8 Britain's Heritage of Science 



The interval between the death of Gilbert in 1603 and 

 that of Napier in 1617 marks the period of Galileo's astro- 

 nomical discoveries and of Kepler's fundamental work on 

 planetary orbits. The world was now waiting for a great 

 generalization, but Kepler passed away and Galileo died an 

 old and broken man before one was born who surpassed 

 both in genius and power as much as they had excelled those 

 who went before them. 



From the seventeenth century onwards, British science 

 has continuously advanced, sometimes rushing ahead with 

 torrential energy, sometimes in a smooth and almost imper- 

 ceptible flow ; at one period chiefly concentrated in the uni- 

 versities; at others almost entirely kept alive by private 

 enthusiasts ; but taken as a whole never losing contact with 

 past achievements or ceasing to foreshadow future conquests. 

 To appreciate correctly the different stages of the advance, 

 we must distinguish between the slow work of accumulating 

 facts or proving and disproving theories and the generation 

 of new ideas which suddenly alter the whole trend of 

 scientific thought. Such creations form the seven land- 

 marks which bring us to nearly the end of the nineteenth 

 century : Newton's establishment of the law of gravitation, 

 Dalton's atomic theory, Faraday's electric discoveries, 

 Young's contribution to the wave-theory of light, Joule's 

 foundation of the conservation of energy, Kelvin's demon- 

 stration of the dissipation of energy; finally, Maxwell's 

 formulation of the electro-magnetic theory of light. 



Roger Bacon made an acute remark to the effect that 

 while in mathematics we can proceed from the simple to 

 the more complicated, it is impossible to do so in other 

 branches of science, because Nature does not, as a rule, 

 present us with the simple phenomenon. The whole history 

 of science shows how it is always struggling in search of the 

 simple starting point with respect to which we are constantly 

 driven to modify or even reverse our ideas. Thales believed 

 water to be the elementary substance from which everything 

 else could be derived, Anaximenes thought it was air, and 

 Heraclitus substituted fire, while, according to Pythagoras, 

 it was the relations between integer numbers which formed 

 the foundation of all science. 



