Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/715



Chemistry grew out of alchemy as natural experience waxed and primeval mysticism waned in reciprocal measure; and in earlier time astronomy grew out of astrology in similar fashion. The growth of chemistry is fairly written and that of astronomy meagerly recorded in early literature; and in the history of both sciences the records are corroborated and the sequence established by vestigial characteristics, which are no less useful in defining mental development than are vestigial organs and functions in outlining vital evolution.

The beginning of chemistry marked the third step in the development of science; the beginning of astronomy marked the second step; the first step, taken amid the mists of unwritten antiquity, was marked by the beginning of mathematics. In the absence of records, the rise of mathematics may be traced partly (like that of the next younger sciences) by vestigial characteristics; and these characteristics indicate that, just as scientific chemistry came out of mystical alchemy, and as scientific astronomy sprang from mystical astrology, so scientific mathematics grew out of a mystical system which long dominated the minds of men and slowly waned under the light of natural experience concentrated among the Arabs of past millenniums. In Arabia this mystical system preceded the essentially natural (though happily conventional) system of algorism, which opened the way to numerical treatment of quantities, and thus gave a foundation