Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/348

 MARK TWAIN

little Reason to value ourselves beyond the Antients, or to be tempted to contemn them, that we cannot give stronger or more convincing Proofs of our own Ignorance, as well as our Pride.

Among all the systematical Writers, I think there are very few who refuse the Preference to Hieron, Fabricius ab Aquapen- dente, as a Person of unquestion d Learning and Judgment; and yet is he not asham d to let his Readers know that Celsus among the Latins, Paulus Aegineta among the Greeks, and Albucasis among the Arabians, whom I am unwilling to place among the Moderns, tho he liv d but six hundred Years since, are the Triumvirate to whom he principally stands indebted, for the Assistance he had receiv d from them in composing his excellent Book.

[In a previous paragraph are puffs of Galen, Hippocrates, and other debris of the Old Silurian Period of Medicine.] How many Operations are there now in Use which were unknown to the Antients?

That is true. The surest way for a nation s scientific men to prove that they were proud and ignorant was to claim to have found out something fresh in the course of a thousand years or so. Evi dently the peoples of this book s day regarded them selves as children, and their remote ancestors as the only grown-up people that had existed. Consider the contrast: without offense, without over-egotism, our own scientific men may and do regard themselves as grown people and their grandfathers as children. The change here presented is probably the most sweeping that has ever come over mankind in the history of the race. It is the utter reversal, in a couple of generations, of an attitude which had been maintained without challenge or interruption from the earliest antiquity. It amounts to creating man over again on a new plan; he was a canal-boat be fore, he is an ocean greyhound to-day. The change

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