THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OK SCIENCE IN MEDICINE. 5 



1500 years: in Egypt he traces eight such periods. The 

 downfall is usually brought about by the invasion of a 

 people of lower culture but greater virility, and from the 

 mixture of the old and the new races a new civilisation is 

 born, but only after an interval of relative barbarism — a 

 sort of incubation period lasting some hundreds of years. 

 The first phase of the new culture is hampered by im- 

 perfect traditions of the past : it is the stage of archaism 

 in art, and in science it is marked by blind reliance on 

 received opinion. In time these trammels are shaken off 

 and the new people enters upon the unfettered exercise 

 of its inborn genius. It acquires intellectual liberty, and 

 now comes the phase of maximum fertility in every branch 

 of human enterprise, lasting, perhaps, but a century or 

 two, and followed by gradual decadence till the over-ripe 

 civilisation is ready to fall. That this has been the course 

 of all the civilisations known to us admits of no dispute, 

 and Prof. Flinders Petrie adds the important observation 

 that there is a fairly regular sequence in the development 

 of the various branches of human activity. Art is the 

 first to reach its highest point, and notably sculpture and 

 architecture ; literature follows later, while science is last 

 of all in its development, and may be delayed for 500 years 

 or more after sculpture has reached its acme. Our own 

 civilisation offers confirmation of the truth of these pro- 

 positions. Science is still advancing rapidly with us, but, as 

 a race, we are now quite incapable of Salisbury Cathedral, 

 of Magdalen Tower, or of King Henry VII's Chapel. 

 Consider the recent work at Cambridge on the structure 

 of the atom, and then go and look at the statue of Sir 

 Wilfred Lawson on the Embankment. 



But, with all this intcrmittence, there is none the less 

 an upward movement of civilisation as a whole. Each 

 new period of culture is coming to found itself more and 

 more on that which has preceded it. In early times a 

 civilisation, when it fell, passed more or less utterly 

 away : its successor had to begin again from the begin- 

 ning. The invention of writing has profoundly affected 



