the AEgean
Sea? Those who wish to know the rock whence science was hewn may read
the story told in vivid language by Professor Gomperz in his "Greek
Thinkers," the fourth volume of which has recently been published
(Murray, 1912; Scribner, 1912). In 1912, there was published a book by
one of the younger Oxford teachers, "The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to
Us,"(1) from which those who shrink from the serious study of Gomperz'
four volumes may learn something of the spirit of Greece. Let me quote a
few lines from his introduction:

(1) By R. W. Livingstone, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1912 (2d
ed., revised, 1915).

"Europe has nearly four million square miles; Lancashire has 1,700;
Attica has 700. Yet this tiny country has given us an art which we,
with it and all that the world has done since it for our models, have
equalled perhaps, but not surpassed. It has given us the staple of our
vocabulary in every domain of thought and knowledge. Politics, tyranny,
democracy, anarchism, philosophy, physiology, geology, history--these
are all Greek words. It has seized and up to the present day kept hold
of our higher education. It has exercised an unfailing fascination, even
on minds alien or hostile. Rome took her culture thence. Young Romans
completed their education in the Greek schools.... And so it was with
natures less akin to Greece than the Roman. St. Paul, a Hebrew of the
Hebrews, who called the wisdom of the Greeks foolishness, was drawn
to their Areopagus, and found himself accommodating his gospel to the
style, and quoting verses from the poets of this alien race. After him,
the Church, which was born to protest against Hellenism, translated its
dogmas into the language of Greek thought and finally crystallized them
in the philosophy of Aristotle."

Whether a plaything of the gods or a cog in the wheels of the universe
this was the problem which life offered to the thinking Greek; and in
undertaking its solution, he set in motion the forces that have made
our modern civilization. That the problem remains unsolved is nothing
in comparison with the supreme fact that in wrestling with it, and in
studying the laws of the machine, man is learning to control the
small section of it with which he is specially concerned. The veil of
thaumaturgy which shrouded the Orient, while not removed, was rent in
twain, and for the first time in history, man had a clear vision of the
world about him--"had gazed on Nature's na