ural knowledge, and especially of that part of it which
is known as Physical Science, in consequence of the application of
scientific method to the investigation of the phenomena of the
material world. Not that the growth of physical science is an
exclusive prerogative of the Victorian age. Its present strength and
volume merely indicate the highest level of a stream which took its
rise, alongside of the primal founts of Philosophy, Literature, and
Art, in ancient Greece; and, after being dammed up for a thousand
years, once more began to flow three centuries ago.

[Sidenote: Greek and mediaeval science.]

It may be doubted if even-handed justice, as free from fulsome
panegyric as from captious depreciation, has ever yet been dealt out
to the sages of antiquity who, for eight centuries, from the time of
Thales to that of Galen, toiled at the foundations of physical
science. But, without entering into the discussion of that large
question, it is certain that the labors of these early workers in the
field of natural knowledge were brought to a standstill by the decay
and disruption of the Roman Empire, the consequent disorganisation of
society, and the diversion of men's thoughts from sublunary matters to
the problems of the supernatural world suggested by Christian dogma in
the Middle Ages. And, notwithstanding sporadic attempts to recall men
to the investigation of nature, here and there, it was not until the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that physical science made a new
start, founding itself, at first, altogether upon that which had been
done by the Greeks. Indeed, it must be admitted that the men of the
Renaissance, though standing on the shoulders of the old philosophers,
were a long time before they saw as much as their forerunners had
done.

The first serious attempts to carry further the unfinished work of
Archimedes, Hipparchus, and Ptolemy, of Aristotle and of Galen,
naturally enough arose among the astronomers and the physicians. For
the imperious necessity of seeking some remedy for the physical ills
of life had insured the preservation of more or less of the wisdom of
Hippocrates and his successors, and, by a happy conjunction of
circumstances, the Jewish and the Arabian physicians and philosophers
escaped many of the influences which, at that time, blighted natural
knowledge in the Christian world. On the other hand, the superstitious
hopes and fears which afforded countenance to astrology and to alc