SCIENCE AND PROGRESS 



quisitions, will find his attention riveted by two 

 notable facts. The first of these is the long range 

 of time in which the human race has stood at about 

 its present level; the second, the briefness of the 

 period in which exact knowledge, based upon meas- 

 ures and experiment, has replaced guess-work and 

 dreams. I wish, in a word, to set in contrast the 

 great antiquity of civilization, as revealed by late 

 archaeological discovery, and how new are the 

 methods and conceptions which we group under 

 the vague name of science. 



Civilization is very old. That is what the ex- 

 cavations and explorations along the Nile, and 

 about Nineveh and Babylon, in the ruins of Troy 

 and Mykenae, and in Crete and Cyprus, have made 

 clear. The Book of Job is probably the most an- 

 cient of the Bible ; we think of Homer at the dawn 

 almost of history, and the Vedas of India seem still 

 more remote. Yet it is doubtful if any of these 

 date from more than 600 or 800 B.C. We now have 

 records of kings who ruled in Egypt 3800 or 4000 

 years before our era, and the inscriptions found in 

 the ruins of the old Sumerian - Accadian capital 

 along the Euphrates carry us back yet further. 

 They were more distant to Homer, to Buddha, or 

 to Job than Homer and Job from us. 



In all the main features of life these remote ages 

 differed less from one or, at most, two centuries ago 



