64 THE ANATOMY OF SCIEXCE 



tions of the type: If you take ore of this (describable) sort and treat 

 it in this (describable) manner, then prohahlij you will obtain a 

 metal having approximately these (describable) properties. Such 

 relations go far beyond the content of ordinary common sense, but I 

 cannot base on them a claim that early man was already a scientist. 

 I suppose that observation, unsystematic empiricism, and common- 

 sense reasoning pro\ide an ample foundation for the discovery and 

 use of such relations— the sets of which are the maxims, recipes, 

 formulas, and rules that constitute craft traditions. 



No craft tradition is properly denominated science. If we deny to 

 carpentry status as "science" we cannot so dignify the colligative rela- 

 tions developed by early man— immense achievements though they 

 were. This position I maintain even when some of the relations are 

 semi-quantitative, or even fully quantitative. The relations of prac- 

 tical metallurgy must already be at least semi-quantitati\'e. The 

 Babylonians go on to de\'elop fully quantitative formulas for predic- 

 tion of eclipses; the Egyptians, some of the theorems of physical 

 geometry. To such relations one is reluctant to deny status as science, 

 but one is hard pressed to see how they can be clearly differentiated 

 from others making only a very dubious claim to such consideration. 

 The involvement of mathematics, after all, is not a distinctive mark 

 of science. Biology has for long been a science, though in it mathe- 

 matics is but slightly brought into play; astrology is often highly 

 mathematical without being at all a science. Hall remarks that: 



It is possible to derive [astronomical] predictions from purely mathe- 

 matical procedures, as the Babylonians did, without making any 

 hypothesis concerning the mechanism involved. 



Here precisely is the point. Just that concern for mechanism signal- 

 izes the appearance of what is recognizably science. In man's history 

 this is a late development— coming first, says Schrodinger, not with 

 the Babylonians or Egyptians but with the Ionian Greeks, in the 6th 

 century B.C. 



The Egyptian surveyor possessed and used a number of relations 

 connecting distances, areas, shapes, and the like. Though often highly 

 sophisticated and precise, these relations are not unreasonably asso- 

 ciated with common sense: they remained discrete, unorganized, 

 each in itself a separate enigma. The situation is changed through 

 the studies of a long series of Greek investigators, culminating with 



