460 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



and the radio, have sprung. Neither of them would have 

 been at all possible without 200 years of work in pure science 

 before any bread and butter applications were dreamed of, 

 work beginning in the sixteenth century with Copernicus 

 and Kepler and Gahleo, whose discoveries for the first time 

 began to cause mankind to gHmpse a nature, or a God, 

 whichever term you prefer, not of caprice and whim as had 

 been all the Gods of the ancient world, but instead a God 

 who rules through law, a nature which can be counted 

 upon and hence is worth knowing and worth carefully 

 studying. This discovery which began to be made about 

 1600 A.D. I call the supreme discovery of all the ages, for 

 before any application was ever dreamed of, it began to 

 change the whole philosophical and religious outlook of the 

 race, to effect a spiritual and an intellectual, not at first a 

 material revolution, this was to come later. This new knowl- 

 edge was what began at this time to banish the monastic 

 ideal which had led thousands, perhaps millions of men, to 

 withdraw themselves from useful lives. It was this new 

 knowledge that began to inspire man to know his universe so 

 as to be able to live in it more rationally. 



As a result of that inspiration there followed 200 years 

 of the pure science involved in the development of the 

 mathematics, and ofthe celestial mechanics, necessary merely 

 to understand the movements of the heavenly bodies, useless 

 knowledge to the unseeing, but all constituting an indispen- 

 sable foundation for the development of the terrestrial 

 mechanics and the industrial civilization which actually 

 followed in the nineteenth century; for the very laws of 

 force and motion essential to the design of all power machines 

 of every sort were completely unknown to the ancient world, 

 completely unknown up to Galileo's time. 



Does the practical man of today fully realize that the 

 airplane was only made possible by the development of the 

 internal combustion engine, that this in its turn was only 

 made possible by the development of the laws governing 

 all heat engines (the laws of thermo dynamics) through the 

 use for the hundred preceding years of the steam engine, 

 that this was only made possible by the preceding 200 

 years of work in celestial mechanics, that this was only made 



