6 GREEK SCIENCE AND 



itself surely an appropriate study. But there is, I think, 

 another and more immediately practical ground on 

 which we may plead for the introduction of History into 

 the scientific curriculum. We are well accustomed to 

 recognize that the store of acquired scientific knowledge 

 is a general treasury from which all men draw, by which 

 alone it has been possible for our material state to rise 

 above that of the savage. Yet we seldom remind our- 

 selves that the guardianship of this treasury, the heri- 

 tage of all men, has always been in the hands of a very 

 small band, and this has been so in all its wanderings. 

 From the lands of the ancient East it passed to Greece, 

 then having dwelt awhile among the Saracens it came to 

 Italy, and it has at last reached the West. In all these 

 countries and at all these periods the organic apparatus 

 by which new knowledge has been created has been the 

 work of a mere handful. 



Surely the contemplation of the conditions under 

 which these men worked and lived, the examination of 

 their training and mental history, of their environment and 

 manner of development, must be of value even in the 

 practical everyday sense to those who would follow in 

 their footsteps. And the other skie of the picture is 

 also not without its application. The study of those 

 social and economic and philosophical conditions that 

 fail to produce effective scientific fruit, or that yield 

 only bizarre and deformed products, has also its lesson. 

 Some idea of the Science of these retrograde periods 

 must also be included in any course on the History 

 of Science, and should form an integral part of any 

 scientific education worthy of the name. The scientific 

 student would thus be grounded in the elements of 

 what we may call the Embryology, the Physiology and 

 the Pathology of his special study. 



