A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



CHAPTER I 

 EARLY CIVILIZATIONS 



'The night of time far surpasseth the day' said Sir Thomas 

 Browne ; and it is the task of Archaeology to light up some parts of 

 this long night. Charles Eliot Norton. 



THE ANTIQUITY AND ANCESTRY OF MAN. It is now gen- 

 erally agreed that men of some sort have been living upon this 

 earth for many thousand years. It is also, though perhaps less 

 generally, agreed that mankind has descended from the lower 

 animals, precisely as the men of to-day have descended from 

 men that lived and died ages ago. 



The history of science, however, is not so much concerned with 

 the ancestry or origin of mankind as with its antiquity ; for while 

 science is a comparatively recent achievement of the human race, 

 its roots may be traced far back in practices and processes of pre- 

 historic and primitive times. Mankind is very old, but science 

 so far as we know had no existence before the beginning of 

 history, i.e. about 6000 years ago, and until 2500 years ago it 

 occurred if at all only in rudimentary form. The best opinion 

 of to-day holds that man has been on this earth at least 250,000 

 years, and in spite of wide variations is of one zoological " kind " 

 or " species " and three principal types or " races/' viz., white or 

 Caucasian, yellow or Mongolian, and black or Ethiopian (Negroid). 

 These great races are believed to have had a common ancestry 

 in a more primitive race, and this in turn to have descended from 

 the lower animals. It is furthermore held that there was prob- 



