54 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



It has led us a long way from Lucretius. We do not ask 

 if other Iliads have perished ; or if poets before Homer 

 have vainly sung, becoming a prey to all-consuming time. We 

 move in a greater history, the land-marks of which are not 

 the birth and death of kings and poets, but of species, genera, 

 orders. And we set out these organic events not according 

 to the passing generations of man, but over hundreds or 

 thousands of millions of years. 



How much Lucretius has lost, and how much we have 

 gained, is bound up with the question of the intrinsic value 

 of knowledge and great ideas. Let us appraise knowledge 

 as we would the Homeric poems, as something which ennobles 

 life and makes it happier. Well, then, we are, as I think, in 

 possession to-day of some of those lost Iliads and Odysseys 

 for which Lucretius looked in vain. 





