682 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 985 



lectual advancement of the United States, 

 the recognition of its importance has al- 

 ready permeated most of our advanced 

 schools, and is rapidly gaining ground in 

 the minds of their governing boards of 

 trustees. 



Aristotle, called by Plato "the mind of 

 my school," came from a family of physi- 

 cians, and thus inherited a taste for experi- 

 mental knowledge. To him we owe the 

 beginnings of exact science and the organi- 

 zation of research on a large scale. Thanks 

 to his influence with his pupil Alexander 

 the Great, he was able to command the 

 immense sum of eight hundred talents for 

 the purchase of books and other expenses 

 involved in the preparation of his treatise 

 on zoology. More than this, a thousand men 

 throughout Asia and Greece studied under 

 his direction the life and habits of birds and 

 beasts, fishes and insects.- The territories 

 conqiiered by Alexander were carefully 

 surveyed, by measuring the position of 

 terrestrial objects with respect to stars. ^ 

 Although Aristotle maintained the iixity of 

 the earth, and supposed comets and the 

 Milky Way to be in its higher atmosphere, 

 his reasoning in many astronomical prob- 

 lems was sound, as when he concluded that 

 the earth must be spherical because its 

 shadow on the eclipsed moon is always 

 curved.* Thus his studies of natural science 

 foreshadowed the work of the present-day 

 investigator and led to the most far-reach- 

 ing results. 



2 Wheeler, ' ' Alexander the Great, ' ' p. 37. The 

 strict accuracy of these assertions, which were 

 made by several classical authors, is questioned by 

 Grote and also by Humboldt, who nevertheless 

 concede that Aristotle received from both Philip 

 and Alexander the most liberal support in pro- 

 curing immense zoological material from Grecian 

 territories and in the collection of books. ' ' Cos- 

 mos," Sabine's trans., Vol. II., p. 158. 



3 Bossut, ' ' Histoire des Mathematiques, ' ' Vol. 

 1, p. 116. 



^IMd., p. 117. 



After his time a gradual division of labor 

 iiltimately separated investigations in natu- 

 ral science from the speculations of the 

 philosophers. In Sicily, Egypt and the 

 islands of the Mediterranean true scientific 

 research, in the strictly modern sense, devel- 

 oped with remarkable rapidity, while in the 

 old Lyceum at Athens the philosophy of 

 reasoning and dialectics, caring little for 

 physical causes, was devoted exclusively to 

 the soul. 



A deep-seated belief that the senses are 

 deceptive, and the natural impatience of the 

 Greeks, inclining them toward reasoning 

 and speculation rather than the slow and 

 laborious processes of observation and ex- 

 periment, had first to be overcome.^ But in 

 the third century B.C. the greatest geometer 

 of antiquity, Archimedes, taught at Syra- 

 cuse a sj'stem of astronomy closely resem- 

 bling that of Copernicus, founded the 

 science of mechanics in his treatise "De 

 ^.quiponderantibus, " and devised some of 

 the fundamental experimental methods of 

 modern physics. At the same period Aris- 

 tarchus of Samos made a first determination 

 of the distance of the sun from the earth 

 and held that "the center of the universe 

 was occupied by the sun, which was im- 

 movable, like other stars, while the earth 

 revolved around it.'"' This view was also 

 taught by Seleucus the Babylonian, but it 

 was rejected by Ptolemy, the most cele- 

 brated astronomer of his day. 



Of all the ancient prototypes of the 

 modern academy, the great Museum of 

 Alexandria holds the first place. Founded 

 by Ptolemy Soter, whose preference would 

 have confined its work to the moral and 

 political sciences, its scope soon expanded 

 under the influence of Ptolemy Phila- 



6 Weber, ' ' History of Philosophy, ' ' Thilly 's 

 trans., p. 133 et seq. 



6 See Humboldt, ' ' Cosmos, ' ' Vol. II., p. 309, and 

 notes, p. cix. 



