr. Crombie's interpretations.

The first four chapters of the first edi- tion (there were six in all), bearing the

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