CHAPTER V 



THE BEGINNINGS OF EXPERIMENTATION 



Two thousand years elapsed between the beginnings 

 which the early Greeks made in the correlation of 

 knowledge and the initiation of logical experimenta- 

 tion, which has made possible the science of to-day. 

 Observation, and correlation based upon it, had in- 

 deed been considerable before the time of Gilbert and 

 Galileo, whom we consider as the first experimenters 

 in physics. In astronomy, experiments are impossible 

 and progress is made from the classified data of many 

 observations. The laws of other physical science have 

 been obtained largely as the result of the observation 

 of the phenomena taking place under conditions arti- 

 ficially prepared to facilitate such observations. 



What civilizations followed the Greek and what 

 were the peculiar characteristics of their bearers to 

 make these years so unproductive ? The widest-spread 

 empire of the ancient world was, of course, the Roman, 

 which by the time of Julius Caesar had practically 

 covered the then known world. But the genius of 

 the Romans was essentially military and not scientific. 

 Their achievements in thought were largely in the 

 science of government. In the method of organizing 

 their growing domains, in the enactment and codifica- 

 tion of the necessary laws, and in the general develop- 

 ment of legal procedure, they made their chief contri- 



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