28 KANSAS ACADEMY OP SCIENCE. 



to the theistic and the humanistic; the second has been used by 

 historians, publicists, jurists, and men of letters; and the third by 

 scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, physicists, naturalists, and, 

 more recently, by anthropologists. The great schools of philosophy 

 and theology of Babylon and Chaldea, of China and India, of Egypt 

 and Athens, could not solve the iDroblem of the universe ; man re- 

 mained essentially barbarian. The story of the first sixteen centuries 

 of the Christian era reveals decaying empires, vice in its most hideous 

 forms, crime of the most appalling character, ignorance and brutality, 

 Neros and Caligulas. Here and there a dim light might be seen. In 

 1257 Roger Bacon was sent to Paris, where he was closely confined 

 for several years, because he had ventured to attack the old philosophy. 

 In 1592 Bruno was burned for his denunciation of Aristotle, and his 

 advocacy of truth, lead where it might. In 1633 Galileo was forced 

 by the inquisition to abjure the Copernican theory. Ostracism, tor- 

 ture, fire and death were the rewards that men of science received in 

 those days. The common notion was that a laboratory was a place in 

 which the truth-seeker was supposed to receive help and inspiration 

 from the devil. Free thought was' heresy, and to investigate nature's 

 mysteries was a diabolical crime. 



Discouraging as all this was to men of science, nothing could pre- 

 vent the onward movement that had already been made. The fall of 

 Constantinople in 1452 ; the discovery of the art of printing in 1456 ; 

 the gift of a new world to mankind in 1492 ; the publication of the 

 Copernican system of astronomy in 1543 ; the invention of the tele- 

 scope by Galileo in 1609, with which he discovered the moons of Ju- 

 piter and the rings of Saturn; the announcement of Kepler's three 

 laws of planetary motion in 1609 and 1618 ; the immortal works of 

 Sir Francis Bacon at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in 

 which he did not hesitate to ridicule the philosophy of Aristotle, on 

 the ground, first, that it yielded no fruit, second, that its only service 

 was for useless disputation, and third, that the end it proposed was a 

 mistaken one ; the discovery, in the seventeenth century, of the cal- 

 culus, the most powerful instrument of calculation in the whole range 

 of mathematics ; the announcement by Newton in 1685 of the uni- 

 versal law of gravitation ; the discovery of oxygen by Priestley in 1774, 

 and the creation of the science of modern chemistry by Lavoisier, were 

 the principal steps taken, few and far between, in order to reach the 

 majestic work of the nineteenth century. Poetry and art, literature 

 and theology, politics and war, were the chief factors in the world's 

 life. 



Books and libraries were to be found in the monasteries and in 

 possession of royal families. They were not for men at large. Their 



