42 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



view, works of art have an immense superiority over every other 

 manifestation of the human mind; they give us a complete and 

 synthetical view of times gone by; they offer us the information 

 that we need at a glance; they bring the past to life again. A 

 granite sphinx, a Nike, a picture by Giotto or by Breughel, a 

 Gothic cathedral, a mass by Palestrina — all these things teach us 

 more in one flash than living men could do by long discourses. 



The following examples will show what kind of information the 

 history of art can give us. It is by comparing various monuments 

 that Viollet le Due has been able to find out some of the principal 

 commercial roads of the twelfth century. Illustrations from Roman 

 monuments give us exact information as to the origin of domestic 

 and medical plants. Indeed, it is through Greece and Rome that 

 most of them were introduced from the East into Europe. The his- 

 tory of these plants tells us all the vicissitudes that modified the 

 commercial and intellectual relations between those peoples. Here 

 is another very curious fact. The great botanist H. de Vries dis- 

 covered the variety monophylla of 7ragaria vesca in a picture by 

 Holbein the Elder ("The Saint Sebastian of Munich/' dated 

 1516). This variety is now cultivated in botanic gardens as a 

 rarity. One guesses that similar discoveries, however small they 

 may appear, sometimes accomplish the solution of historical prob- 

 lems. 



Lastly, I wish to note that the history of science is also, to a 

 certain extent — perhaps less than some mathematicians think, but 

 much more than the artists suppose — a history of taste. Leaving 

 aside the external beauty of many books of science, for many 

 scientists were splendid writers (think of Galileo, Descartes, Pas- 

 cal, Goethe, Darwin) , the very substance of their work has often 

 a great aesthetic value. Scientists who are men of taste very easily 

 distinguish the scientific theories that are beautiful and elegant 

 from the others. It would be wrong to ignore this distinction, be- 

 cause this beauty and harmony, that the average person cannot 

 see but that the scientist does see, is extremely deep and significant. 

 One might ask : 'These theories that are more beautiful — are they 



