ia8 THE WORLD MACHINE 



warfare, debauched by universal slavery and superstition, their 

 brilliant and slender civilisation went down. The advance of 

 six wonderful centuries came to an end. What had been learned 

 was forgotten. For the space of ten centuries after there is 

 not an experiment, not an inquiry, not a book, not a tract, pro- 

 duced in Europe that is worth ten lines in a history of human 

 thought. The empire of the mind was given over to Platonising 

 mystics and to dreary theologasters. 



On the side of astronomical investigation, then, Greek science 

 just failed by a step to attain the point upon which our modern 

 world conceptions are pivoted : the representation of cosmos, 

 and more especially of the planetary system to which we belong, 

 as a mechanism. Was there any other path by which the 

 human mind might reach the same point of view ? 



In that English Lake Country, where the charm of the land- 

 scape grows by times so intimate and penetrating as to stir 

 the heart of poet and dizzard alike, there lived at the beginning 

 of the last century a Quaker schoolmaster, a diffident and retiring 

 man, who filled his vacant hours studying the weather and the 

 rain-gauge. They say that this John Dalton got to wondering 

 about the process of evaporation and how it could be effected. 

 It was a small beginning ; to it our modern atomic theory and 

 the foundations of modern chemistry are due. Though he did 

 not seem to know or care, Dalton had a forerunner among the 

 same old Greeks, who, from much the same beginnings, followed 

 nearly the same course of thought. 



If we look back into that ancient day, we shall meet with 

 a solitary and dominating figure, attached to no school, pursuing 

 his own way, a profound and original investigator, perhaps 

 as near to a universal genius as this world has ever known. 

 Who was this Democritus of Abdera, the whole of whose two 

 and seventy works Plato wished to burn, and of which time, 

 not more lenient, has left us scarce a page ? 



