Third Preface to Volume Forty: Qualifications of Teachers of the History of Science (SecondArticle)Author(s): George SartonSource: Isis, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Nov., 1949), pp. 311-313Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/226364 .

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Third Preface to Volume Forty

Qualifications of teachers of the history of science (Second art'icle

T HE organization of teaching in a new field is made difficult by many misunder- standings. Those misunderstandings are unavoidable because administrators who have no familiarity with the field do not even know who are the competent

scholars in it and apply for information to other scholars as incompetent as them- selves. I have given a good example of those administrative methods in my discussion of a famous case.2

The history of science is so vast and complex a field that it may be approached from a great variety of directions in a three-dimensional space. The three dimensions are time, area and subject, or, to put it otherwise, chronology, geography and scientific knowledge. One may be interested in science of the fifth century B. C., or of the fourteenth century, or of the twentieth. One may be interested in the work done in Russia, or in France, or in India, or in the achievements of the Greek-speaking people or of the Muslim ones. Finally, one may be interested in mathematics, or in biochemistry, or in botany (or in much smaller parts of those branches of knowledge). Every man of science, every scholar having acquired an interest in the history of science, will approach it from the point of view of his own experience. That is as it should be. The multiplicity of approaches is a blessing in the case of research, but it should not be permitted to make elementary teaching too lopsided, if not impossible.

Valuable contributions to the history of science can be made only by specialists. It is clear that investigations in the development of spherical trigonometry can only be made by mathematicians, or that a historical study of the methods of classification used in botany and zoology cannot be made intelligently except by a trained naturalist. Looking at it from another "dimension" of our intellectual space, in order to study French mediaeval documents profitably, one must be familiar with the French lan- guage and French history, and, what is more difficult, with the resources and peculiari- ties of French libraries and French archives. Nowhere are such limitations more obvious than when ancient or oriental philology is involved: it is clear that one should be a Hellenist to add to our knowledge of Greek science, an Egy,ptologist to investigate Egyptian documents, a Sinologue to investigate Chinese ones, and so on. The original contributions of a historian of science are thus restricted in various ways to a relatively small part of the three-dimensional volume to which we referred above.

The teaching of the history of science should not be restricted in the same manner, however, or it would become impossible. The prospective teacher should have a general acquaintance, if not with the whole field, at least with a very large part of it. A teacher might be forgiven for excluding from his attention a good deal of oriental science,3 even much of mediaeval science, or higher mathematics, etc., but there are certain parts which he should never be allowed to omit. Every historian of science should have at least a superficial knowledge of Greek science, and he can obtain such knowledge without knowing Greek since the main texts are available in translations; 4 he should know the development of the main branches of science, with the possible exception of higher mathematics.

1My first article on the subject appeared in Isis 37, 5-7, I947.

2 Sarton: Paul, Jules, and Marie Tannery (Isis 38, 33-5I, I947).

'Not Arabic science, however, as I have ex-

plained repeatedly. Our own tradition is Greek- Arabic-Latin; we cannot leave the Arabic links out without breaking it.

' The recently published anthology of Morris R. Cohen and I. E. Drabkin: A source book in

3II

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312 George Sarton His situation is the same as that of every other historian, especially in new fields.

A historian of science should know the whole history of science in the same sense that a historian of art should know the whole history of art, or a historian of religion the whole history of religion. That obligation remains for all teachers, even if they have the good fortune to be permitted to restrict their formal teaching to a part of the field.

When a university or college appoints a single teacher for the history of science (and that will be the general case), that teacher should be prepared to teach the whole subject and not simply a part of it. The very few colleges which could afford to appoint many teachers might divide the task between them; if they could afford "research scholars" as well, the task of each might be restricted even more; it would have to be restricted if the research concerned a special philological or scientific field. Such opportunities will remain exceptional, however, for exceptional men.5

The excuse that the field is too large for anybody to encompass is not valid. It is far too large, of course, for original research, but not for general teaching. It is of course hopelessly out of reach of the men who lack scientific training, e.g., old- fashioned historians, philosophers, philologists, that is, all the men who are not historians of science, but are simply interested in the history of science, or in a par- ticular aspect of it. It is possible to devise a basic scientific training for prospective historians of science; such training would be different from that necessary for practical work in any scientific field, but it should not be less attainable, nor even much more difficult.6 A man with adequate training can easily become a historian of science; without adequate training he never can, and he should not try; he should not be allowed to teach.

Let us again consider other fields. It would not do for a man assigned to teach elementary physics to say that he is an electrician and does not want to teach any thing but electricity. Or imagine a historian appointed to teach the history of France who would say, "I can deal only with the Merovjngians, for I lack familiarity with later periods," - do you think he could get away with that? A college appointing a single historian of art would not be satisfied if the latter declared that he were competent to deal only with Greek sculpture or with Ming painting. If it had but one teacher of the history of religion, it could not allow that teacher to speak only of Islamic theology. It is not necessary to multiply these examples. In the same way, it would not do at all for a historian of science to claim that he must restrict his teaching to eighteenth-century mechanics or to nineteenth-century biology, unless there were other teachers on the staff in charge of the general introductory courses.

The teaching of the whole history of science is made possible by the fact that that history should not be extended to scientific subjects the explanation of which would be too long or too difficult. Those subjects have to be excluded not only for the sake of the teacher, who may or may not be competent to deal with them, but also for the sake of the students. The proper time to teach the history of a very special and recondite subject is at the end of a course devoted to that very subject. I am convinced that it would be very useful to conclude any such course (say on the methods of cartogra- phy, the theory of functions, neural histology) with a historical outline, wherein the main facts and ideas are recapitulated no longer in systematic order but in their

Greek science (New York I948; Isis 40, 277) will greatly facilitate the teaching of Greek sci- ence to scientific (non-philological) students.

6 The best example in America is that of Professor Otto Neugebauer, whom Brown Uni- versity wisely permits to restrict himself to the study of ancient science. ' At least for the person having the necessary aptitude. There are men unable to learn general science, just as others are unable to learn mathe-

matics or to become good observers or skilful experimentalists. Such men may be very good men for other purposes; they should do what they can do best and keep out of the fields for which they are unfitted.

A good example of basic training in general science is provided by Henrick Bode, Frederick Mosteller, John Tukey and Charles Winsor: The education of a scientific generalist (Science zog, 553-58, I949).

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Third Preface to Volume 40 313

chronological sequence. Such an outline puts all of these facts in a new light, helps the students to remember them and to become more keenly aware of their human and cultural implications. The very course which preceded the outline makes full understanding of the latter relatively easy; without the introductory course, the history of the subject, however long, would remain almost meaningless.

The teacher of the history of science must be prepared to teach the whole of it (with the restrictions indicated above), but such a preparation, however necessary, is insufficient. No one should be permitted to teach anything who had not proved his mastery in a definite part of the field intrusted to him. He is not competent to teach if he has not made special investigations, the results of which have been published and been generally approved of by good critics. These investigations may concern the history of a definite theory, or the development of science within a definite period or by a certain group of people. The future teacher of the history of science need not have proved his mastery in pure science or in any field but his own; but he must have proved his historical mastery, his ability to explain the development of science, his full understanding of historical methods, his appreciation of sources (the distinc- tion between primary documents and derivative ones) and of the means of exploiting them. If he has succeeded in completing original investigations in one part, even a small part, of his field, he may be able to judge the investigations made by other scholars in other parts and to transmit their results correctly to his own students.

In short, the teacher of the history of science must have a general knowledge of that history, and be able and ready to teach the whole of it. Such ability implies a deeper and more intimate knowledge of a small part of the field. His knowledge must be whole and pure. Cambridge, Massachusetts, I4 December 1948 GEORGE SARTON

Notes on Some Early Chemistry Books

Published in Pennsylvania

BY WYNDHAM MILES *

IN Henry Carrington Bolton's A select bibliography of Chemistry. I492-I897, first supplement (Washington, I899, p. 387), is listed Curiosities of Common Water, by John Smith, Boston, I725. This is the earliest American imprint men-

tioned by Bolton, and the conclusion might be drawn that Smith's Curiosities was the first book on chemistry printed in America. However, the listing of this book in a bibliography of chemistry is misleading, for the subject of the book is hydropathy rather than chemistry. The author, John Smith, was an Englishman who had received some training in medicine, and who was interested in the use of water in the treatment of disease. Smith compiled the material for his book mainly from prominent medical authors, and turned out what seems to have been a very popular little work. It was first published in London in I722 (according to DNB), went through several English

* The Pennsylvania State College

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