A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



the line between fact and allegory; nor need we at- 

 tempt to analyse the early poetic narratives to this end. 

 It will better serve our present purpose to cite three 

 or four instances which illustrate the tangibility of 

 beliefs based upon pseudo-scientific inductions. 



Let us cite, for example, the account which Herodo- 

 tus gives us of the actions of the Greeks at Plataea, when 

 their army confronted the remnant of the army of 

 Xerxes, in the year 479 B.C. Here we see each side 

 hesitating to attack the other, merely because the 

 oracle had declared that whichever side struck the first 

 blow would lose the conflict. Even after the Persian 

 soldiers, who seemingly were a jot less superstitious or 

 a shade more impatient than their opponents, had 

 begun the attack, we are told that the Greeks dared 

 not respond at first, though they were falling before 

 the javelins of the enemy, because, forsooth, the en- 

 trails of a fowl did not present an auspicious ap- 

 pearance. And these were Greeks of the same genera- 

 tion with Empedocles and Anaxagoras and ^schylus ; 

 of the same epoch with Pericles and Sophocles and 

 Euripides and Phidias. Such was the scientific status 

 of the average mind nay, of the best minds with 

 here and there a rare exception, in the golden age of 

 Grecian culture. 



Were we to follow down the pages of Greek history, 

 we should but repeat the same story over and over. 

 We should, for example, see Alexander the Great balked 

 at the banks of the Hyphasis, and forced to turn back 

 because of inauspicious auguries based as before upon 

 the dissection of a fowl. Alexander himself, to be sure, 

 would have scorned the augury ; had he been the prey 



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