A History of Science — Volume 4
- Pages
- about 290
- Category
- History
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 5.3 h at 250 wpm
From the opening
AS regards chronology, the epoch covered in the present volume is
identical with that viewed in the preceding one. But now as regards
subject matter we pass on to those diverse phases of the physical world
which are the field of the chemist, and to those yet more intricate
processes which have to do with living organisms. So radical are the
changes here that we seem to be entering new worlds; and yet, here as
before, there are intimations of the new discoveries away back in the
Greek days. The solution of the problem of respiration will remind
us that Anaxagoras half guessed the secret; and in those diversified
studies which tell us of the Daltonian atom in its wonderful
transmutations, we shall be reminded again of the Clazomenian
philosopher and his successor Democritus.
Yet we should press the analogy much too far were we to intimate that
the Greek of the elder day or any thinker of a more recent period had
penetrated, even in the vaguest way, all of the mysteries that the
nineteenth century has revealed in the fields of chemistry and biology.
At the very most the insight of those great Greeks and of the wonderful
seventeenth-century philosophers who so often seemed on the verge of our
later discoveries did no more than vaguely anticipate their successors
of this later century. To gain an accurate, really specific knowledge of
the properties of elementary bodies was reserved for the chemists of a
recent epoch. The vague Greek questionings as to organic evolution were
world-wide from the precise inductions of a Darwin. If the mediaeval
Arabian endeavored to dull the knife of the surgeon with the use of
drugs, his results hardly merit to be termed even an anticipation
of modern anaesthesia. And when we speak of preventive medicine--of
bacteriology in all its phases--we have to do with a marvellous field of
which no previous generation of men had even the slightest inkling.
A short sample. Read the whole book
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