236 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



RELATIONS OF SCIENCE TO THE PUBLIC WEAL.* 



By Sir LYON PLAYFAIE, K. C. B., M. P., F. E. S. 

 TART SECOXD. 



Y SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. — In the popular mind the 

 • value of science is measured by its applications to the use- 

 ful purposes of life. It is no doubt true that science wears a 

 beautiful aspect when she confers practical benefits upon man. But 

 truer relations of science to industry are implied in Greek mytholo- 

 gy. Vulcan, the god of industry, wooed science, in the form of 

 Minerva, with a passionate love, but the chaste goddess never mar- 

 ried, although she conferred upon mankind nearly as many arts as 

 Prometheus, who, like other inventors, saw civilization progressing 

 by their use while he lay groaning in want on Mount Caucasus. 

 The rapid development of industry in modern days depends on the 

 applications of scientific knowledge, while its slower growth in for- 

 mer times was due to experiments being made by trial and error 

 in order to gratify the needs of man. Then an experiment was 

 less a questioning of Nature than an exercise on the mind of the 

 experimentalist. For a true questioning of Nature only arises when 

 intellectual conceptions of the causes of phenomena attach them- 

 selves to ascertained facts as well as to their natural environments. 

 Much real science had at one time accumulated in Egypt, Greece, 

 Rome, and Arabia, though it became obscured by the intellectual 

 darkness which spread over Europe like a pall for many centu- 

 ries. The mental results of Greek science, filtered through the Ro- 

 mans and Arabians, gradually fertilized the soil of Europe. Even in 

 ages which are deemed to be dark and unprolific, substantial though 

 slow progress was made. By the end of the fifteenth century the 

 mathematics of the Alexandrian school had become the possession of 

 Western Europe ; Arabic numerals, algebra, trigonometry, decimal 

 reckoning, and an improved calendar, having been added to its stock 

 of knowledge. The old discoveries of Democritus and Archimedes in 

 physics, and of Ilipparchus and Ptolemy in astronomy, were produc- 

 ing their natural developments, though with great slowness. Many 

 manufactures, growing chiefly by experience, and occasionally light- 

 ened up by glimmerings of science throughout the prevailing darkness, 

 had arisen before the sixteenth century. A knowledge of the proper- 

 ties of bodies, though scarcely of their relations to each other, came 

 through the labors of the alchemists, who had a mighty impulse to 

 work, for by the philosopher's stone, often not larger than half a rape- 



* InaucT'iral address of the President of the P.rilish Association for the Advancement 

 of Science, at tlic Aberdeen meeting, September 9, 1885. 



