THREE CENTURIES OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY ^ 



By W. F. G. SwANN, D.Sc. 

 Director, Bartol Research Foundation of the Franklin Institute 



Three thousand years ago there died in Egypt a king. He was 

 l)uried with much pomp and ceremony, and in the company of such 

 material things as reflected the atmosphere of his time. After 30 

 centuries, untouched except for the minor vandalism of robbers, 

 these relics speak to us the story of an age which has passed. They 

 tell us of a skill in craftsmanship equal to our own, of a beauty in 

 art and in concept of design such as wins the admiration of our 

 most famous artists ; and reading the evidence of a little act here and 

 a little thought there, we begin to see a people such as we could well 

 have known as friends — a people of whom who can say that if one 

 of them were born to-day and raised with our children he would be 

 distinguishable from one of us. Yet, neither in the age that knew 

 Tutankhamun, nor in any of the ancient civilizations that have gone 

 before or after, do we find any shadow of a concept of that great 

 scheme of nature's laws which has unfolded itself so unsparingly 

 in our generation. 



If the period from the dawn of history to the present time be 

 shrunk into a day, we shall find that 23 hours of that day are barren 

 as far as natural philosophy is concerned, for it is only in the last 

 hour that science was born; and, even as the human child develops 

 in its struggles toward manhood, so this child of nature has grown, 

 but with such ever-increasing strength that in the last 10 minutes 

 of its existence, in the last 25 years of actual time, it has outshone 

 all the accomplishments of its infancy and adolescence and has torn 

 from nature more of her secrets than she has vouchsafed to man 

 in the whole previous history of his existence. 



Three hundred years ago we find the world just emerging from 

 the state in which he who would search for the hidden truths of 

 nature must contend with three great obstacles — superstition, the 

 power of the church, and, last but not least, a conglomeration of 

 fixed notions as to the way things should happen, built upon the 

 pseudo-philosophical reasoning of bygene ages, reasoning founded 



1 Founders' Day Address, Swarthmore College, Gel. 29, 1927. Reprinted by permission 

 from the Journal of the Franklin Institute, vol. 205, No. 1, January, 1928. 



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