Ancient and Mediaeval Science 25 



down to us in its integrity is the text of Hippocrates of Chios (V B.C.) 

 on the quadratures of lunules; it is really a fragment of the history 

 of geometry of Eudemos (IV-2 B.C.), preserved by Simplicios (VI-1) 

 in the latter's commentary on Aristotle's Physics! ^^ Please note the 

 tortuousness of that tradition. Thanks to the industry and sagacity of 

 many scholars, such as the German Hermann Diels, the Scot John 

 Burnet, and the Frenchman Paul Tannery, the fragments and doxog- 

 raphy concerning the early Greek "physiologists" are now gathered in 

 convenient form and can be scrutinized at leisure. Our doubts are re- 

 stricted to definite fragments or quotations or to definite personalities 

 and hardly afiFect our conception of the whole, that is, of, let us say, early 

 Greek mathematics or astronomy. 



Yet for all that our friends who are investigating Egyptian and 

 Babylonian mathematics have the pleasure of triumphing over the 

 Hellenists. Though the period which attracts their attention may be 

 anterior to the Hellenic period by a thousand years or more, they have 

 the privilege of dealing with original documents ( not mediaeval copies ) 

 — hieroglyphic papyri or cuneiform tablets. In some cases those docu- 

 ments may be contemporary with their authors or even holographs! 

 In contrast with the sayings of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (V B.C.) 

 or even with the Ochumena of Archimedes, which we know from MSS. 

 a thousand years posterior to Archimedes think of the Papyrus Rhind 

 written c. 1650 B.C. (not the text but the papyrus itself) after an older 

 work of say the eighteenth century.^^ That mathematical papyrus is 

 almost as good as an original while the Ochumena is a copy many 

 times removed from its source. This would be a cause of despair, but 

 for the faithfulness of ancient and mediaeval traditions which we have 

 explained a moment ago, and let it be added, but for the elaborate 

 methods of external and internal criticism which enable good scholars 

 to make the most of the least documents available to them, and yet 

 restrain them from expressing immoderate claims. 



The transmission or tradition of modern science is insured by so 

 many agencies that it is almost automatic; the individual man of sci- 

 ence need make no efforts to obtain news; indeed, he would have to 

 take special pains in order to eschew it, on the contrary the trans- 

 mission of scientific news in the ancient world and even in the mediaeval 

 one was extremely capricious and uncertain. A scientific book might 

 survive and many did, but many more were lost; it is possible that some 

 never reached anywhere. It is even conceivable that men of science did 

 not trouble to write up their discoveries, because they may have thought 



^ Greek and French edition by Paul Tannery ( Memoires de la Societe des 

 sciences de Bordeaux 5, 217-37, 1883), reprinted in Tannery's Memoires (1, 339-70, 

 1912). Greek and German edition by Ferdinand Rudio (194 p., Leipzig 1907). 



^T. Eric Peet: The Rhind mathematical papyrus (foHo 136 p. 24 pi., University 

 Press, Liverpool, 1923; Isis 6, 553-57). 



A. B. Chace, LuDLOvi' Bull, H. P. Manning, R. C. Archibald: The Rhind 

 mathematical papyrus (2 vols. Oberlin, Ohio, 1927-29; Isis, 14, 251-55). 



