sinks back into the semibarbarism of the middle ages.

The few scattered students of nature of that day picked up the
clue to her secrets exactly as it fell from the hands of the
Greeks a thousand years before. The foundations of mathematics
were so well laid by them that our children learn their
geometry from a book written for the schools of Alexandria two
thousand years ago. Modern astronomy is the natural
continuation and development of the work of Hipparchus and of
Ptolemy; modern physics of that of Democritus and of
Archimedes; it was long before biological science outgrew the
knowledge bequeathed to us by Aristotle, by Theophrastus and by
Galen.[1]

[1] T. H. Huxley, "Science and Culture."



If, therefore, we ask ourselves what has been the value of
science to man, the answer is that its value is practically the
value of the whole world in which we find ourselves to-day, or,
at any rate, the difference between the value of our world and
that of a world inhabited by Neolithic savages.

The sweeping nature of this deduction may from its very
comprehensiveness fail to carry conviction to the reader. But
concrete illustrations of the value which scientific research
may add to our environment are not far to seek. They are
afforded in abundance by the dramatic achievements of the past
century of human progress, in which science has begun painfully