a history of science, vol 1 beginnings of science - henry smith williams (1904)

7/28/2019 A History of Science, VOL 1 Beginnings of Science - Henry Smith Williams (1904)

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Digitized by the Internet Archivein 2010 with funding from

Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries


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AHISTORY OF SCIENCE

BY


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Copyright, 1904, by Harper & Brothers.All rigkts reserz'ed.

Published November, 1904.


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CONTENTSCHAPTER VII

GREEK SCIENCE IN THE EARLY ATTIC PERIODAnaxagoras, p. 140His ideas of the sun and stars, and the originof the heavenly bodies, p. 143His conception of universal gravi-tation, p. 145Anaxagoras as meteorologist, p. 151His biologicalspeculations, p. 152His physical speculations, p. 154Leucippusand Democritus, p. 161Democritus and the primordial atom, p.163Comparison of Anaxagoras and Democritus as inductivethinkers, p. 163Hippocrates and Greek medicine, p. 170Hishumoral theory of disease, p. 176.

CHAPTER VIIIPOST-SOCRATIC SCIENCE AT ATHENS

Socrates and Plato, p. 179Aristotle, p. 182His teachings as tothe shape of the earth, p. 183His studies in zoology, p. 185lhesimilarity of his division of the animal kingdom to the Lamarckiansystem, p. 187Theophrastus, the father of botany, p. 188.

CHAPTER IXGREEK SCIENCE OF THE ALEXANDRIAN OR HELLENISTIC PERIOD

Alexandria and Ptolemy Soter, p. 189The great school of sciencefour ed, p. 190Studies in geography and astronomy, p. 191Euclid and systematic geometry, p. 192Herophilus and Erasistra-tus and their studies of anatomy, p. 194Archimedes and the foun-dation of mechanics, p. 196His mechanical contrivances for thedefence of Syracuse, p. 201Plutarch's estimate of Archimedes, p.203Aristarchus of Samos, p. 212His anticipation of Copernicusin his solution of the mechanism of the solar system, p. 214Histheory of the revolution of the earth, p. 215Eratosthenes, "thesurveyor of the world," p. 225Hipparchus, "the lover of truth,"a. 233His measurement of the length of the year and the moon'sdisk, p. 239Ctesibus and Hero, magicians of Alexandria, p. 242Hero's steam-engine and other mechanical devices, p. 249.

CHAPTER XSCIENCE OF THE ROMAN PERIOD

Strabo the geographer, p. 255His belief in the globe's sphericity,p. 258His division of the earth into zones, p. 262Pliny the elder

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CONTENTSand Ptolemy Secundus, p. 265 Natural History of Pliny, p. 266Ptolemy, the last great astronomer of antiquity, p. 267Galen, thelast great Alexandrian, p. 272His teachings in anatomy, surgery,arid medicine, p. 278His conception of the functions of the organsof the body, p. 282.

CHAPTER XIA RETROSPECTIVE GLANCE AT CLASSICAL SCIENCE

Periodicity in the continuity of the stream of history, p. 285Length of the span from Thales to Galen, p. 286Retrospect of theGreek cosmology, p. 287Progress in the field of the biologicalsciences, p. 288Birthplaces of the great philosophers and theirrelation to the peninsula of Greece, p. 289Racial minglings andtheir bearing upon scientific advancement, p. 290Superstitions ofthe ancient Greek and Roman world, p. 292An example of Greeksuperstition as told by Herodotus, p. 294An example as given byDion Cassius, and the comment of Xiphilinus, p. 296.APPENDIX . 301


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CONTENTSBOOK I

CHAPTER IPREHISTORIC SCIENCE

What is science ? p. 3Scien^fic instincts in the lower animals, p. 4Scientific knowledge of primitive man, p. 5His observationsof the sun and moon, p. 7His observation of universal gravitation,p. 9His observations in biology, p. 11His knowledge of medi-cine, p. 13His conception of life and his late conception of nat-tiral death, p. 15His political ideas and conceptions of ownership,p. 20His questionings of natural phenomena and his fanciful ex-planations, p. 22His superstitions and their perpetuity through-out succeeding centuries, p. 23.

CHAPTER IIEGYPTIAN SCIENCE

Sources of our knowledge of Egyptian history, p. 25Decipheringthe hieroglyphics, p. 27State of civilization at the beginning ofthe historic period, p. 30Building the pyramids, p. 32The dawnof astronomy, p. 33The Egyptian calendar, p. 34Adjustmentof the calendar, p. 35The Egyptians' ideas of cosmology, p. 41Their scheme of celestial mechanism, p. 42Their conceptions ofthe heavenly bodies, p. 44Charms and incantations, p. 46Scientific knowledge of the Egyptian physician, p. 49Abstractscience, p. 51Methods of computation, p. 52Science and super-stition, p. 54.

CHAPTER IIISCIENCE OF BABYLONIA AND ASSYRIA.

Babylon in the time of Herodotus, p. 57Assyrian and Baby-lonian records,, p. 59Babylonian astronomy, p. 61The adjust-

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CONTENTSYnent of the calendar, p. 62Astrology, p. 66Chaldean magic,p. 69Various classes of evil spirits in different parts of the body,'p. 71The import of various omens, p. 71Babylonian medicine,p. 75Estimates of Babylonian science, p. 77Canon Rawlin-son's estimate, p. 82.

CHAPTER IVTHE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALPHABET

The Greeklegend of Kadmus and the introduction of letters, p. 87The Egyptian and Assyrian characters, p. 87First steps in picture-writing, p. 89Egyptian writing, p. 30Babylonian writing, p. 93The Assyrian grammar, p. 94The alphabet achieved, p. 98The extension and perfection of the dphabet, p. 101.CHAPTER V

THE BEGINNINGS OF GREFK SCIENCEHerodotus' account of an eclipse, p. 103Thales, the Milesian, thefather of Greek astronomy, p. 104His knowledge of geometry,p. 107His method of measuring distant objects, p. 107Anaxi-mander and Anaximenes, p. 109Anaximander's conception ofthe earth, p. noHis ideas concerning man's development froman aquatic animal, p. in.

CHAPTER VITHE EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN ITALY

Pythagoras the boxer, p. 112Pythagoras the philosopher, p. 113Greek philosophers in Italy, p. 114The followers of Pythagoras,Parmenides, and Empedocles, p. 117The doctrine that the earthis a sphere, p. 118Astronomical observations of Pythagoras, p.119His measurements of triangles, p. 120His theories accord-ing to Diogenes Laertius, p. 121His repudiation of the theory ofspontaneous generation, p. 123Xenophanes and Parmenides, p.127-Xenophanes' conception of the formation of fossils, p. 12SEmpedocles, physician, observer, and dreamer, p. 132His de-nial of an anthropomorphic god, p. 134His anatomical knowl-edge, p. 136His conception of evolution, p. 137.

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ILLUSTRATIONShenry smith Williams (Photogravure)MAN AND THE ANTHROPOID APESTHE SUN EMBARKING FOR HIS DAILY JOURNEY THROUGH

EGYPT TWELVE STAGES IN THE LIFE OF THE SUN AND ITS

TWELVE FORMS THROUGHOUT THE DAY ....SHU SEPARATING SIBU AND NUIT'E SELF-PROPELLING BOAT CONTAINING THE SUN,UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE TWO EYES .

/HE WORLD AS CONCEIVED BY THE CHALDEANS . .CHALDEAN MAP OF THE WORLDASSYRIAN BAKED CLAY PRISMS, WITH INSCRIPTIONS OF

KINGS SENNACHERIB (705-681, B.C.), ESARHADDON(681-66S, B.C.), AND ASHUR-BANI-PAL (668-626, B.C.)

THE MOABITE STONEMEXICAN PICTURE-WRITINGREPRODUCTION OF A FRAGMENT OF THE EGYPTIAN BOOK

OF THE DEADOLD BABYLONIAN INSCRIPTIONPYTHAGORASHIPPOCRATESARISTOTLEARCHIMEDES

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FrontispieceFacing p. 10

36

40" 42

466264

6886

9096114170182


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ILLUSTRATIONSDIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE ARISTARCHUS MEASUREMENT

OF THE RELATIVE DISTANCES FROM THE EARTH OFTHE MOON AND THE SUN Facing p. 2l8

DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE ERATOSTHENES* MEASURE-MENT OF THE GLOBE " 230

DEVICE FOR CAUSING THE DOORS OF THE TEMPLE TOOPEN WHEN THE FIRE ON THE ALTAR IS LIGHTED " 246

THE STEAM-ENGINE OF HERO " 24STHE SLOT-MACHINE OF HERO " 250PLINY ' " 254PTOLEMY " 268GALEN " 280


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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEBOOK I

SHOULD the story that is about to be unfoldedbe found to lack interest, the writers must standconvicted of unpardonable lack of art. Nothing butdulness in the telling could mar the story, for in itselfit is the record of the growth of those ideas that havemade our race and its civilization what they are; ofideas instinct with human interest, vital with meaningfor our race ; fundamental in their influence on humandevelopment; part and parcel of the mechanism ofhuman thought on the one hand, and of practical civil-ization on the other. Such a phrase as " fundamentalprinciples ' ' may seem at first thought a hard saying,but the idea it implies is less repellent than the phraseitself, for the fundamental principles in question areso closely linked with the present interests of every oneof us that they lie within the grasp of every averageman and womannay, of every well-developed boyand girl. These principles are not merely the stepping-stones to culture, the prerequisites of knowledge

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEthey are, in themselves, an essential part of the knowl-edge of every cultivated person.It is our task, not merely to show what these prin-ciples are, but to point out how they have been dis-covered by our predecessors. We shall trace thegrowth of these ideas from their first vague beginnings.We shall see how vagueness of thought gave way toprecision; how a general truth, once grasped andformulated, was found to be a stepping-stone to othertruths. We shall see that there are no isolated facts,no isolated principles, in nature ; that each part of ourstory is linked by indissoluble bands with that whichgoes before, and with that which comes after. Forthe most part the discovery of this principle or that ina given sequence is no accident. Galileo and Kepplermust precede Newton. Cuvier and Lyall must comebefore Darwin ;which, after all, is no more than say-ing that in our Temple of Science, as in any other pieceof architecture, the foundation must precede the super-structure.We shall best understand our story of the growthof science if we think of each new principle as a step-ping-stone which must fit into its own particularniche; and if we reflect that the entire structure ofmodern civilization would be different from what it is,and less perfect than it is, had not that particularstepping-stone been found and shaped and placed inposition. Taken as a whole, our stepping-stones leadus up and up towards the alluring heights of an acrop-olis of knowledge, on which stands the Temple of Mod-ern Science. The story of the building of this wonder-ful structure is in itself fascinating and beautiful.


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PREHISTORIC SCIENCE

TO speak of a prehistoric science may seem likea contradiction of terms. The word prehistoricseems to imply barbarism, while science, clearlyenough, seems the outgrowth of civilization; butrightly considered, there is no contradiction. For,on the one hand, man had ceased to be a barbarianlong before the beginning of what we call the historicalperiod; and, on the other hand, science, of a kind, isno less a precursor and a cause of civilization than itis a consequent. To get this clearly in mind, we mustask ourselves: What, then, is science? The wordruns glibly enough upon the tongue of our every-dayspeech, but it is not often, perhaps, that they who useit habitually ask themselves just what it means. Yetthe answer is not difficult. A little attention willshow that science, as the word is commonly used,implies these things: first, the gathering of knowledgethrough observation; second, the classification of suchknowledge, and through this classification, the elabo-ration of general ideas or principles. In the familiardefinition of Herbert Spencer, science is organizedknowledge.Now it is patent enough, at first glance, that theveriest savage must have been an observer of thephenomena of nature. But it may not be so obvious

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEthat he must also have been a classifier of his ob-servationsan organizer of knowledge. Yet the morewe consider the case, the more clear it will become thatthe two methods are too closely linked together tobe dissevered. To observe outside phenomena is notmore inherent in the nature of the mind than to drawinferences from these phenomena. A deer passingthrough the forest scents the ground and detects acertain odor. A sequence of ideas is generated inthe mind of the deer. Nothing in the deer's experiencecan produce that odor but a wolf ; therefore the scien-tific inference is drawn that wolves have passed thatway. 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, combiningdirect observation in the present with the applicationof a general principle based on past experience, thedeer reaches the very logical conclusion that it maywisely turn about and run in another direction. Allthis implies, essentially, a comprehension and use ofscientific principles; and, strange as it seems to speakof a deer as possessing scientific knowledge, yet thereis really no absurdity in the statement. The deerdoes possess scientific knowledge; knowledge differingin degree only, not in kind, from the knowledge of aNewton. Nor is the animal, within the range of itsintelligence, less logical, less scientific in the applicationof that knowledge, than is the man. The animal thatcould not make accurate scientific observations of itssuiToundings, and deduce accurate scientific conclu-sions from them, would soon pay the penalty of its lackof logic,

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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEWhat is true of man's precursors in the animal scale

is, of course, true in a wider and fuller sense of man him-self at the very lowest stage of his development. Agesbefore the time which the limitations of our knowledgeforce us to speak of as the dawn of history, man hadreached a high stage of development. As a socialbeing, he had developed all the elements of a primitivecivilization. If, for convenience of classification, wespeak of his state as savage, or barbaric, we use termswhich, after all, are relative, and which do not shutoff our primitive ancestors from a tolerably close asso-ciation with our own ideals. We know that, even inthe Stone Age, man had learned how to domesticateanimals and make them useful to him, and that he hadalso learned to cultivate the soil. Later on, doubtlessby slow and painful stages, he attained those wonder-ful elements of knowledge that enabled him to smeltmetals and to produce implements of bronze, and thenof iron. Even in the Stone Age he was a mechanic ofmarvellous skill, as any one of to-day may satisfy him-self by attempting to duplicate such an implement asa chipped arrow-head. And a barbarian who couldfashion an axe or a knife of bronze had certainly gonefar in his knowledge of scientific principles and theirpractical application. The practical application was,doubtless, the only thought that our primitive an-cestor had in mind; quite probably the question asto principles that might be involved troubled him notat all. Yet, in spite of himself, he knew certain rudi-mentary principles of science, even though he did notformulate them.

Let us inquire what some of these principles are.5


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A HISTORY OF SCIENCESuch an inquiry will, as it were, clear the ground forour structure of science. It will show the plane ofknowledge on which historical investigation begins.Incidentally, perhaps, it will reveal to us unsuspectedaffinities between ourselves and our remote ancestor.Without attempting anything like a full analysis, wemay note in passing, not merely what primitive manknew, but what he did not know ; that at least a vaguenotion may be gained of the field for scientific researchthat lay open for historic man to cultivate.

It must be understood that the knowledge of primi-tive 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 ofthem, as already suggested, are man's heritage fromnon-human ancestors. Others can only have beengrasped by him after he had reached a relatively highstage of human development. But all the principleshere listed must surely have been parts of our primi-tive ancestor's knowledge before those earliest days ofEgyptian and Babylonian civilization, the records ofwhich constitute our first introduction to the so-calledhistorical period. Taken somewhat in the order oftheir probable discovery, the scientific ideas of primi-tive man may be roughly listed as follows

i. Primitive man must have conceived that theearth is flat and of limitless extent. By this it is notmeant to imply that he had a distinct conception ofinfinity, but, for that matter, it cannot be said thatany one to-day has a conception of infinity that couldbe called definite. But, reasoning from experience

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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEand the reports of travellers, there was nothing to sug-gest to early man the limit of the earth. He did, in-deed, find in his wanderings, that changed climatic con-ditions barred him from farther progress; but beyondthe farthest reaches of his migrations, the seeminglyflat land-surfaces and water-surfaces stretched awayunbroken and, to all appearances, without end. Itwould require a reach of the philosophical imaginationto conceive a limit to the earth, and while such imag-inings may have been current in the prehistoric period,we can have no proof of them, and we may well post-pone consideration of man's early dreamings as to theshape of the earth until we enter the historical epochwhere we stand on firm ground.

2. Primitive man must, from a very early period,have observed that the sun gives heat and light, andthat the moon and stars seem to give light only andno heat. It required but a slight extension of thisobservation to note that the changing phases of theseasons were associated with the seeming approach andrecession of the sun. This observation, however,could not have been made until man had migratedfrom the tropical regions, and had reached a stage ofmechanical development enabling him to live in sub-tropical or temperate zones. Even then it is con-ceivable that a long period must have elapsed before adirect causal relation was felt to exist between theshifting of the sun and the shifting of the seasons;because, as every one knows, the periods of greatestheat in summer and greatest cold in winter usuallycome some weeks after the time of the solstices. Yet,the fact that these extremes of temperature are asso-

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEciated in some way with the change of the sun's placein the heavens must, in time, have impressed itselfupon even a rudimentary intelligence. It is hardlynecessary to add that this is not meant to imply anydefinite knowledge of the real meaning of the seemingoscillations of the sun. We shall see that, even ata relatively late period, the vaguest notions werestill in vogue as to the cause of the sun's changes ofposition.That the sun, moon, and stars move across theheavens must obviously have been among the earliestscientific observations. It must not be inferred, how-ever, that this observation implied a necessary con-ception of the complete revolution of these bodies aboutthe earth. It is unnecessary to speculate here as tohow the primitive intelligence conceived the transferof the sun from the western to the eastern horizon, tobe effected each night, for we shall have occasion toexamine some historical speculations regarding thisphenomenon. We may assume, however, that theidea of the transfer of the heavenly bodies beneath theearth (whatever the conception as to the form of thatbody) must early have presented itself.

It required a relatively high development of the ob-serving faculties, yet a development which man musthave attained ages before the historical period, to notethat the moon has a secondary motion, which leads itto shift its relative position in the heavens, as regardsthe stars ; that the stars themselves, on the other hand,keep a fixed relation as regards one another, with thenotable exception of two or three of the most brilliantmembers of the galaxy, the latter being the bodies


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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEwhich came to be known finally as planets, or wander-ing stars. The wandering propensities of such brilliantbodies as Jupiter and Venus cannot well have escapeddetection. We may safely assume, however, that theseanomalous motions of the moon and planets found noexplanation that could be called scientific until a rela-tively late period.

3. Turning from the heavens to the earth, and ig-noring such primitive observations as that of the dis-tinction between land and water, we may note thatthere was one great scientific law which must haveforced itself upon the attention of primitive man.This is the law of universal terrestrial gravitation. Theword gravitation suggests the name of Newton, and itmay excite surprise to hear a knowledge of gravitationascribed to men who preceded that philosopher by, say,twenty-five or fifty thousand years. Yet the slightestconsideration of the facts will make it clear that thegreat central law that all heavy bodies fall directlytowards the earth, cannot have escaped the attentionof the most primitive intelligence. The arborealhabits of our primitive ancestors gave opportunitiesfor constant observation of the practicalities of thislaw. And, so soon as man had developed the mentalcapacity to formulate ideas, one of the earliest ideasmust have been the conception, however vaguelyphrased in words, that all unsupported bodies fall tow-ards the earth. The same phenomenon being observedto operate on water-surfaces, and no alteration beingobserved in its operation in different portions of man'shabitat, the most primitive wanderer must have cometo have full faith in the universal action of the ob-

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEserved law of gravitation. Indeed, it is inconceivablethat he can have imagined a place on the earth wherethis law does not operate. On the other hand, ofcourse, he never grasped the conception of the opera-tion of this law beyond the close proximity of theearth. To extend the reach of gravitation out to themoon and to the stars, including within its compassevery particle of matter in the universe, was the workof Newton, as we shall see in due course. Meantimewe shall better understand that work if we recall thatthe mere local fact of terrestrial gravitation has beenthe familiar knowledge of all generations of men. Itmay further help to connect us in sympathy with ourprimeval ancestor if we recall that in the attempt toexplain this fact of terrestrial gravitation Newtonmade no advance, and we of to-day are scarcely moreenlightened than the man of the Stone Age. Likethe man of the Stone Age, we know that an arrowshot into the sky falls back to the earth. We cancalculate, as he could not do, the arc it will de-scribe and the exact speed of its fall; but as to whyit returns to earth at all, the greatest philosopherof to-day is almost as much in the dark as wasthe first primitive bowman that ever made the ex-periment.

Other physical facts going to make up an elementaryscience of mechanics, that were demonstratively knownto prehistoric man, were such as these : the rigidity ofsolids and the mobility of liquids ; the fact that changesof temperature transform solids to liquids and viceversathat heat, for example, melts copper and eveniron, and that cold congeals water; and the fact that

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TO


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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEfriction, as illustrated in the rubbing together of twosticks, may produce heat enough to cause afire. Therationale of this last experiment did not receive anexplanation until about the beginning of the nineteenthcentury of our own era. But the experimental factwas so well known to prehistoric man that he employedthis method, as various savage tribes employ it to thisday, for the altogether practical purpose of making afire ; just as he employed his practical knowledge of themutability of solids and liquids in smelting ores, inalloying copper with tin to make bronze, and in castingthis alloy in molds to make various implements andweapons. Here, then, were the germs of an elementaryscience of physics. Meanwhile such observations asthat of the solution of salt in water may be consideredas giving a first lesson in chemistry, but beyond suchaltogether rudimentary conceptions chemical knowl-edge could not have goneunless, indeed, the prac-tical observation of the effects of fire be included ; norcan this well be overlooked, since scarcely anothersingle line of practical observation had a more directinfluence in promoting the progress of man towardsthe heights of civilization.

4. In the field of what we now speak of as biologicalknowledge, primitive man had obviously the widestopportunity for practical observation. We can hardlydoubt that man attained, at an early day, to that con-ception of identity and of difference which Plato placesat the head of his metaphysical system. We shall urgepresently that it is precisely such general ideas as thesethat were man's earliest inductions from observation,and hence that came to seem the most universal and

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCE" innate " ideas of his mentality. It is quite inconceiv-able, for example, that even the most rudimentaryintelligence that could be called human could fail todiscriminate between living things and, let us say,the rocks of the earth. The most primitive intelli-gence, then, must have made a tacit classification ofthe natural objects about it into the grand divisionsof animate and inanimate nature. Doubtless the nas-cent scientist may have imagined life animating manybodies that we should call inanimatesuch as the sun,wandering planets, the winds, and lightning; and, onthe other hand, he may quite likely have relegatedsuch objects as trees to the ranks of the non-living ; butthat he recognized a fundamental distinction between,let us say, a wolf and a granite bowlder we cannot welldoubt. A step beyond this a step, however, thatmay have required centuries or millenniums in thetakingmust have carried man to a plane of intelli-gence from which a primitive Aristotle or Linnagus wasenabled to note differences and resemblances connotingsuch groups of things as fishes, birds, and furry beasts.This conception, to be sure, is an abstraction of a rela-tively high order. We know that there are savageraces to - day whose language contains no word forsuch an abstraction as bird or tree. We are bound tobelieve, then, that there were long ages of humanprogress during which the highest man had attainedno such stage of abstraction; but, on the other hand,it is equally little in question that this degree of mentaldevelopment had been attained long before the openingof our historical period. The primeval man, then,whose scientific knowledge we are attempting to predi-

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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEcate, had become, through his conception of fishes,birds, and hairy animals as separate classes, a scientificzoologist of relatively high attainments.

In the practical field of medical knowledge, a certainstage of development must have been reached at a veryearly day. Even animals pick and choose among thevegetables about them, and at times seek out certainherbs quite different from their ordinary food, prac-tising a sort of instinctive therapeutics. The cat'sfondness for catnip is a case in point. The most primi-tive man, then, must have inherited a racial or instinc-tive knowledge of the medicinal effects of certain herbsin particular he must have had such elementary knowl-edge of toxicology as would enable him to avoid eatingcertain poisonous berries. Perhaps, indeed, we areplacing the effect before the cause to some extent ; for,after all, the animal system possesses marvellous pow-ers of adaption, and there is perhaps hardly any poison-ous vegetable which man might not have learned toeat without deleterious effect, provided the experi-ment were made gradually. To a certain extent, then,the observed poisonous effects of numerous plantsupon the human system are to be explained by thefact that our ancestors have avoided this particularvegetable. Certain fruits and berries might have cometo have been a part of man's diet, had they grown inthe regions he inhabited at an early day, which noware poisonous to his system. This thought, however,carries us too far afield. For practical purposes, it suf-fices that certain roots, leaves, and fruits possess prin-ciples that are poisonous to the human system, andthat unless man had learned in some way to avoid

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEthese, our race must have come to disaster. In pointof fact, he did learn to avoid them; and such evi-dence implied, as has been said, an elementary knowl-edge of toxicology.Coupled with this knowledge of things dangerous to

the human system, there must have grown up, at avery early day, a belief in the remedial character ofvarious vegetables as agents to combat disease. Here,of course, was a rudimentary therapeutics, a crudeprinciple of an empirical art of medicine. As just sug-gested, the lower order of animals have an instinctiveknowledge that enables them to seek out remedialherbs (though we probably exaggerate the extent ofthis instinctive knowledge) ; and if this be true, manmust have inherited from his prehuman ancestors thisinstinct along with the others. That he extended thisknowledge through observation and practice, and cameearly to make extensive use of drugs in the treatmentof disease, is placed beyond cavil through the obser-vation of the various existing barbaric tribes, nearlyall of whom practice elaborate systems of therapeutics.We shall have occasion to see that even within his-toric times the particular therapeutic measures em-ployed were often crude, and, as we are accustomedto say, unscientific; but even the crudest of themare really based upon scientific principles, inasmuchas their application implies the deduction of prin-ciples of action from previous observations. Certaindrugs are applied to appease certain symptoms ofdisease because in the belief of the medicine -mansuch drugs have proved beneficial in previous similarcases.

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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEAll this, however, implies an appreciation of the fact

that man is subject to "natural" diseases, and that ifthese diseases are not combated, death may result.But it should be understood that the earliest man prob-ably had no such conception as this. Throughout allthe ages of early development, what we call "natural"disease and "natural " death meant the onslaught of atangible enemy. A study of this question leads usto some very curious inferences. The more we lookinto the matter the more the thought forces itself hometo us that the idea of natural death, as we now con-ceive it, came to primitive man as a relatively latescientific induction. This thought seems almost star-tling, so axiomatic has the conception "man is mortal"come to appear. Yet a study of the ideas of existingsavages, combined with our knowledge of the point ofview from which historical peoples regard disease,make it more probable that the primitive conceptionof human life did not include the idea of necessarydeath. We are told that the Australian savage whofalls from a tree and breaks his neck is not regarded ashaving met a natural death, but as having been thevictim of the magical practices of the "medicine-man"of some neighboring tribe. Similarly, we shall findthat the Egyptian and the Babylonian of the earlyhistorical period conceived illness as being almost in-variably the result of the machinations of an enemy.One need but recall the superstitious observances ofthe Middle Ages, and the yet more recent belief inwitchcraft, to realize how generally disease has beenpersonified as a malicious agent invoked by an un-friendly mind. Indeed, the phraseology of our pres-

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEent-day speech is still reminiscent of this ; as when, forexample, we speak of an "attack of fever," and thelike.When, following out this idea, we picture to our-

selves the conditions under which primitive man lived,it will be evident at once how relatively infrequentmust have been his observation of what we usuallyterm natural death. His world was a world of strifehe lived by the chase ; he saw animals kill one anotherhe witnessed the death of his own fellows at the handsof enemies. Naturally enough, then, when a memberof his family was "struck down" by invisible agents,he ascribed this death also to violence, even thoughthe offensive agent was concealed. Moreover, havingvery little idea of the lapse of timebeing quite un-accustomed, that is, to reckon events from any fixederaprimitive man cannot have gained at once a clearconception of age as applied to his fellows. Until arelatively late stage of development made tribal lifepossible, it cannot have been usual for man to haveknowledge of his grandparents; as a rule he did notknow his own parents after he had passed the adolescentstage and had been turned out upon the world to carefor himself. If, then, certain of his fellow - beingsshowed those evidences of infirmity which we ascribeto age, it did not necessarily follow that he saw anyassociation between such infirmities and the length oftime which those persons had lived. The very factthat some barbaric nations retain the custom of killingthe aged and infirm, in itself suggests the possibilitythat this custom arose before a clear conception hadbeen attained that such drags upon the community

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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEwould be removed presently in the natural order ofthings. To a person who had no clear conception ofthe lapse of time and no preconception as to the limitedperiod of man's life, the infirmities of age might verynaturally be ascribed to the repeated attacks of thoseinimical powers which were understood sooner or laterto carry off most members of the race. And coupledwith this thought would go the conception that inas-much as some people through luck had escaped thevengeance of all their enemies for long periods, thesesame individuals might continue to escape for indefiniteperiods of the future. There were no written recordsto tell primeval man of events of long ago. He livedin the present, and his sweep of ideas scarcely carriedhim back beyond the limits of his individual memory.But memory is observed to be fallacious. It must earlyhave been noted that some people recalled events whichother participants in them had quite forgotten, andit may readily enough have been inferred that thosemembers of the tribe who spoke of events which otherscould not recall were merely the ones who were giftedwith the best memories. If these reached a periodwhen their memories became vague, it did not followthat their recollections had carried them back to thebeginnings of their lives. Indeed, it is contrary to allexperience to believe that any man remembers allthe things he has once known, and the observed falla-ciousness and evanescence of memory would thus tendto substantiate rather than to controvert the idea thatvarious members of a tribe had been alive for an in-definite period.Without further elaborating the argument, it seems

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEa justifiable inference that the first conception primi-tive man would have of his own life would not includethe thought of natural death, but would, conversely,connote the vague conception of endless life. Our ownancestors, a few generations removed, had not got ridof this conception, as the perpetual quest of the springof eternal youth amply testifies. A naturalist of ourown day has suggested that perhaps birds never dieexcept by violence. The thought, then, that man has aterm of years beyond which "in the nature of things,"as the saying goes, he may not live, would have dawnedbut gradually upon the developing intelligence of suc-cessive generations of men; and we cannot feel surethat he would fully have grasped the conception of a"natural" termination of human life until he hadshaken himself free from the idea that disease is alwaysthe result of the magic practice of an enemy. Ourobservation of historical man in antiquity makes itsomewhat doubtful whether this conception had beenattained before the close of the prehistoric period. Ifit had, this conception of the mortality of man was oneof the most striking scientific inductions to which pre-historic man attained. Incidentally, it may be notedthat the conception of eternal life for the human bodybeing a more primitive idea than the conception ofnatural death, the idea of the immortality of the spiritwould be the most natural of conceptions. The im-mortal spirit, indeed, would be but a correlative of theimmortal body, and the idea which we shall see preva-lent among the Egyptians that the soul persists onlyas long as the body is intactthe idea upon which thepractice of mummifying the dead dependedfinds a

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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEready explanation. But this phase of the subjecijcarries us somewhat afield. For our present purposeit suffices to have pointed out that the conception ofman's mortalitya conception which now seems of allothers the most natural and "innate"was in allprobability a relatively late scientific induction of ourprimitive ancestors.

5. Turning from the consideration of the body toits mental complement, we are forced to admit thathere, also, our primitive man must have made certainelementary observations that underlie such sciencesas psychology, mathematics, and political economy.The elementary emotions associated with hunger andwith satiety, with love and with hatred, must haveforced themselves upon the earliest intelligence thatreached the plane of conscious self-observation. Thecapacity to count, at least to the number four orfive, is within the range of even animal intelligence.Certain savages have gone scarcely farther than this;but our primeval ancestor, who was forging on towardscivilization, had learned to count his fingers and toes,and to number objects about him by fives and tens inconsequence, before he passed beyond the plane ofnumerous existing barbarians. How much beyond thishe had gone we need not attempt to inquire ; but therelatively high development of mathematics in theearly historical period suggests that primeval man hadattained a not inconsiderable knowledge of numbers.The humdrum vocation of looking after a numerousprogeny must have taught the mother the rudimentsof addition and subtraction ; and the elements of mul-tiplication and division are implied in the capacity to

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEcarry on even the rudest form of barter, such as thevarious tribes must have practised from an early-day.As to political ideas, even the crudest tribal life was

based on certain conceptions of ownership, at least oftribal ownership, and the application of the principleof likeness and difference to which we have already re-ferred. Each tribe, of course, differed in some regardfrom other tribes, and the recognition of these differ-ences implied in itself a political classification. Acertain tribe took possession of a particular hunting-ground, which became, for the time being, its home,and over which it came to exercise certain rights. Aninvasion of this territory by another tribe might leadto war, and the banding together of the members ofthe tribe to repel the invader implied both a recogni-tion of communal unity and a species of prejudice infavor of that community that constituted a primitivepatriotism. But this unity of action in opposing an-other tribe would not prevent a certain rivalry of in-terest between the members of the same tribe, whichwould show itself more and more prominently as thetribe increased in size. The association of two ormore persons implies, always, the ascendency of someand the subordination of others. Leadership and sub-ordination are necessary correlatives of difference ofphysical and mental endowment, and rivalry betweenleaders would inevitably lead to the formation of prim-itive political parties. With the ultimate success andascendency of one leader, who secures either absolutepower or power modified in accordance with the ad-vice of subordinate leaders, we have the germs of an

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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEelaborate political system an embryo science ofgovernment.

Meanwhile, the very existence of such a communityimplies the recognition on the part of its members ofcertain individual rights, the recognition of which isessential to communal harmony. The right of indi-vidual ownership of the various articles and imple-ments of every-day life must be recognized, or all har-mony would be at an end. Certain rules of justiceprimitive lawsmust, by common consent, give pro-tection to the weakest members of the community.Here are the rudiments of a system of ethics. It mayseem anomalous to speak of this primitive morality,this early recognition of the principles of right andwrong, as having any relation to science. Yet, rightlyconsidered, there is no incongruity in such a citation.There cannot well be a doubt that the adoption ofthose broad principles of right and wrong which under-lie the entire structure of modern civilization was dueto scientific induction,in other words, to the belief,based on observation and experience, that the prin-ciples implied were essential to communal progress.He who has scanned the pageant of history knows howoften these principles seem to be absent in the inter-course of men and nations. Yet the ideal is alwaysthere as a standard by which all deeds are judged.

It would appear, then, that the entire superstruct-ure of later science had its foundation in the knowledgeand practice of prehistoric man. The civilization ofthe historical period could not have advanced as it hashad there not been countless generations of culture

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEback of it. The new principles of science could nothave been evolved had there not been great basalprinciples which ages of unconscious experiment hadimpressed upon the mind of our race. Due meed ofpraise must be given, then, to our primitive ancestorfor his scientific accomplishments ; but justice demandsthat we should look a little farther and consider thereverse side of the picture. We have had to do, thusfar, chiefly with the positive side of accomplishment.We have pointed out what our primitive ancestorknew, intimating, perhaps, the limitations of his knowl-edge ; but we have had little to say of one all-importantfeature of his scientific theorizing. The feature inquestion is based on the highly scientific desire andpropensity to find explanations for the phenomena ofnature. Without such desire no progress could bemade. It is, as we have seen, the generalizing fromexperience that constitutes real scientific progress;and yet, just as most other good things can be over-done, this scientific propensity may be carried to a dis-astrous excess.

Primeval man did not escape this danger. He ob-served, he reasoned, he found explanations ; but he didnot always discriminate as to the logicality of his rea-sonings. He failed to recognize the limitations of hisknowledge. The observed uniformity in the sequenceof certain events impressed on his mind the idea ofcause and effect. Proximate causes known, he soughtremoter causes; childlike, his inquiring mind was al-ways asking, Why? and, childlike, he demanded anexplicit answer. If the forces of nature seemed to com-bat him, if wind and rain opposed his progress and

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PREHISTORIC SCIENCEthunder and lightning seemed to menace his existence,he was led irrevocably to think of those human foeswho warred with him, and to see, back of the warfareof the elements, an inscrutable malevolent intelligencewhich took this method to express its displeasure.But every other line of scientific observation leadsequally, following back a sequence of events, to seem-ingly causeless beginnings. Modern science can ex-plain the lightning, as it can explain a great number ofthe mysteries which the primeval intelligence could notpenetrate. But the primordial man could not wait forthe revelations of scientific investigation : he must vaultat once to a final solution of all scientific problems.He found his solution by peopling the world with in-visible forces, anthropomorphic in their conception,like himself in their thought and action, differing onlyin the limitations of their powers. His own dream-existence gave him seeming proof of the existence of analter ego, a spiritual portion of himself that could dis-sever itself from his body and wander at will ; his scien-tific inductions seemed to tell him of a world of invisi-ble beings, capable of influencing him for good or ill.From the scientific exercise of his faculties he evolvedthe all-encompassing generalizations of invisible andall-powerful causes back of the phenomena of nature.These generalizations, early developed and seeminglysupported by the observations of countless generations,came to be among the most firmly established scientificinductions of our primeval ancestor. They obtaineda hold upon the mentality of our race that led subse-quent generations to think of them, sometimes tospeak of them, as "innate" ideas. The observations

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEupon which they were based are now, for the mostpart, susceptible of other interpretations; but the oldinterpretations have precedent and prejudice back ofthem, and they represent ideas that are more difficultthan almost any others to eradicate. Always, andeverywhere, superstitions based upon unwarrantedearly scientific deductions have been the most im-placable foes to the progress of science. Men havebuilt systems of philosophy around their conception ofanthropomorphic deities; they have linked to thesesystems of philosophy the allied conception of theimmutability of man's spirit, and they have asked thatscientific progress should stop short at the brink ofthese systems of philosophy and accept their dictatesas final. Yet there is not to-day in existence, andthere never has been, one jot of scientific evidencefor the existence of these intangible anthropomorphicpowers back of nature that is not susceptible of scien-tific challenge and of more logical interpretation. Indespite of which the superstitious beliefs are still asfirmly fixed in the minds of a large majority of our raceas they were in the mind of our prehistoric ancestor.The fact of this baleful heritage must not be forgottenin estimating the debt of gratitude which historic manowes to his barbaric predecessor.


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IIEGYPTIAN SCIENCE

IN the previous chapter we have purposely re-frained from referring to any particular tribe orrace of historical man. Now, however, we are at thebeginnings of national existence, and we have to con-sider the accomplishments of an individual race; orrather, perhaps, of two or more races that occupiedsuccessively the same geographical territory. Buteven now our studies must for a time remain very gen-eral; we shall see little or nothing of the deeds of in-dividual scientists in the course of our study of Egyp-tian culture. We are still, it must be understood, atthe beginnings of history; indeed, we must first bridgeover the gap from the prehistoric before we may findourselves fairly on the line of march of historical science.At the very outset we may well ask what constitutes

the distinction between prehistoric and historic epochsa distinction which has been constantly implied inmuch that we have said. The reply savors somewhatof vagueness. It is a distinction having to do, not somuch with facts of human progress as with our inter-pretation of these facts. When we speak of the dawnof history we must not be understood to imply that,at the period in question, there was any sudden changein the intellectual status of the human race or in thestatus of any individual tribe or nation of men. What

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEwe mean is that modern knowledge has penetrated themists of the past for the period we term historical withsomething more of clearness and precision than it hasbeen able to bring to bear upon yet earlier periods.New accessions of knowledge may thus shift from timeto time the bounds of the so-called historical period.The clearest illustration of this is furnished by our in-terpretation of Egyptian history. Until recently thebiblical records of the Hebrew captivity or service,together with the similar account of Josephus, furnishedabout all that was known of Egyptian history even ofso comparatively recent a time as that of Ramses II.(fifteenth century B.C.), and from that period on therewas almost a complete gap until the story was takenup by the Greek historians Herodotus and Diodorus.It is true that the king-lists of the Alexandrian his-torian, Manetho, were all along accessible in somewhatgarbled copies. But at best they seemed to supplyunintelligible lists of names and dates which no onewas disposed to take seriously. That they were,broadly speaking, true historical records, and mostimportant historical records at that, was not recognizedby modern scholars until fresh light had been thrownon the subject from altogether new sources.

These new sources of knowledge of ancient historydemand a moment's consideration. They are all-im-portant because they have been the means of extendingthe historical period of Egyptian history (using thewordhistory in the way just explained) by three or fourthousand years. As just suggested, that historicalperiod carried the scholarship of the early nineteenthcentury scarcely beyond the fifteenth century B.C., but

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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEto-day's vision extends with tolerable clearness toabout the middle of the fifth millennium b.c. Thischange has been brought about chiefly through studyof the Egyptian hieroglyphics. These hieroglyphicsconstitute, as we now know, a highly developed systemof writing ; a system that was practised for some thou-sands of years, but which fell utterly into disuse inthe later Roman period, and the knowledge of whichpassed absolutely from the mind of man. For abouttwo thousand years no one was able to read, with anydegree of explicitness, a single character of this strangescript, and the idea became prevalent that it did notconstitute a real system of writing, but only a more orless barbaric system of religious symbolism. The fal-sity of this view was shown early in the nineteenthcentury when Dr. Thomas Young was led, throughstudy of the famous trilingual inscription of theRosetta stone, to make the first successful attemptat clearing up the mysteries of the hieroglyphics.

This is not the place to tell the story of his fascinat-ing discoveries and those of his successors. That storybelongs to nineteenth-century science, not to the scienceof the Egyptians. Suffice it here that Young gainedthe first clew to a few of the phonetic values of theEgyptian symbols, and that the work of discoverywas carried on and vastly extended by the FrenchmanChampollion, a little later, with the result that the firmfoundations of the modern science of Egyptology werelaid. Subsequently such students as Rosellini theItalian, Lepsius the German, and Wilkinson the Eng-lishman, entered the field, which in due course was cul-tivated by De Rouge in France and Birch in England,

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEand by such distinguished latter-day workers as Chabas,Mariette, Maspero, Amelineau, and De Morgan amongthe Frenchmen; Professor Petrie and Dr. Budge inEngland ; and Brugsch Pasha and Professor Erman inGermany, not to mention a large coterie of somewhatless familiar names. These men working, some ofthem in the field of practical exploration, some asstudents of the Egyptian language and writing, haverestored to us a tolerably precise knowledge of thehistory of Egypt from the time of the first histori-cal king, Mena, whose date is placed at about themiddle of the fifth century B.C. We know not merelythe names of most of the subsequent rulers, but some-thing of the deeds' of many of them; and, what is vastlymore important, we know, thanks to the modern inter-pretation of the old literature, many things concerningthe life of the people, and in particular concerning theirhighest culture, their methods of thought, and theirscientific attainments, which might well have beensupposed to be past finding out. Nor has modern in-vestigation halted with the time of the first kings ; therecent explorations of such archaeologists as Amelineau,De Morgan, and Petrie have brought to light numer-ous remains of what is now spoken of as the predynasticperioda period when the inhabitants of the Nile Val-ley used implements of chipped stone, when their pot-tery was made without the use of the potter's wheel,and when they buried their dead in curiously crampedattitudes without attempt at mummification. Theseaboriginal inhabitants of Egypt cannot perhaps withstrict propriety be spoken of as living within the his-torical period, since we cannot date their relics with


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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEany accuracy. But they give us glimpses of the earlystages of civilization upon which the Egyptians of thedynastic period were to advance.

It is held that the nascent civilization of these Egyp-tians of the Neolithic, or late Stone Age, was over-thrown by the invading hosts of a more highly civilizedrace which probably came from the East, and whichmay have been of a Semitic stock. The presumptionis that this invading people brought with it a knowl-edge of the arts of war and peace, developed or adoptedin its old home. The introduction of these arts servedto bridge somewhat suddenly, so far as Egypt is con-cerned, that gap between the prehistoric and the his-toric stage of culture to which we have all along re-ferred. The essential structure of that bridge, let itnow be clearly understood, consisted of a single ele-ment. That element is the capacity to make writtenrecords: a knowledge of the art of writing. Clearlyunderstood, it is this element of knowledge that formsthe line bounding the historical period. Numberlessmementos are in existence that tell of the intellectualactivities of prehistoric man; such mementos as flintimplements, pieces of pottery, and fragments of bone,inscribed with pictures that may fairly be spokenof as works of art ; but so long as no written word ac-companies these records, so long as no name of king orscribe comes down to us, we feel that these records be-long to the domain of archaeology rather than to that ofhistory. Yet it must be understood all along that thesetwo domains shade one into the other and, it has al-ready been urged, that the distinction between themis one that pertains rather to modern scholarship than

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEto the development of civilization itself. Bearing thisdistinction still in mind, and recalling that the histori-cal period, which is to be the field of our observationthroughout the rest of our studies, extends for Egyptwell back into the fifth millennium B.C., let us brieflyreview the practical phases of that civilization towhich the Egyptian had attained before the beginningof the dynastic period. Since theoretical science iseverywhere linked with the mechanical arts, this sur-vey will give us a clear comprehension of the field thatlies open for the progress of science in the long stagesof historical time upon which we are just entering.We may pass over such rudimentary advances in thedirection of civilization as are implied in the use ofarticulate language, the application of fire to the usesof man, and the systematic making of dwellings of onesort or another, since all of these are stages of progressthat were reached very early in the prehistoric period.What more directly concerns us is to note that a reallyhigh stage of mechanical development had been reachedbefore the dawnings of Egyptian history proper. Allmanner of household utensils were employed ; the pot-ter's wheel aided in the construction of a great varietyof earthen vessels ; weaving had become a fine art, andweapons of bronze, including axes, spears, knives, andarrow-heads, were in constant use. Animals had longbeen domesticated, in particular the dog, the cat, andthe ox ; the horse was introduced later from the East.The practical arts of agriculture were practised almostas they are at the present day in Egypt, there being,of course, the same dependence then as now upon theinundations of the Nile.

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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEAs to government, the Egyptian of the first dynasty

regarded his king as a demi-god to be actually deifiedafter his death, and this point of view was not changedthroughout the stages of later Egyptian history. Inpoint of art, marvellous advances upon the skill ofthe prehistoric man had been made, probably in partunder Asiatic influences, and that unique style of stilt-ed yet expressive drawing had come into vogue, whichwas to be remembered in after times as typically Egyp-tian. More important than all else, our Egyptian ofthe earliest historical period was in possession of theart of writing. He had begun to make those specificrecords which were impossible to the man of the StoneAge, and thus he had entered fully upon the way ofhistorical progress which, as already pointed out, hasits very foundation in written records. From now onthe deeds of individual kings could find specific record.It began to be possible to fix the chronology of re-mote events with some accuracy; and with this samefixing of chronologies came the advent of true his-tory. The period which precedes what is usuallyspoken of as the first dynasty in Egypt is one intowhich the present-day searcher is still able to see butdarkly. The evidence seems to suggest than an in-vasion of relatively cultured people from the East over-threw, and in time supplanted, the Neolithic civiliza-tion of the Nile Valley. It is impossible to date this in-vasion accurately, but it cannot well havebeen later thanthe year 5000 B.C., and it may have been a great manycenturies earlier than this. Be the exact dates whatthey may, we find the Egyptian of the fifth millenniumB.C. in full possession of a highly organized civilization.

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEAll subsequent ages have marvelled at the pyramids,

some of which date from about the year 4000 B.C.,though we may note in passing that these dates mustnot be taken too literally. The chronology of ancientEgypt cannot as yet be fixed with exact accuracy, butthe disagreements between the various students of thesubject need give us little concern. For our presentpurpose it does not in the least matter whether thepyramids were built three thousand or four thousandyears before the beginning of our era. It suffices thatthey date back to a period long antecedent to thebeginnings of civilization in Western Europe. Theyprove that the Egyptian of that early day had attaineda knowledge of practical mechanics which, even fromthe twentieth - century point of view, is not to bespoken of lightly. It has sometimes been suggestedthat these mighty pyramids, built as they are of greatblocks of stone, speak for an almost miraculous knowl-edge on the part of their builders ; but a saner view ofthe conditions gives no warrant for this thought. Dio-dorus, the Sicilian, in his famous World's History,written about the beginning of our era, explains thebuilding of the pyramids by suggesting that greatquantities of earth were piled against the side of therising structure to form an inclined plane up whichthe blocks of stone were dragged. He gives us cer-tain figures, based, doubtless, on reports 'made tohim by Egyptian priests, who in turn drew upon thetraditions of their country, perhaps even upon writtenrecords no longer preserved. He says that one hun-dred and twenty thousand men were employed in theconstruction of the largest pyramid, and that, not-

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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEwithstanding the size of this host of workers, the taskoccupied twenty years. We must not place too muchdependence upon such figures as these, for the ancienthistorians are notoriously given to exaggeration inrecording numbers ; yet we need not doubt that the re-port given by Diodorus is substantially accurate in itsmain outlines as to the method through which thepyramids were constructed. A host of men puttingtheir added weight and strength to the task, with theaid of ropes, pulleys, rollers, and levers, and utilizingthe principle of the inclined plane, could undoubtedlymove and elevate and place in position the largestblocks that enter into the pyramids orwhat seemseven more wonderful the most gigantic obelisks,without the aid of any other kind of mechanism or ofany more occult power. The same hands could, asDiodorus suggests, remove all trace of the debris ofconstruction and leave the pyramids and obelisksstanding in weird isolation, as if sprung into beingthrough a miracle.

ASTRONOMICAL SCIENCEIt has been necessary to bear in mind these phases

of practical civilization because much that we knowof the purely scientific attainments of the Egyptiansis based upon modern observation of their pyramidsand temples. It was early observed, for example,that the pyramids are obviously oriented as regardsthe direction in which they face, in strict accordancewith some astronomical principle. Early in the nine-teenth century the Frenchman Biot made interestingstudies in regard to this subject, and a hundred years

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCElater, in our own time, Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer, fol-lowing up the work of various intermediary observers,has given the subject much attention, making it thecentral theme of his work on The Dawn of Astronomy. 1Lockyer' s researches make it clear that in the main thetemples of Egypt were oriented with reference to thepoint at which the sun rises on the day of the summersolstice. The time of the solstice had peculiar in-terest for the Egyptians, because it correspondedrather closely with the time of the rising of the Nile.The floods of that river appear with very great regu-larity; the on-rushing tide reaches the region of Heli-opolis and Memphis almost precisely on the day of thesummer solstice. The time varies at different stagesof the river's course, but as the civilization of the earlydynasties centred at Memphis, observations made atthis place had widest vogue.

Considering the all-essential character of the Nilefloodswithout which civilization would be impossi-ble in Egyptit is not strange that the time of theirappearance should be taken as marking the beginningof a new year. The fact that their coming coincideswith the solstice makes such a division of the calendarperfectly natural. In point of fact, from the earliestperiods of which records have come down to us, thenew year of the Egyptians dates from the summersolstice. It is certain that from the earliest historicalperiods the Egyptians were aware of the approximatelength of the year. It would be strange were it other-wise, considering the ease with which a record of dayscould be kept from Nile flood to Nile flood, or fromsolstice to solstice. But this, of course, applies only

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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEto an approximate count. There is some reason tobelieve that in the earliest period the Egyptians madethis count only 360 days. The fact that their yearwas divided into twelve months of thirty days eachlends color to this belief; but, in any event, the mis-take was discovered in due time and a partial remedywas applied through the interpolation of a "littlemonth" of five days between the end of the twelfthmonth and the new year. This nearly but not quiteremedied the matter. What it obviously failed to dowas to take account of that additional quarter of a daywhich really rounds out the actual year.

It would have been a vastly convenient thing for hu-manity had it chanced that the earth had so accommo-dated its rotary motion with its speed of transit aboutthe sun as to make its annual flight in precisely 360 days.Twelve lunar months of thirty days each would thenhave coincided exactly with the solar year, and mostof the complexities of the calendar, which have so puz-zled historical students, would have been avoided ; but,on the other hand, perhaps this very simplicity wouldhave proved detrimental to astronomical science bypreventing men from searching the heavens as care-fully as they have done. Be that as it may, the com-plexity exists. The actual year of three hundred andsixty -five and (about) one -quarter days cannot bedivided evenly into months, and some such expedientas the intercalation of days here and there is essential,else the calendar will become absolutely out of har-mony with the seasons.

In the case of the Egyptians, the attempt at adjust-ment was made, as just noted, by the introduction of

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEthe five days, constituting what the Egyptians them-selves termed "the five days over and above theyear." These so-called epagomenal days were un-doubtedly introduced at a very early period. Mas-pero holds that they were in use before the first Thinitedynasty, citing in evidence the fact that the legend ofOsiris explains these days as having been created bythe god Thot in order to permit Nuit to give birth toall her children ; this expedient being necessary to over-come a ban which had been pronounced against Nuit,according to which she could not give birth to childrenon any day of the year. But, of course, the five addi-tional days do not suffice fully to rectify the calendar.There remains the additional quarter of a day to beaccounted for. This, of course, amounts to a full dayevery fourth year. We shall see that later Alexan-drian science hit upon the expedient of adding a dayto every fourth year; an expedient which the Juliancalendar adopted and which still gives us our familiarleap-year. But, unfortunately, the ancient Egyptianfailed to recognize the need of this additional day, orif he did recognize it he failed to act on his knowledge,and so it happened that, starting somewhere back inthe remote past with a new year's day that coincidedwith the inundation of the Nile, there was a constantlyshifting maladjustment of calendar and seasons as timewent on.The Egyptian seasons, it should be explained, werethree in number: the season of the inundation, the sea-

son of the seed-time, and the season of the harvest;each season being, of course, four months in extent.Originally, as just mentioned, the season of the inun-

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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEdations began and coincided with the actual time ofinundation. The more precise fixing of new year'sday was accomplished through observation of the timeof the so-called heliacal rising of the dog-star, Sirius,which bore the Egyptian name Sothis. It chancesthat, as viewed from about the region of Heliopolis,the sun at the time of the summer solstice occupies anapparent position in the heavens close to the dog-star.Now, as is well known,!- the Egyptians, seeing divinityback of almost every phenomenon of naturejvery nat-urallyjjpaid particular reverence to so obviously in-fluential a personage as the sun - god. | In particularthey thought it fitting to do homage to him just as hewas starting out on his tour of Egypt in the morning;and that they might know the precise moment of hiscoming, the Egyptian astronomer priests, perched onthe hill-tops near their temples, were wont to scan theeastern horizon with reference to some star which hadbeen observed to precede the solar luminary. Ofcourse the precession of the equinoxes, due to thataxial wobble in which our clumsy earth indulges, wouldchange the apparent position of the fixed stars in ref-erence to the sun, so that the same star could not doservice as heliacal messenger indefinitely; but, on theother hand, these changes are so slow that observa-tions by many generations of astronomers would berequired to detect the shifting. It is believed byLockyer, though the evidence is not quite demonstra-tive, that the astronomical observations of the Egyp-tians date back to a period when Sothis, the dog-star,was not in close association with the sun on the morn-ing of the summer solstice. Yet, according to the cal-

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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEmeans so much so in actual practice. We need go nofarther than to our own experience to know that thenames of seasons, as of months and days, come to havein the minds of most of us a purely conventional sig-nificance. Few of us stop to give a thought to themeaning of the words January, February, etc., exceptas they connote certain climatic conditions. If, then,our own calendar were so defective that in the courseof 1 20 years the month of February had shifted backto occupy the position of the original January, thechange would have been so gradual, covering theperiod of two life-times or of four or five average gen-erations, that it might well escape general observation.Each succeeding generation of Egyptians, then, may

not improbably have associated the names of the sea-sons with the contemporary climatic conditions,troubling themselves little with the thought that in anearlier age the climatic conditions for each period ofthe calendar were quite different. We cannot wellsuppose, however, that the astronomer priests wereoblivious to the true state of things. Upon them de-volved the duty of predicting the time of the Nileflood; a duty they were enabled to perform withoutdifficulty through observation of the rising of the sol-stitial sun and its Sothic messenger. To these ob-servers 'it must finally have been apparent that theshifting of the seasons was at the rate of one day infour years; this known, it required no great mathe-matical skill to compute that this shifting would finallyeffect a complete circuit of the calendar, so that after(4 x 365 =) 1460 years the first day of the calendar yearwould again coincide with the heliacal rising of Sothis

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEand with the coming of the Nile flood. In other words,1 46 1 vague years or Egyptian calendar years of 365days each correspond to 1460 actual solar years of365 1 days each. This period, measured thus by theheliacal rising of Sothis, is spoken of as the Sothiccycle.To us who are trained from childhood to understand

that the year consists of (approximately) 36 5-4- days, andto know that the calendar may be regulated approxi-mately by the introduction of an extra day every fourthyear, this recognition of the Sothic cycle seems simpleenough. Yet if the average man of us will reflect howlittle he knows, of his own knowledge, of the exactlength of the year, it will soon become evident that theappreciation of the faults of the calendar and theknowledge of its periodical adjustment constituted arelatively high development of scientific knowledgeon the part of the Egyptian astronomer. It may beadded that various efforts to reform the calendar weremade by the ancient Egyptians, but that they cannotbe credited with a satisfactory solution of the problemfor, of course, the Alexandrian scientists of the Ptole-maic period (whose work we shall have occasion to re-view presently) were not Egyptians in any propersense of the word, but Greeks.

Since so much of the time of the astronomer priestswas devoted to observation of the heavenly bodies, it isnot surprising that they should have mapped out theapparent course of the moon and the visible planets intheir nightly tour of the heavens, and that they shouldhave divided the stars of the firmament into more orless arbitrary groups or constellations. That they did

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TWELVE STAGES IN THE LIFE OF THE SUN AND ITS TWELVEFORMS THROUGHOUT THE DAY(From a drawing by Faucher-Gudin in Maspero's Dawn of Civilization, fromthe ceiling of the Hall of the New Year at Edfu.)


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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEso is. evidenced by various sculptured representationsof constellations corresponding to signs of the zodiacwhich still ornament the ceilings of various ancienttemples. Unfortunately the decorative sense, whichwas always predominant with the Egyptian sculptor,led him to take various liberties with the distributionof figures in these representations of the constellations,so that the inferences drawn from them as to the exactmap of the heavens as the Egyptians conceived it can-not be fully relied upon. It appears, however, thatthe Egyptian astronomer divided the zodiac into twen-ty-four decani, or constellations. The arbitrary group-ings of figures, with the aid of which these are de-lineated, bear a close resemblance to the equally ar-bitrary outlines which we are still accustomed to usefor the same purpose.

IDEAS OF COSMOLOGYIn viewing this astronomical system of the Egyp-

tians one cannot avoid the question as to just whatinterpretation was placed upon it as regards the actualmechanical structure of the universe. A proximalanswer to the question is supplied us with a good dealof clearness. It appears that the Egyptian conceivedthe sky as a sort of tangible or material roof placedabove the world, and supported at each of its four cor-ners by a column or pillar, which was later on conceivedas a great mountain. The earth itself was conceivedto be a rectangular box, longer from north to souththan from east to west ; the upper surface of this box,upon which man lived, being slightly concave and hav-ing, of course, the valley of the Nile as its centre. The

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEpillars of support were situated at the points of thecompass; the northern one being located beyond theMediterranean Sea; the southern one away beyondthe habitable regions towards the source of the Nile,and the eastern and western ones in equally inaccessi-ble regions. Circling about the southern side of theworld was a great river suspended in mid-air on some-thing comparable to mountain cliffs ; on which river thesun-god made his daily course in a boat, fighting dayby day his ever-recurring battle against Set, the demonof darkness. The wide channel of this river enabledthe sun-god to alter his course from time to time, as heis observed to do ; in winter directing his bark towardsthe farther bank of the channel; in summer glidingclose to the nearer bank. As to the stars, they weresimilar lights, suspended from the vault of the heavenbut just how their observed motion of translationacross the heavens was explained is not apparent.It is more than probable that no one explanation wasuniversally accepted.

In explaining the origin of this mechanism of theheavens, the Egyptian imagination ran riot. Eachseparate part of Egypt had its own hierarchy of gods,and more or less its own explanations of cosmogony.There does not appear to have been any one centralstory of creation that found universal acceptance, anymore than there was one specific deity everywhererecognized as supreme among the gods. Perhaps themost interesting of the cosmogonic myths was thatwhich conceived that Nuit, the goddess of night, hadbeen torn from the arms of her husband, Sibu the earth-god, and elevated to the sky despite her protests and

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SB


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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEher husband's struggles, there to remain supported byher four limbs, which became metamorphosed into thepillars, or mountains, already mentioned. The forci-ble elevation of Nuit had been effected on the day ofcreation by a new god, Shu, who came forth from theprimeval waters. A painting on the mummy case ofone Betuhamon, now in the Turin Museum, illustrates,in the graphic manner so characteristic of the Egyp-tians, this act of creation. As Maspero 2 points out, thestruggle of Sibu resulted in contorted attitudes towhich the irregularities of the earth's surface are to beascribed.

In contemplating such a scheme of celestial mechan-ics as that just outlined, one cannot avoid raising thequestion as to just the degree of literalness which theEgyptians themselves put upon it. We know howessentially eye-minded the Egyptian was, to use amodern psychological phrasethat is to say, how essen-tial to him it seemed that all his conceptions should bevisualized. The evidences of this are everywhere: allhis gods were made tangible; he believed in the im-mortality of the soul, yet he could not conceive of suchimmortality except in association with an immortalbody; he must mummify the body of the dead, else,as he firmly believed, the dissolution of the spiritwould take place along with the dissolution of the bodyitself. His world was peopled everywhere with spirits,but they were spirits associated always with corporealbodies; his gods found lodgment in sun and moon andstars; in earth and water; in the bodies of reptilesand birds and mammals. He worshipped all of thesethings: the sun, the moon, water, earth, the spirit of

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEthe Nile, the ibis, the cat, the ram, and apis the bull;but, so far as we can judge, his imagination did notreach to the idea of an absolutely incorporeal deity.Similarly his conception of the mechanism of theheavens must be a tangibly mechanical one. He mustthink of the starry firmament as a substantial entitywhich could not defy the law of gravitation, and which,therefore, must have the same manner of support as isrequired by the roof of a house or temple. We knowthat this idea of the materiality of the firmamentfound elaborate expression in those later cosmologicalguesses which were to dominate the thought of Eu-rope until the time of Newton. We need not doubt,therefore, that for the Egyptian this solid vault of theheavens had a very real existence. If now and thensome dreamer conceived the great bodies of the firma-ment as floating in a less material plenumand suchiconoclastic dreamers there are in all agesno recordof his musings has come down to us, and we must freelyadmit that if such thoughts existed they were alien tothe character of the Egyptian mind as a whole.While the Egyptians conceived the heavenly bodies

as the abiding-place of various of their deities, it doesnot appear that they practised astrology in the lateracceptance of that word. This is the more remarkablesince the conception of lucky and unlucky days wascarried by the Egyptians to the extremes of absurdity."One day was lucky or unlucky," says Erman, 3 "ac-cording as a good or bad mythological incident tookplace on that day. For instance, the ist of Mechir, onwhich day the sky was raised, and the 27th of Athyr,when Horus and Set concluded peace together and

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EGYPTIAN SCIENCEdivided the world between them, were lucky days ; onthe other hand, the 14th of Tybi, on which Isis andNephthys mourned for Osiris, was an unlucky day.With the unlucky days, which, fortunately, were less innumber than the lucky days, they distinguished dif-ferent degrees of ill-luck. Some were very unlucky,others only threatened ill-luck, and many, like the 17thand the 27th Choiakh, were partly good and partlybad according to the time of day. Lucky days might,as a rule, be disregarded. At most it might be as wellto visit some specially renowned temple, or to 'cele-brate a joyful day at home,' but no particular precau-tions were really necessary; and, above all, it was said,'what thou also seest on the day is lucky.' It wasquite otherwise with the unlucky and dangerous days,which imposed so many and such great limitations onpeople that those who wished to be prudent were al-ways obliged to bear them in mind when determiningon any course of action. Certain conditions were easyto carry out. Music and singing were to be avoidedon the 14th Tybi, the day of the mourning of Osiris,and no one was allowed to wash on the 16th Tybi;whilst the name of Set might not be pronounced on the24th of Pharmuthi. Fish was forbidden on certaindays ; and what was still more difficult in a countryso rich in mice, on the 12 th of Tybi no mouse mightbe seen. The most tiresome prohibitions, however,were those which occurred not infrequently, namely,those concerning work and going out: for instance,four times in Paophi the people had to 'do nothingat all,' and five times to sit the whole day or halfthe day in the house; and the same rule had to be

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A HISTORY OF SCIENCEobserved each month. It was impossible to rejoiceif a child was born on the 23d of Thoth; the par-ents knew it could not live. Those born on the20th of Choiakh would become blind, and those bornon the 3d of Choiakh, deaf."

CHARMS AND INCANTATIONSWhere such conceptions as these pertained, it goes

without saying that charms and incantations intendedto break the spell of the unlucky omens were equallyprevalent. Such incantations consisted usually of therecitation of certain phrases based originally, it wouldappear, upon incidents in the history of the gods. Thewords which the god had spoken in connection withsome lucky incident would, it was thought, prove effec-tive now in bringing good luck to the human suppli-cantthat is to say, the magician hoped through re-peating the words of the god to exercise the magic pow-er of the god. It was even possible, with the aid of themagical observances, partly to balk fate itself. Thusthe person predestined through birth on an unluckyday to die of a serpent bite might postpone the timeof this fateful visitation to extreme old age. The likeuncertainty attached to those spells which one personwas supposed to be able to exercise over another. Itwas held, for example, that if something belonging toan individual, such as a lock of hair or a paring of thenails, could be secured and incorporated in a waxenfigure, this figure would be intimately associated withthe personality of that individual. An enemy mightthus secure occult power over one ; any indignity prac-tised upon the waxen figure would result in like injury

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7/28/2019 A History of Scienc

a history of science, vol 1 beginnings of science - henry smith williams (1904)

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