sting chapters of history is the effort of
man to let some one else or something else do his work for him, while he
enjoyed his leisure, sitting in the sun or painting pictures on rocks,
or training young wolves and little tigers to behave like peaceful
domestic animals.

Of course in the very olden days; it was always possible to enslave a
weaker neighbour and force him to do the unpleasant tasks of life. One
of the reasons why the Greeks and Romans, who were quite as intelligent
as we are, failed to devise more interesting machinery, was to be
found in the wide-spread existence of slavery. Why should a great
mathematician waste his time upon wires and pulleys and cogs and fill
the air with noise and smoke when he could go to the marketplace and buy
all the slaves he needed at a very small expense?

And during the middle-ages, although slavery had been abolished and
only a mild form of serfdom survived, the guilds discouraged the idea of
using machinery because they thought this would throw a large number
of their brethren out of work. Besides, the Middle-Ages were not at all
interested in producing large quantities of goods. Their tailors and
butchers and carpenters worked for the immediate needs of the small
community in which they lived and had no desire to compete with their
neighbours, or to produce more than was strictly necessary.

During the Renaissance, when the prejudices of the Church against
scientific investigations could no longer be enforced as rigidly as
before, a large number of men began to devote their lives to mathematics
and astronomy and physics and chemistry. Two years before the beginning
of the Thirty Years War, John Napier, a Scotchman, had published his
little book which described the new invention of logarithms. During the
war it-self, Gottfried Leibnitz of Leipzig had perfected the system
of infinitesimal calculus. Eight years before the peace of Westphalia,
Newton, the great English natural philosopher, was born, and in that
same year Galileo, the Italian astronomer, died. Meanwhile the Thirty
Years War had destroyed the prosperity of central Europe and there was
a sudden but very general interest in "alchemy," the strange
pseudo-science of the middle-ages by which people hoped to turn base
metals into gold. This proved to be impossible but the alchemists in
their laboratories stumbled upon many new ideas and greatly helped the
work of the chemists who were their successors.

The work