Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/403

 HISTORICAL CONTINUITY OF SCIENCE 397

osity has never been surpassed, perhaps indeed never equalled, most happily, by geographical proximity, furnished the connecting channel by which the accumulated knowledge of the east flowed to the receptive peoples of the west. But with their restless temperament and intel- lectual gifts the Greeks could not be mere passive recipients of facts. Everything that they received from Egypt, from Persia and from Asia Minor was transmitted to the west and to posterity marked with the indelible stamp of Greek genius. Isolated facts garnered from the east were multiplied by Greek investigators and welded into comprehensive generalizations.

For the first time the professional scientist who pursued science for its own sake appears in history. The multitude of isolated medical observations of the ancients were multiplied and interwoven into a sys- tem of medical practise by Hippocrates of Cos, and so intense was the enthusiasm and idealism with which he inspired his students that to this day the medical student enters upon the practise of his profession with the avowal upon his lips of the principles of medical practise which were enunciated by this great master. Geometry was applied to science by Archimedes and the fruits were the foundations of hydrostatics and mechanics. Great systematists like Democritus and Aristotle gathered together countless facts of nature and endeavored to weld them into a connected and interpretable whole.

With pupils such as these it is not surprising that the antique wis- dom of the east had soon to turn to the west for inspiration. Greek architects were in request from the Ganges to the White Nile and Greek engineers directed the construction of those massive feats of engineering which were the stable foundations of the Roman Empire.

The fall of the Eoman Empire, at first seeming the absolute destruc- tion of civilization, simply resulted by steps which are too well known to require description here, in the dispersal of the seeds of knowledge over the continent of Europe. The practical knowledge of the Greeks was safe in the hands of countless artisans and engineers who trans- mitted it by word and example, enriched by experience and practise, to generations which succeeded them. The more abstract generalizations and inspired literature of the Greeks were kept alive by the sudden awakening into intellectual activity of a people who never before had evinced, and, their task accomplished, have never since displayed capa- bility or desire of assimilating and constructing thought. Not only did the Arabs preserve for us the most perfect fruits of Greek thought, but they contrived a fresh and most significant importation from the east, algebra, the distinctive product of the contemplative rather than the kinetic intellect, a system of thought as truly expressive of the men- tality of the peoples of India to whom we owe it as geometry was of the more rugged and virile mentality of the Greek.

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