26 IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 



ful achievements of the ancients in the arts and industries 

 would have been impossible. 



Ancient chemistry was a cult rather than a science. It 

 was a study in which influences of an occult and mysteri- 

 ous kind were invoked. It was largely a supernatural 

 line of inquiry. And it was late before anything like a 

 rational body of principles or laws was formulated. While 

 chemistry or alchemy was the only department of study 

 in which experiment played any important part, the 

 experiments were devised not to exclude unknown and 

 uncontrolled conditions, but rather to include as many 

 unknown factors or agencies as could be brought into 

 play. And experimentation on that basis would do little to 

 promote discoveries. 



What we know of the science of antiquity has come to 

 us almost wholly from the Greeks. The Romans seem to 

 have let pure science alone. In the middle ages there 

 was of course some progress, but it was slow and tedious. 

 There was no notable change in processes. The more 

 ancient the method the more highly it was prized. 



But the scientific method of the ancients was character- 

 ized by certain serious shortcomings, which were at least 

 partly responsible for the painfully slow progress made 

 among them. Men were in early times handicapped in a 

 manner now difficult to appreciate, by a lack of most of 

 the ingenious devices and instrumental aids to research 

 which we possess. But if their methods had been right 

 they would have acquired these means as men acquired 

 them later, because modern scientific methods led to the 

 discoveries which made these aids possible. 



The science of antiquity grew by the often treacherous 

 method of deduction, and by what we may by courtesy 

 call observation. Such was the mental bondage of men at 

 the close of the middle ages, that when observations 

 revealed natural conditions which were at variance with 

 the dicta of earlier authorities, the evidence was disre- 

 garded or discredited as being but deception of the senses, 

 and the phenomena were frequently ascribed to the agency 

 of the evil one. 



