It may be doubted if even-handed justice, as free 

 from fulsome panegyric as from captious deprecia- 

 tion, has ever yet been dealt out to the sages of 

 antiquity who, for eight centuries, from the time 

 of Thales to that of Galen, toiled at the founda- 

 tions of physical science. 



HUXLEY, Methods and Results, art. "The Prog- 

 ress of Science. 



How high a value the Greeks put upon strict 

 logical thought is shown by the conception of 

 Plato, whose pupil was Aristotle, according to 

 which a man untrained to mathematics was not 

 to be reckoned as a man of intelligence (homo 

 sapiens) , but rather of a sort standing nearer to 

 the animals. 



LEHMANN, Physik und Politik. 



In the year 1600, Bruno was burned at the 

 stake for teaching that our earth is not the cen- 

 tre of the universe. In 1700, Newton was pro- 

 nounced "impious and heretical" by a large 

 school of philosophers for declaring that the force 

 which holds the planets in their orbits is uni- 

 versal gravitation. In 1800, Laplace and Her- 

 schel are honored for teaching that gravitation 

 built up the system which it still controls; that 

 our universe is but a minor nebula, our sun but a 

 minor star, our earth a mere atom of matter, our 

 race only one of myriad races peopling an infinity 

 of worlds. Doctrines which but the span of two 

 human lives before would have brought their 

 enunciators to the stake were now pronounced 

 not impious, but sublime. 



HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, Nineteenth -Century 

 Science. 



