132 

 NATURAL-HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS. 



Baron Cuviek's Lectures on the History of the Natural Sciences. 



Lecture IV. — Greece. — The Greeks did not receive all their knowledge 

 from Egypt. They had communications with the Phenicians, and probably also 

 with the Babylonians. It is certain that they had intercourse with the tribes of 

 Colchis and Caucasus, from whom they received religious rites very different from 

 those of Egypt. But we can only form conjectures as to the results of these ear- 

 ly communications, and can only refer to the period when Cadmus brought the 

 Phenician alphabet into Greece, as that at which precise historical accounts com- 

 mence. An uninterrupted chain then commenced, and the history of the 

 sciences became based upon a continuous series of written documents. 



The sciences once introduced among the Greeks, were with them free from the 

 fetters which had retarded their progress among the other three nations, whose 

 history we have sketched. They had no longer to suffer either from the irrup- 

 tions of barbarians, or from the selfishness of a privileged caste. 



India, Assyria, and Egypt were, as we have said, countries quite open, and, 

 from the very nature of their ground, in a great measure incapable of being de- 

 fended. The case was different with Greece, the whole central part of which be- 

 ing mountainous, afforded great facilities for resisting an invasion. There each 

 tribe, separated from the others by deep gorges, found natural ramparts in its 

 rocks. An invader could only conquer the land foot by foot, and the parts which 

 he had subjected would quickly withdraw themselves from his domination. All 

 the small islands which depended upon that country were equally defended by 

 their mere position, and enabled to maintain their independence. Accordingly, 

 Greece could never remain long united under the same form of government ; and 

 perhaps this circumstance, which arises from the very form of the country, will, 

 even at the present day, prevent the establishment of a central government 



The settlements which the Greeks made on the coasts of Asia Minor and Italy 

 were not, it is true, so easily defended ; but when they were overpowered, the 

 learned men to whom they had given birth fied back to Central Greece, and thus 

 carried to that country the tribute of their acquirements ; so that the conquest of 

 the colonies, instead of retarding the civilization of the mother country, only 

 served to accelerate it. 



Mythological forms were in the east only the emblematic expression of a gene- 

 ral system of philosophy, and thus the priests were at the same time the learned 

 men of the nation. In Greece, there were only received the external forms of 

 religion, without any apprehension of the meaning concealed under these emblems, 

 so that there the priests were not in general more learned than the vulgar. They 

 did not form a caste ; for, although there was a tendency to perpetuate the priest- 

 hood in the same families, this tendency was confined within very narrow limits, 

 and had very little influence upon the constitution. 



The sciences, therefore, at their renovation in Greece, were completely sepa- 

 rated from religion, and consequently free in their progress; whereas in the 

 countries in which a divine origin was attributed to them, they necessarily re- 

 mained stationary, as nothing, without sacrilege, could be changed in a doctrine 

 that had emanated from the divinity itself. 



The history of the sciences in ancient Greece presents four very distinct epochs. 

 The first commences at the settlement of the Pelasgi in that country, and ends at 

 the arrival of the Egyptian colonies, about the fourteenth or fifteenth century be- 

 fore our era. The second includes all the time that elapsed between the 

 arrival of these Egyptians and the settlement of the Greek colonies on the coasts 



