LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



it is certainly profitless and probably meaningless to enquire. But 

 scientific men, as Bukharin^ said, do not live in a vacuum; on the 

 contrary, the directions of their interest are ever conditioned by the 

 structure of the world they live in. Further historical research will 

 enable us to do for the great embr}'ologists what has been well done 

 by Hessen^ for Isaac Newton, and in this survey it will not be out of 

 plate to take into account the social and economic status of the in- 

 vestigator himself (Cf. Frank Chambers^ for the Hellenistic artist; 

 M. Yearsley* for the sixteenth-century physician). 



It would thus be of the greatest interest to know accurately the 

 sources of the emoluments of embryologists at different times.^ 

 From Omstein's admirable book on the scientific societies of the 

 Renaissance,^ the suspicion arises that their royal patronage was 

 dictated not so much by a purely disinterested passion for abstract 

 truth, as by the desire to profit as much as possible by the new tech- 

 niques which the decay of the anti-usury doctrines, the willingness of 

 the rising capitalist class to make industrial "ventures," and the far- 

 ranging thought of the scientific men were combining to produce. 

 In our own Royal Society, indeed, the preoccupation of the early 

 Fellows with the "improvement of trade and husbandry" is patent to 

 anyone acquainted with its early history (Cf. Thomas Sprat's account 

 of it^). Thus Dr. Jasper Needham, elected in 1663, read only one 

 paper before the Society — not, as might have been expected from his 

 profession, on the transfusion of blood or the anatomy of the brain, 

 but on the value and use of China Varnish.^ However, it is probable 

 that for the most part the embryologists whose work we shall have 

 to discuss were practising physicians, free or relatively free, from the 

 ancient tradition, and conscious that to understand the mystery of 

 generation would be to advance the science and art of medicine. 



In this connection, it is of interest that the Church in the 17th 

 and 1 8th centuries provided a certain source of demand for embryo- 

 logical research. Of this Swammerdam^ and Malebranche^^ provide 



^ Historical Materialism (Allen & Unwin, London, 1928). 



2 "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" in Science at the Cross- 

 Roads (London, 193 1). 



^ Cycles of Taste (Harvard, 1928). 



* Doctors in EUiabethan Drama (London, 1933). 



^ On this, cf. Cumston, Ann. Med. Hist., 1921, 2, 265 and Dittrick, Ann. Med. Hist., 

 1928, 10, 90. 



* The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1928). 

 ' History of the Royal Society^ 1670. ' i.e. lacquer. 



^ Biblia Naturae, 1737, ■"' Recherche de la Verite, 1672. 



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