Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/58

 52 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

gebra; Eudoxus and Hipparchufl, astronomy. Qrecian architecture was the outcome of scientific principles just as much as of the perception of the beautiful. The columns of the temples were so constructed as to appear from the ground correct in outline and perspective, although in many cases they were neither vertical nor were their sides parallel. Euclid gives a full treatment of the mathematical principles of stereo- scopic vision, as also does Galen.

If science is knowledge based on or flowing from exact thinking, the Oreeks possessed such science, and laid down for all succeeding genera- tions the philosophical basis for the superstructure.

There were natural philosophers as distinguished from metaphysi- cians from the earliest times. Aristotle and his pupils subsidized by Alexander the Great made vast collections of facts as truly empirical as those of any laborious collector or eystematist of the present day. This spade-work in science was certainly less congenial to the Grecian mind ijian speculation; but some one had to do the spade-work and even that was not shirked. To the Greek mind the mere specialist or tech- nician would have been deemed a monstrosity or a barbarian. To a per- son to-day who had acquired the facts of chemistry, let us say, without a knowledge of logic, mathematics, metaphysics, music, astronomy and modern languages, the Greeks would never have given the name of ''scientist.'*

The Greeks cultivated the objective sciences with conspicuous suc- cess; they gathered facts in astronomy, optics, geography, zoology, em- bryology, botany and medicine, in very much the same general way that we do now. Without instruments of precision, they observed so pre- cisely as to predict eclipses successfully. The universe, the environment, was to the Greeks a constant source of interest and of material for analysis; and this study of nature did not in the least impair their contemplation of the beautiful, the powerful, the graceful or the sym- metrical.

But when we say " the Greeks,*' we do not confine our attention to thinkers within the geographical confines of Greece itself, we must include such seats of intellectual activity as her colonies at Pergamos and at Alexandria. Euclid, who left a certain portion of mathematics so complete that nothing was added to it until the seventeenth century A.D., was a resident in Alexandria and he fiourished in the reign of Ptolemy I., King of Egypt (Ptolemy Soter who reigned from 323 to 285 B.C.). Euclid, who may have been born about 300 B.C., was one of the chief ornaments of that leamed society at Alexandria which one, nowadays, would call a university, for it included philosophers, astron- omers, mathematicians, physicians and anatomists. Not, of course, that Euclid really was the author of all the books extant and lost which have been attributed to him; for Proposition 47 of the First Book (In every

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