NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



vanced than Thales or Heraclitus we should be 

 speculating, dreaming still. 



But it may be objected that many of these de- 

 vices, in some form or other, were known to the 

 ancients. Whence comes it, then, that the con- 

 vex-lens of Nimrud's palace, the catapults and 

 tackle of Archimedes, the force-pumps of Ctesibius, 

 the ingenious measurements of Eratosthenes, the 

 astronomical work of Hipparchus and Ptolemy, the 

 dissections of Aristotle and Galen, bore so little 

 fruit? Whence comes it that the light of the 

 scientific method should have flamed for a time 

 in Babylon, in Thebes, in Athens, in Alexandria, 

 and then the world gone dark for a thousand dis- 

 mal years? 



He who is curious in such affairs may trace the 

 sorry story in the caustic and relentless pages of 

 Draper ; l how an enlightened civil power gave way 

 for a time to an ignorant and bigoted theocracy, 

 how " a wild astronomy supplanted that of Hippar- 

 chus; the miserable fictions of Eusebius subverted 

 the chronology of Manetho and Eratosthenes; the 

 geometry of Euclid and Apollonius was held to be 

 of no use; the geography of Ptolemy a blunder; 

 the great mechanical inventions of Archimedes in- 

 comparably surpassed by the miracles worked at 



1 History of Civilization in Europe, vol. i. 

 26 



