F. Preface to the Philosophic Naturalis Principia Mathe- - Power; Its Sources and Significance Gunpowder, Nitro- glycerine, Dynamite The Steam-Engine The Spinning ral Apparatus and Inventions-Applied Science; Engineering. Newton's Telescope and Newton's Theory of the Rainbow opposite 292 Sketch Map of Places Important in Ancient and Medieval Science opposite 448 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE CHAPTER I EARLY CIVILIZATIONS "The night of time far surpasseth the day' said Sir Thomas Browne; and it is the task of Archaeology to light up some parts of this long night. Charles Eliot Norton. THE ANTIQUITY AND ANCESTRY OF MAN. It is now generally agreed that men of some sort have been living upon this earth for many thousand years. It is also, though perhaps less generally, agreed that mankind has descended from the lower animals, precisely as the men of to-day have descended from men that lived and died ages ago. The history of science, however, is not so much concerned with the ancestry or origin of mankind as with its antiquity; for while science is a comparatively recent achievement of the human race, its roots may be traced far back in practices and processes of prehistoric and primitive times. Mankind is very old, but science so far as we know had no existence before the beginning of history, i.e. about 6000 years ago, and until 2500 years ago it occurred if at all only in rudimentary form. The best opinion of to-day holds that man has been on this earth at least 250,000 years, and in spite of wide variations is of one zoölogical "kind" or "species" and three principal types or "races," viz., white or Caucasian, yellow or Mongolian, and black or Ethiopian (Negroid). These great races are believed to have had a common ancestry in a more primitive race, and this in turn to have descended from the lower animals. It is furthermore held that there was prob ably one principal place of origin, or "cradle," of the human race from which have spread all known varieties of mankind, alive or extinct, and that this was probably in "Indo-Malaysia" in that remarkable valley which lies between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and in its upper part is known as Mesopotamia (between the rivers). Mesopotamia, or the broad valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, was the cradle of civilization in the remotest antiquity. There can be little doubt that man evolved somewhere in southern Asia, possibly during the Pleiocene or Miocene times. . . . [And] as paleolithic man was certainly interglacial in Europe, we may assume that he was preglacial in Asia. . . . The earliest known civilization in the world arose north of the Persian Gulf among the Sumerians . . . . but the Babylonians of history were a mixed people, for Semitic influences according to Winckler began to flow up the Euphrates Valley from Arabia during the fourth millennium B.C. This influence was more strongly felt, however, in Akkad than in Sumer, and it was in the north that the first Semitic Empire, that of Sargon the Elder (about 2500 B.C. according to E. Meyer) had its seat. . . . The supremacy of Babylon was first established by the Dynasty of Hamurabi (about 1950 B.C., earlier according to Winckler) which was overthrown by the Hittites about 1760 B.C. Then followed the Kassite dominion, which lasted from about 1760 to 1100 B.C. It was probably due to them that the horse, first introduced by the Aryans, became common in southwest Asia; it was introduced into Babylon about 1900 B.C. but was unknown in Hamurabi's reign. - Haddon. ARCHEOLOGY.-The study of antiquity, and especially of prehistoric antiquity, is known as archæology (the science of antiquities or beginnings), and is based upon finds of ruins, tools, weapons, caves, skeletons, carvings, ornaments, and similar remains or evidences of human life and action in prehistoric times. It has been well described as "unwritten history." Remains of all kinds have long been roughly but conveniently classified into three groups corresponding to three periods of development, viz.: a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an |