3 io PHYSICAL SCIENCE 



As he was in the habit of sojourning on the shores of 

 the Bay of Naples, he probably visited the scene of de- 

 struction himself for the purpose of his book. We learn 

 from Tacitus that it was immediately after his return 

 from Campania to his villa near Rome, bringing with him, 

 we may suppose, his nearly completed manuscript, that 

 Seneca received the Emperor's order to commit suicide. 



In the second place, Seneca's work on Natural 

 Questions stands out as one of the few treatises on 

 physical science which have come down to us from anti- 

 quity. It is interesting alike for the quotations it contains 

 from the works of previous authors, some of which have 

 not survived, and for the criticisms and opinions which he 

 himself expresses on the various subjects of which he 

 treats. It can hardly, however, be regarded as an original 

 contribution to science. Its author's life had been spent 

 in other and widely different pursuits, which led him far 

 away from scientific inquiry. But as a summary of the 

 general state of knowledge in his day, made by a man of 

 strong intellect, who had been trained in the legal and 

 philosophical schools of the time, and had read widely and 

 reflected much on these matters, the book may be taken to 

 afford a fair presentation of the manner in which a number 

 of questions in astronomy, meteorology, and physical geo- 

 graphy were regarded by thoughtful minds in the first 

 century of our era. 



In judging of the intrinsic merit of such a work as the 

 present, the modern reader finds a difficulty in realising 

 from the broad platform of natural knowledge which, after 

 the labours of the intervening centuries, has now been 

 laid, how exceedingly narrow was the circle of ascertained 

 fact available to the student two thousand years ago. The 

 spirit of scientific observation and experiment had not then 

 been developed, yet the familiar phenomena of every- 

 day life pressed, as they still do, for explanation. Man's 

 knowledge of nature was then too limited to furnish a 

 basis for distinguishing what was fact from what was mere 

 guesswork. In the infancy of our race, as in the childhood 

 of the individual, the tendency of the human mind is to 



