18 Introduction 



ignorance of those rays would have branded himself as an ass. In our 

 day it is almost impossible for a man who reads but a few journals, to 

 escape the knowledge of a new discovery. The problem of tradition 

 does hardly exist; the transmission of knowledge from one end of the 

 world to the other is almost automatic. Hence the historian of science 

 who restricts himself to "modern" science does not think of tradition, he 

 takes it for granted.^ Reciprocally, in order to understand the true 

 meaning of scientific tradition and its value one has to look backward 

 more deeply, and this we shall now proceed to do. 



Think of Greek science of the sixth and fifth centuries, what we 

 might perhaps call the "Greek miracle," as do people who have Homer, 

 Sophocles or Phidias in mind. The early blossoming of Greek science 

 is just as miraculous (i.e., as little explainable) as that of Greek art or 

 Greek literature. (Is not each masterpiece a miracle?, you might say. 

 Yes, but that is another story.) For Greek science the difficulty of 

 explanation or the "miracle" if you prefer to use that word, is of a double 

 nature. There is the miracle of creation and the miracle of transmission. 

 We know, of course, that a substantial amount of Greek science is lost, 

 probably forever; the astonishing thing, however, is not that much has 

 been lost, but rather that so much has escaped the vicissitudes of time 

 and reached our very hands. 



Take the case of Archimedes, who was killed at the age of 75 during 

 the siege of Syracuse by the Romans in 212 B.C. Thus his works were 

 written during the period c. 257 (aet. 30) to 212. He was already 

 famous in antiquity, but the earliest commentaries on his works known 

 to us are those of the Palestinian mathematician, Eutocios of Ascalon 

 (VI-1) and these are restricted to three treatises (the sphere and the 

 cylinder, measurement of the circle, equilibrium of planes ) . The oldest 

 Greek MS. to which definite reference is made was written during the 

 Byzantine renaissance of the ninth to the tenth century, initiated by 

 Leon of Thessalonica ( IX-1 ), probably at the beginning of that period. 

 That MS. contained only seven treatises (the three already mentioned, 

 conoids and spheroids, spirals, sand-reckoner, quadrature of the parab- 

 ola); it is lost, but the earliest Greek MSS. extant are copies of it made 

 toward the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the six- 

 teenth. Another copy of the lost archetype found its way to Baghdad, 

 for we have Arabic translations and commentaries by al-M ahani, Thabit 

 iBN QuRRA, YusuF al-Khuri, Ishaq ibn Hunain, all of whom flourished 

 in the second half of the ninth century. Another Archimedian treatise, 

 the one on floating bodies in two books, not included in the MS. tradition 

 just referred to, was translated into Latin by the Flemish Dominican, 

 WiLLEM OF Moerbeke, in 1269. His translation of book 1 appeared in 



° His difficulty is rather to account for exceptional failures of transmission. E.g., 

 the "Edison effect" discovered in 1884 which remained unnoticed for many years 

 until it was exploited by John Ambrose Fleming ( 1905 ) and by Lee De Forest 

 in wireless telegraphy. 



