CHAPTER X 



THE REVIVAL OF SCIENCE IN THE 

 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY* 



WITH one or two exceptions astronomy on the 

 physical side, human anatomy on the biological 

 the reawakening in science lagged a century or 

 more behind the renascence in literature 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 investiga- 

 tions 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 them, 

 were slowly but surely separating themselves out 



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

 chapter in the eighth volume of The Cambridge History of 

 English Literature. 



265 



