44 THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



everything he could lay hands on. He copied out 

 what most appealed to him. A few books he read 

 and re-read till he had almost memorized them. 

 What constituted his library ? The Bible, ^Esop's 

 Fables, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, 

 a Life of Washington, a History of the United 

 States. These established for him a vital relation 

 with the past, and laid the foundations of a demo- 

 cratic culture ; not the culture of a Chesterfield, to 

 be sure, but something immeasurably better, and 

 none the less good for being almost universally ac- 

 cessible. Lincoln developed his logical powers con- 

 ning the dictionary. Long before he undertook the 

 regular study of the law, he spent long hours poring 

 over the revised statutes of the State in which he 

 was living. From a book he mastered with a pur- 

 pose the principles of grammar. In the same spirit 

 he learned surveying, also by means of a book. 

 There is no need to ignore any of the influences 

 that told toward the development of this great 

 statesman, the greatest of English-speaking orators, 

 but it is evident that remote as was his habitation 

 from all the famous centers of learning he was, never- 

 theless, early immersed in the current of the world's 

 best thought. 



Similarly, in the history of science, every great 

 thinker has his intellectual pedigree. Aristotle was 

 the pupil of Plato, Plato was the disciple of Soc- 

 rates, and the latter's intellectual genealogy in turn 

 can readily be traced to Thales, and beyond to 

 Egyptian priests and Babylonian astronomers. 



The city of Alexandria, founded by the pupil of 

 Aristotle in 332 B.C., succeeded Athens as the center 



