Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196629).pdf/13

Rh had never been entirely abandoned, it had been reduced to matters of very simple and easy comprehension, such as were merely subservient to practice. There had been men who could compute the area of a triangle, draw a meridian line, or even construct a sun-dial, in the worst of times; but between such skill, and the capacity to understand or the taste to relish, the demonstrations of Euclid, Apollonius, or Archimedes, there was a great interval, and many difficulties were to be overcome, for which much time, and much subsidiary knowledge, were necessary. The repositories of the ancient treasures were to be opened, and made accessible; the knowledge of the languages was to be acquired; the manuscripts were to be decyphered; and the skill of the grammarian and the critic were to precede, in a certain degree, that of the geometrician or the astronomer. The obligations which we have to those who undertook this laborious and irksome task, and who rescued the ancient books from the prisons to which ignorance and barbarism had condemned them, and from the final destruction by which they must soon have been overtaken, are such as we can never sufficiently acknowledge; and, indeed, we shall never know even the names of many of the benefactors to whom our thanks are due. In the midst of the wars, the confusion, and bloodshed, which overwhelmed Europe during the middle ages, the religious houses and monasteries afforded to the remains of ancient learning an asylum, which a salutary prejudice forced even the most lawless to respect; and the authors who have given the best account of the revival of letters, agree that it is in a great measure to those establishments that we owe the safety of the books which have kept alive the scientific and literary attainments of Greece and Rome.

The study of the remains of antiquity gradually produced men of taste and intelligence, who were able to correct the faults of the manuscripts they copied, and to explain the difficulties of the authors they translated. Such were Purbach, Regiomontanus, Commandine, Maurolycus, and many others. By their means, the writings of Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Ptolemy, and Pappus, became known and accessible to men of science. Arabia contributed its share towards this great renovation, and from the language of that country was derived the knowledge of many Greek books, of the originals of which, some were not found till long afterwards, and others have never yet been discovered.

In nothing, perhaps, is the inventive and elegant genius of the Greeks better exemplified than in their geometry. The elementary truths of that science were connected by Euclid into one great chain, beginning from the axioms, and extending to the properties of the five regular solids; the whole digested into such admirable order, and explained with such clearness and precision, that no similar work of superior excellence has appeared, even in the present advanced state of mathematical science.