A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



thinker of a more recent period had penetrated, even 

 in the vaguest way, all of the mysteries that the nine- 

 teenth century has revealed in the fields of chemistry 

 and biology. At the very most the insight of those 

 great Greeks and of the wonderful seventeenth-century 

 philosophers who so often seemed on the verge of our 

 later discoveries did no more than vaguely anticipate 

 their successors of this later century. To gain an ac- 

 curate, really specific knowledge of the properties of 

 elementary bodies was reserved for the chemists of a 

 recent epoch. The vague Greek questionings as to 

 organic evolution were world-wide from the precise 

 inductions of a Darwin. If the mediaeval Arabian 

 endeavored to dull the knife of the surgeon with the 

 use of drugs, his results hardly merit to be termed even 

 an anticipation of modern anaesthesia. And when we 

 speak of preventive medicine of bacteriology in all its 

 phases we have to do with a marvellous field of which 

 no previous generation of men had even the slightest 

 inkling. 



All in all, then, those that lie before us are perhaps 

 the most wonderful and the most fascinating of all the 

 fields of science. As the chapters of the preceding 

 book carried us out into a macrocosm of inconceivable 

 magnitude, our present studies are to reveal a micro- 

 cosm of equally inconceivable smallness. As the stud- 

 ies of the physicist attempted to reveal the very nature 

 of matter and of energy, we have now to seek the solu- 

 tion of the yet more inscrutable problems of life and of 

 mind. 



