20 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



"Where is the mortal man who can bring England into ac- 

 cord with France? Let a great host set forth, and its internal 

 enmities will destroy its organization. Behold, a true picture 

 of Christendom." * Few would have been found who real- 

 ized that the final fall of the Byzantine Empire was far less 

 important than the work of Johannes Gutenberg, who for 

 the first time was printing books from movable type. 



At the time when Isaac Newton was preparing the Principia 

 for publication, in 1686 and 1687, the British people were 

 engaged in a bitter struggle with the king, arising from the 

 fact that the king was a Catholic, while the people as a whole 

 had become Protestants and after years of struggle had a very 

 great fear and hatred of the Roman Catholic church. The 

 feeling was so bitter that the struggle ended in the expulsion 

 of the king, whose place on the throne was taken by his Dutch 

 son-in-law, William, and his daughter, Mary. It may easily 

 be imagined that in a political crisis of this magnitude few 

 people saw that the work of a professor at Cambridge was 

 of far greater significance for the future of England and of 

 the world. Again in 1831, England ^vas seething with dis- 

 content. Even the old Duke of Wellington, the victor of 

 Waterloo, was threatened by the mob. The Reform Bill 

 had been defeated in the House of Commons and a dissolu- 

 tion of Parliament was necessary. In these circumstances, 

 probably no one recognized that the work of Michael Fara- 

 day, who in that year discovered the principles of electro- 

 magnetic induction, was to change the face of the earth. 



There is no absolute standard for the judgment of history. 

 One individual will be interested in history as a record of 

 administration; another, as a record of the art of human wel- 

 fare; another will view history in relation to economics; a 

 medical man has written two very interesting books on the 

 medical aspects of the history of well-known individuals; 

 in this study we are considering the progress of civilization 

 through the ages. 



* Boulting, "Aeneas Sylvius," quoted by J. W. Thompson, The Middle 

 Ages, p. 205, New York. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1931. 



