THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1016. 
THE SCHOOL OF PYTHAGORAS. 
aristotelici, I.) By Dr. Aldo Mieli. Pp. xvi+ 
503. (Firenze: Libreria della Voce, 1916.) 
Price lire 12. 
nie the study of history maketh a man wise 
was the saying of a great Elizabethan, but 
it was one of the great Victorians who preferred a 
copy of the Times to ‘all the writings of Thucy- 
dides”; the great days’ of Elizabeth would not 
seem so spacious had one or two such sayings as 
the last come down to us from them! An historic 
sense was somewhat far to seek in the Victorian 
age. The ninetéenth century had all but forgotten 
its own past. Lyell and Darwin, Schwann and 
Virchow, Lister, Faraday and Joule had a way of 
making their immediate predecessors look old- 
fashioned, as the post-chaise looked when the rail- 
way came. In short, so great a revolution had 
taken place in things mental as well as in things 
practical that it seemed (so Judge Stallo said) as 
though Bacon’s demand had at last been thor- 
oughly complied with, ut opus mentis universum 
de integro resumatur. 
I never heard a lesson in my _ school- or 
college-days on the historical aspect of any 
science, though some few of our teachers were by 
no means unacquainted with history. One was 
on intimate terms with Ray and Willughby, and 
all the older English naturalists; another got no 
small part of his large wisdom from Boerhaave 
and Haller, and even Ambroise Paré. There 
was yet another who led his pupils (his better 
pupils) to Newton, while his neighbours were per- 
fectly satisfied with Frost. When one thinks how 
deep was the reading, how wide the learning, of 
men like Sharpey and Rolleston, Alfred Newton 
and Michael Foster, it is all the more striking that 
even by them the historical method was very 
seldom employed and the love of history very little 
instilled. The fact is, we were all dazzled and 
obsessed, young and old, by “the great press of 
novelty at hand.” Linnzus and Cuvier, even 
Johannes Miller himself, had read their Aristotle 
to learn of him, just as they read their Swammer- 
dam and their Réaumur. But we had come to 
think of the old books as so much bric-a-brac, as 
material for a hobby but of no more use in the 
world. The tide has turned since those days, one 
scarce knows how or why; and a world that is as 
busy as ever finds more time for the study of 
history than it did. The long series of Ostwald’s 
“Wissenschaftliche Klassiker” is proof of a wide- 
spread desire to consult the sources of knowledge ; 
and Mach’s “Science of Mechanics” is perhaps 
the best but not the only example of the historic 
method, rigorously and critically applied to the 
teaching of a science. : 
Dr. Aldo Mieli, the writer of the book before 
us, is already known by a number of historical 
articles in Scientia, that admirable journal of our 
NO. 2453, VOL. 98] 
~ 
NATURE 165 
Italian allies; we may welcome him accordingly 
as a member of the little company of historical 
students, of which Prof. Gino Loria is the distin- 
guished head. He all but takes our-breath away, 
Le Scuole Ionica, Pythagorica ed Eleata (I Pre- in his very preface, by the vastness of his aT 
tions and his projects, while he relates with 
ingenuous sincerity the recent history of his own 
mental development. He had a thirst for univer- 
sal knowledge in his schooldays, and essayed to 
comprehend, “con l’aiuto di poche premisse, tutti 
| i fenomeni fisici e sociali, artistici e filosofici.” 
He presently sought in mathematics, but sought 
in vain, for the inner meaning, “la spiegazione,” 
of things. When he failed there, he betook him- 
self in haste to chemistry; “a corpo perduto mi 
gettai allora (1902) nello studio della chimica!” 
He was baffled again; he had striven as the old 
alchemists strove, and his longings, like theirs, 
were unfulfilled. At last, under the influence of 
Mach and Ostwald, he turned to history and to 
philosophy; renouncing the search after a 
“rational and experimental explanation of the 
world,” he resolved to study the creations of the 
spirit, and to trace in particular the development 
of scientific thought. 
While charmed by these naive confessions of the 
young Italian scholar, the reader is startled to dis- 
cover that the present bulky book is but the first 
part of a universal history, on a scale vaster than 
Gibbon’s or Hallam’s, of the whole circle of the 
sciences. It is to be divided into some seven 
portions, dealing with the great ancient pre- 
Hellenic empires, next with Hellenic, Arabic, and 
Far-Eastern science; again, with the Middle Ages 
and with thé Renaissance to Galileo’s day; and 
lastly, with the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies. The story of Hellenic learning will be 
divided into four parts, of which one must end 
where Aristotle’s work begins; and this pre- 
Aristotelian treatise will be in three volumes, of 
which one is the book before us, and the other 
two will deal in due time with the Atomists and 
with Plato and the Sophists. 
The reader may be a trifle prejudiced, he might 
be dismayed or even dumfounded, by so vast 
an ambition. But the fact is that the book is mar- 
vellously well done—so far as the present writer 
is capable of judging. Big as it is, it is compact 
and full; it leads us smoothly and easily, with but 
brief and impartial discussion, through the sub- 
jects on which we expect and desire to be 
informed. We hear the legendary history of 
Pythagoras and his confraternity; we are intro- 
duced to the philosophy, the science, and the 
mystical mathematics of the school. We learn in 
successive chapters, for instance, of the mystical 
theory of number; of figurate and other .curious 
numbers, and of the proportio divina; of the great 
Pythagorean theorem, and of the gnomon; of the 
concepts of application and of excess and defect; 
of the principles of acoustics and of the musical 
scale, and of the astronomic and other theories of 
Archytas and Philolaus and the rest. The sub- 
jects are those with which any book or encyclo- 
pedia article on Pythagoras is bound to deal, and 
K 
