The Project Gutenberg EBook of A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5), by
Henry Smith Williams

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Title: A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5)

Author: Henry Smith Williams

Release Date: April, 1999 [Etext #1708]
Posting Date: November 18, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF SCIENCE, V4 ***

Produced by Charles Keller

A HISTORY OF SCIENCE

By Henry Smith Williams, M.D., LL.D.

Assisted By Edward H. Williams, M.D.

In Five Volumes

Volume IV.

MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

BOOK IV. MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES

AS regards chronology, the epoch covered in the present volume is
identical with that viewed in the preceding one. But now as regards
subject matter we pass on to those diverse phases of the physical world
which are the field of the chemist, and to those yet more intricate
processes which have to do with living organisms. So radical are the
changes here that we seem to be entering new worlds; and yet, here as
before, there are intimations of the new discoveries away back in the
Greek days. The solution of the problem of respiration will remind
us that Anaxagoras half guessed the secret; and in those diversified
studies which tell us of the Daltonian atom in its wonderful
transmutations, we shall be reminded again of the Clazomenian
philosopher and his successor Democritus.

Yet we should press the analogy much too far were we to intimate that
the Greek of the elder day or any thinker of a more recent period had
penetrated, even in the vaguest way, all of the mysteries that the
nineteenth century has revealed in the fields of chemistry and biology.
At the very most the insight of those great Greeks and of the wonderful
seventeenth-century philosophers who so often seemed on the verge of our
later discoveries did no more than vaguely anticipate their successors
of this later century. To gain an accurate, really specific knowledge of
the properties of elementary bodies was reserved for the chemists of a
recent epoch. The vague Greek questionings as to organic evolution were
world-wide from the