CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 263 



Alexandrine school. But nothing so plainly exhibits the hesitating 

 step of natural science among the ancients as the simple fact that 400 

 years after Aristotle's day an interval equal to that between Roger 

 Bacon and Newton so uncritical a collector as Pliny could exist. The 

 case is as if Herodotus and Tacitus had exchanged places. 



The history of the human mind offers few more noteworthy phe- 

 nomena than this. Here are nations whose poetry and sculpture still 

 afford us the highest delight; who, in metaphysics, history, and the 

 science of law, produced works which, both in form and in substance, 

 constitute the models for all ages ; who to this day are our instructors 

 in oratory, the art of war, government, and jurisprudence ; but who, in 

 their knowledge of Nature, never advanced beyond the puerile stage 

 of credulity, and in which they rested content with the broaching of 

 futile hypotheses. Their minds, ever ready, Icarus-like, to essay flights 

 into the region of supersensual speculation, lacked the painstaking assi- 

 duity required to ascend the difficult path of induction the only safe 

 path from particular and sharply-circumscribed facts, up to general 

 propositions, thus rising gradually and methodically from the appar- 

 ently accidental to the conception of law. True, the germ of the 

 inductive process appears in Socrates and Aristotle ; still the method 

 which in general and theoretically was recognized as correct no one 

 knew how to apply to particular cases ; and beyond this feeble begin- 

 ning nothing was done by the ancients. Even when by chance they 

 observed aright, their very first attempt at an explanation would involve 

 them in a tangle of such absurd and ridiculous fancies that one much 

 prefers the theory of old Pan with his train of golden-haired nymphs 

 ruling forest and field; of Poseidon with his trident agitating and 

 again calming the sea; of Zeus hurling his thunderbolts. The picture 

 drawn by Prometheus Bound of his services to humanity is a true rep- 

 resentation of ancient science, when with astronomy, arithmetic, the 

 alphabet, breeding of animals, navigation, mining, and medicine, he 

 directly couples as equally important gifts the interpretation of dreams, 

 of the flight of birds, and of the signs found in the entrails of immo- 

 lated animals. 1 



In his very instructive rectorate address on " The Backwardness of 

 the Ancients in Natural Science," a Herr von Littrow deduces, from 

 Plutarch's dialogue on " The Man in the Moon," a striking evidence of 

 the inability of the ancients to reason scientifically. He might have 

 quoted to the same effect Plato's " Timjeus," a work abounding in intol- 

 erable absurdities ; or the whole of a treatise that has come down to 

 us bearing the name of Plutarch as its author, and entitled " Opinions 

 of the Philosophers," 3 of which Biot affirms that it contains the germs 



1 HpofjLi)8evs SefffidTTis, v., 442, et seq. 



2 See Popular Science Monthly, vol. ix., p. 438. 



3 ITepl twi/ apea-Kouruv rots <ptAo<r6<pois. Concerning the doubtful authorship of this 

 work, see Monatsberichte dcr Berliner Akademie, 1874, p. 485. 



