lyo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



He imposes on himself a far graver task. After a pathetic recital of 

 the sacrifice of Iphigenia on the altar of religion by the hand of her 

 father, Lucretius writes the great line of the poem — 



Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum — 



such are the evils to which religion leads! And he soon adds, "This 

 terror and darkness of mind must be dispelled, not by the rays of the 

 sun and the glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and law of 

 nature." His lofty aim is no less than the permanent defeat of the 

 ancient reign of superstition by setting forth the new knowledge of 

 nature. 



The poem is in six books, which aggregate nearly seven and a half 

 thousand lines. It is not far from three-fourths the length of 'Paradise 

 liost.' In the first book Lucretius expounds the physics of his great 

 master Epicurus, starting with the fundamental principle that nothing 

 comes from nothing, and the other that all that is is either atoms or 

 space. In the second book he derives all the properties of things from 

 the shapes and concourse of the atoms. The remaining books apply the 

 general principles of the first two to sensation and the doctrine of the 

 soul's immortality, the origin and the final ruin of the mass and fabric 

 of the world, the origin of plants and animals, the rise and development 

 of human civilization, and lastly the explanation of certain terrifying 

 phases of nature, as thunder, earthquake, volcanic eruptions and the 

 plague. 



If it be asked, How can this exposition of ancient physics, biology 

 and physical geography be poetry? it must be answered that much 

 of it is not poetry. But the same is true of 'Paradise Lost' or 'The Ring 

 and the Book.' A poem is to be judged, not by the proportion of prosaic 

 content which it carries, nor by successes or infelicities of detail, but 

 by the single impression which it makes considered in its totality. 

 Judged by this standard the poem of Lucretius is one of the world's 

 masterpieces. It becomes all the more remarkable when we recall the 

 limitations under which the poet worked: the language in which he 

 wrote had hitherto been all unused to the music of verse, the exigencies 

 of the exposition of an obscure and prosaic subject-matter dominated 

 the treatment, and the yoke of a practical moral purpose was always on 

 the neck of the poetic impulse. 



Of course the value of Lucretius does not lie in his science, and yet 

 our subject demands some consideration of at least one feature of his 

 scientific system. In the first place, he has, amid many puerilities, 

 some curious foreshadowings of modern scientific opinion. The fol- 

 lowing may be cited: the eternity of matter;"^ the conservation of 

 matter'^ and of force^ — Haeckel's 'law of substance'; the atomic con- 



> I. 149, 150. *I. 215-266; II. 294-307. ' II. 294-307. 



