MODERN SCIENCE 19 



of his mental processes. ^vHe tells us nothing of how 

 he embarked on many different lines of work and 

 abandoned them as unprofitable or too difficult. He 

 tells us nothing of the months or years spent in merely 

 repeating the experience of others. He says not a word 

 of how he acquired and improved his experimental skill 

 and technical experience. He tells merely of the final 

 line of work that has yielded him results. But he does 

 not tell us all even of that. When he had after many 

 trials at last discerned an apparently profitable and 

 feasible direction for his investigations, he reached after 

 a time those conclusions which his final line of work 

 has verified and rendered more exact. It is this final 

 process of verification that he mainly describes in his 

 article, and it is the details of this that occupy the bulk, 

 perhaps nineteen-twentieths or more, of all that he has 

 to say. Then having described these verificatory ex- 

 periments, he summarizes his conclusions in a short 

 paragraph of a few lines. 



Now, how do the scientific works of antiquity compare 

 with_material such as this? The corpus of ancient 

 science is of course less in quantity and often frag- 

 mentary in character, but it is not that which makes 

 comparison difficult. The difficulty arises from the 

 habit of the Gre^k writers of setting down only 

 conclusions. vTheir methods of work, even the verifi- 

 catory observations and experiments, they have almost 

 completely hidden from us, and those methods were 

 almost as completely hidden from their more immediate 

 successors. It is as though we had a collection of the 

 last few lines of a series of scientific articles. To grasp 



scientific method from a 



_ 



scientific article is difficult enough, since not all the 

 mental processes involved are represented. In the case 



