44 HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE 



excepting only along lines of government and law. The 

 intellectual decline of Greece began with the collapse of her 

 political influence, despite the extension of Greek culture 

 during the Hellenistic Age. The apex of the curve had been 

 reached by the ancient learning before the first century 

 a. d. Christendom inherited from Greece and Rome a 

 philosophy already divorced from the sure ground of science. 

 We have seen how the cultural, and perhaps racial, traits of 

 the Romans prevented the complete assimilation of the Greek 

 spirit of investigation. It is important that this replace- 

 ment of the scientific spirit by the ignorance and supersti- 

 tion, which culminated in the Dark Ages, was in progress 

 during the two centuries that preceded the Christian era. 

 At the most, Christianity but hastened what was already 

 begun. 



The causes of the disintegration of the Roman Empire, 

 while the subject of much controversy, have become toler- 

 ably clear to the historian. 2 Notable among them was the 

 failure of Rome to use and to extend scientific knowledge. 

 In her feats of engineering and architecture, she did indeed 

 utilize and develop the knowledge of an earlier day. But in 

 agriculture and in the more difficult field of social phenomena 

 she failed to establish an enduring civilization. The scien- 

 tist of to-day is particularly interested in some of the biologi- 

 cal factors which seem to have been involved. From the 

 standpoint of heredity there are signs of a physical degenera- 

 tion resulting from the elimination of the more competent 

 human strains by war, by the administration of distant 

 provinces, and by the race-suicide and general deterioration 



2 The terrible picture of the degenerate spiritual life of the capital is pic- 

 tured by Uhlhorn, Chap. II, loc. cit. Specific evidence of physical degeneration 

 is suggested by the fact that portrait busts and statues of the last centuries of 

 pagan Rome, which are still extant, " display an increasing ugliness. Their 

 forms look unhealthy, either bloated or shrunken," p. 313. Also: Adams, G. B., 

 "Civilization during the Middle Age," 77-88, for a well considered resume of 

 the complex of factors involved in the decline of this race which was the strong- 

 est the world had then produced. 



