70 THE PATH OF SCIENCE 



edge he had won would generally die with him. But after 

 the invention of printing, scientific works could be repro- 

 duced so easily that they had a much larger circulation and, 

 thus, a much greater chance of reaching the few students of 

 the subject. The great book of Copernicus, for instance, 

 published when he was on his deathbed, produced an im- 

 pression on all astronoiners. 



The early history of science is only slowly emerging 

 through the work of the archaeologists. As in other fields 

 in the history of human understanding, there is little doubt 

 but that, as we learn more of the ancient world, we shall find 

 that that world knew more than we realize of the ideas that 

 we value today. The Dawn of Conscience, which fifty years 

 ago would have been ascribed to the early Hebrew prophets, 

 whose work we happen to have in written form dating from 

 the eighth century b.c, has now been traced by Breasted back 

 beyond the Old Kingdom of Egypt to a period as remote 

 from that of Amos as Amos is from us. And so it is not 

 unlikely that many of the scientific ideas that we meet first 

 among the Greeks had their true origin in Babylon or in 

 Egypt or even perhaps in Crete or the Hittite Empire. We 

 simply do not know the origin of many of the ideas that the 

 Greeks developed in systematic and written form. Much 

 valuable work has been done recently on the mathematical 

 and astronomical ideas of the Babylonians and on the 

 methods used by the Egyptian engineers, but it is not until 

 we reach the beginning of the classic era in Greece that we 

 meet an organized school of science. 



The philosopher to whom the Greeks ascribed the earliest 

 scientific thought was Thales of Miletus, who achieved fame 

 by his prophecy of the eclipse of 585 b.c, a prophecy which 

 he was able to make from information on the timing of 

 eclipses that he had acquired during a visit to Babylon. 

 Thales worked chiefly on geometry. His pupil Anaximander 

 was interested in geography and the making of maps. Hera- 

 clitus of Ephesus, Leucippus of Miletus, and Democritus ad- 

 vocated a priori views of the "nature of things," and Pythag- 



