38 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



Where then does first explicit proof of the amber phenom- 

 enon, in fact, exist? 



In the spring of B. C., 334, Alexander of Macedor 

 crossed the Hellespont and began the famous campaign 

 which left him master of all the countries between the 

 Danube and the Ganges. At about the same time, Aris- 

 totle, who had been his preceptor, established a school at 

 the L,ykeum at Athens, and began to gather collections of 

 plants, animals and minerals, wherewith he illustrated his 

 lectures, delivered while walking up and down the leafy 

 paths which wound through the adjacent gardens. In 

 this undertaking he found in his powerful disciple a most 

 willing ally for Alexander not only contributed a vast 

 sum of money for the purchase of rare objects, but em- 

 ployed thousands of men to collect and transport to Athens 

 all that was strange to the Greeks in the distant countries 

 which had yielded to his arms. 1 



To the gathering of this stupendous mass of material 

 may be traced three results of the highest import; first the 

 acquisition of the multitudinous physical facts which fill 

 the Aristotelian treatises on natural sciences. Second, the 

 foreshadowing of the inductive method of reasoning. 

 Third, the production by Theophrastus, the Lesbian, of a 

 history of stones, probably based directly upon the study 

 of Aristotle's collections. 



I have said that Aristotle foreshadowed the inductive 

 theory. As any intellectual rise, coincident in time with 

 that of this great principle, must have been more or less 

 controlled by the mightier mental advancement, some ex- 

 planation of this statement is perhaps here necessary. 

 Because Aristotle gathered as has been stated a vast mass 

 of facts, it has been frequently maintained that the pro- 

 cess which Bacon calls that "double scale or ladder, as- 

 cendent and descendent, ascending from experiments to 



1 Grote: Aristotle, i. i. 12. 



