rn men
of science; and they are few. In our own day, amid the throng of
inventions, there are a multitude of small men using the name of science
but working for their own ends, jostling and scrambling just as they
would jostle and scramble in any other trade or profession. These may be
workers, they may and do advance knowledge, but they are never pioneers.
Not to them is it given to open out great tracts of unexplored
territory, or to view the promised land as from a mountain-top. Of them
we shall not speak; we will concern ourselves only with the greatest,
the epoch-making men, to whose life and work we and all who come after
them owe so much. Such a man was Thales. Such was Archimedes,
Hipparchus, Copernicus. Such pre-eminently was Newton.

Now I am not going to attempt a history of science. Such a work in ten
lectures would be absurd. I intend to pick out a few salient names here
and there, and to study these in some detail, rather than by attempting
to deal with too many to lose individuality and distinctness.

We know so little of the great names of antiquity, that they are for
this purpose scarcely suitable. In some departments the science of the
Greeks was remarkable, though it is completely overshadowed by their
philosophy; yet it was largely based on what has proved to be a wrong
method of procedure, viz the introspective and conjectural, rather than
the inductive and experimental methods. They investigated Nature by
studying their own minds, by considering the meanings of words, rather
than by studying things and recording phenomena. This wrong (though by
no means, on the face of it, absurd) method was not pursued exclusively,
else would their science have been valueless, but the influence it had
was such as materially to detract from the value of their speculations
and discoveries. For when truth and falsehood are inextricably woven
into a statement, the truth is as hopelessly hidden as if it had never
been stated, for we have no criterion to distinguish the false from the
true.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Archimedes.]

Besides this, however, many of their discoveries were ultimately lost to
the world, some, as at Alexandria, by fire--the bigoted work of a
Mohammedan conqueror--some by irruption of barbarians; and all were
buried so long and so completely by the night of the dark ages, that
they had to be rediscovered almost as absolutely and completely as
though they had never been. Some of the names of an