8 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF SCIENCE IN MEDICINE. 



US from the pages of Homer, were amongst the earher 

 comers ; the Dorians came last, and partly drove out the 

 already half-mingled Mediterranean and Achaean races. 

 The Dorians seem to have contributed little to the intel- 

 lectual development of future Greece ; they remained 

 more or less apart— a military people of which the 

 Spartans were a type. The effective elements were the 

 Achaean and Mediterranean races, the first contribu- 

 ting discipline, order and self-control, while intellectual 

 acuteness and artistic gifts were brought by the southern 

 race — a fertile combination for the growth of science. 

 There was a long period of darkness and barbarism, lasting 

 some four or five hundred years — a dreadful time about 

 which history is silent. In the wreck of the old culture 

 even the art of writing seems to have perished, and a 

 new alphabet had to be brought into use. But by 800 

 or 700 B.C. the new civilisation began to dawn, and in 

 the realms of thought the dawn was earliest, not on the 

 mainland of Greece, but in the more settled countries 

 round the ^Egean occupied by the Ionian Greeks. 



So far as we are aware, the earliest attempts at science 

 began in Ionia some six centuries before Christ, and the 

 name which I would first commemorate as a spiritual 

 benefactor of this College is that of Thales of Miletus. 

 I might have chosen Empedocles or Pythagoras, but we 

 may let Thales, as the first of the succession of early 

 Greek thinkers, stand as the prototype of the group of 

 men who laid the foundations upon which science was to 

 be built by future generations. Doubtless these men 

 had acquired what they might of the lore of older civili- 

 sations, but they seem to have been the first to pursue 

 abstract knowledge. Till their day men had been content 

 to accept any foolish myth about the nature of the world 

 and of the things they saw around them. The service 

 which Thales and his successors rendered to mankind 

 was that they rejected all fabulous tales, and began to 

 think for themselves how things had become such as 

 they saw, definitely reaching out after the laws which 



