THE REVIVAL OF SCIENCE IN THE 



SEVENTEENTH CENTURY^ 



By Arthur E. Shipley 



With one or two exceptions — astronomy on 

 the physical side, human anatomy on the bio- 

 logical — the reawakening in science lagged a 

 century or more behind the renascence in lit- 

 erature and in art. What the leaders of 

 thought and of practice in the arts of writing, 

 of painting and of sculpture in western Europe 

 were effecting in the latter part of the fifteenth 

 and throughout the sixteenth century began to 

 be paralleled in the investigations of the 

 physical laws of nature only at the end of the 

 sixteenth century and throughout the first 

 three quarters of the seventeenth. 



Writing broadly, we may say that, during 

 the Stewart time, the sciences, as we now class 



* This address, revised and enlarged, formed part of a 

 chapter in the eighth volume of The Cambridge History of 

 English Literature. 



97 



