SCIENCE AND PROGRESS 



ventive genius of antiquity." The stories that 

 have come down of his feats and his discoveries are 

 legion, and many of them are familiar tales. There 

 is hardly a school-boy who has not read how he 

 detected the alloy in King Hiero's crown; how a 

 weight of gold had been given by the King to an 

 artificer to make over into a crown ; how the King, 

 suspecting a cheat, asked his friend Archimedes 

 if he could tell whether base metal had been put 

 in with the gold ; how Archimedes, sorely puzzled, 

 stepped one day into his bath, observed how the 

 water ran over, forgot everything, and shouting 

 " EvprjKal tvprjKal" ran home through the streets of 

 Syracuse with no clothes on at all. 



Archimedes' observation set him to pondering the 

 whole subject of the action of bodies in water; he 

 became the founder of the science of hydrostatics. 

 It was he who established the idea of specific grav- 

 ity that is, the weight of equal volumes of 

 different materials. From this he was led to all 

 sorts of investigations, and finally to that of the 

 lever. Not that the lever had not been used, 

 doubtless, by prehistoric man; but Archimedes 

 seems to have been the first to give its theory. 

 That he realized to the full his discovery, and 

 that he possessed in the highest degree what Tyn- 

 dall calls the " scientific imagination," is amply 

 illustrated in the saying attributed to him: "Had 



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