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it is likely to reduce them further. But no State is prepared to undertake international obligations binding it to make such further reduction or even to maintain its armaments at their present level; for every Power, great or small, wishes to retain its own freedom of action, untrammelled by international obligations and uncontrolled by League committees, in case necessities for self-defence should suddenly arise.

The efforts of the League of Nations have, as we have seen, not succeeded in getting any nearer to a solution of the problem in 1927 than in 1919. The reason for this failure is that all the efforts have been directed to the elimination of the symptoms rather than to curing the disease. To attempt to ensure the maintenance of peace by reducing armaments is an action similar to that of a doctor who limited his ministrations to reducing the patient's fever, instead of diagnosing and dealing with the causes of the illness. The problem must be handled otherwise than by direct action. What is wanted is not so much material disarmament as a disarmament of the spirit, and this is progressing independently of international commissions and conferences. The League, which has accomplished such useful work in other fields, has in this connexion wasted time and effort on a hopeless task. Where it can help is in increasing and improving the organs for the peaceful composition of international disputes, and all its activities should be concentrated on that object. The attempt to fix a limit to armaments in general and to those of each country are bound to fail, and only result in producing unnecessary irritation and indeed in provoking an increase of armaments, or at all events in retarding their reduction. The only really equitable scheme for disarmament should be based on the principle of fixing a maximum limit of armaments, beyond which no Power should be allowed to go, although all would of course be free to keep as far below that limit as they deemed compatible with their own safety. But the Powers with the largest armies and fleets do not appear willing to accept such a plan.

LUIGI VILLARI.

Art. 7-GREEK SCIENCE.

THERE is a question-it soon raises other questionswhich every thinker who views history from the vantage point of a Philo, or a Spengler, finds endlessly engaging. Why have science and thought bloomed in one age and place; in another, withered; and in yet another, taken no root at all? Why indeed? Has religion as much to do with it as Gibbon said, and sincerely thought? Or was Plato right in holding that mechanical aids to thought were pernicious since, if used, they would atrophy and destroy thought itself? Is superstition or materialism the logical and exact opposite of genius? Or is there any more complex, and more satisfactory explanation? Is the question beyond answering? Does the wind blow where it listeth, and is there no more to be said? Will the torch fall again between hand and eager hand, and lie in the dust? Will any one tell us precisely why Archimedes should have taken a step which no one followed for 1800 years?

Questions of this kind, and they abound among us today, apart altogether from the 'Spenglerkampf,' might profitably lead us at least to a more exact study of history, and to a criticism of those easy and sciolistic comparisons between periods, races, civilisations. For example, when historians compare Greeks with Modern men, which Greeks do they mean; and Greeks of what century? Perhaps the most serious blunder made about the Greeks in so-called histories of science is the mistaken idea that the Greek scientific period was a short one. The truth is that the modern scientific period is short in comparison with the Greek.

We have mentioned Archimedes. About him and his native city, Syracuse, we know many things, and the order of their occurrence, as well as we know anything in European history. He lost his life when Syracuse was captured by the Romans in 212 B.C. Backwards from that date, we have a pretty continuous history, much of it written, to the foundation of the city in 734 B.C. The first settlers were a civilised people, for they came from Corinth, which was the earliest of the Greek cities of historic times to attain to eminence in

trade and the arts. The younger city had therefore

522 years of continuous civilisation and culture. Long before Athens withstood the Persians, Syracuse was a bulwark against the merely commercial power of Carthage and the still darker power of the Etruscans. 522 years! Count back in our history and we are almost precisely at the death of Chaucer, the first Englishman to leave a classic behind him. It carries us back two and a quarter centuries before the death of Francis Bacon; it takes us within a century almost of Roger Bacon. In France if we count back five hundred and twenty-two years we find ourselves more than a century before the accession of Louis XI, who is generally credited with the establishment of the modern monarchy upon which French civilisation has rested. We are

back at a period two and a half centuries before the death of Descartes, the first French thinker of any eminence. In Italian history the same lapse of time carries us almost to the death of Petrarch; it takes us back a full half-century before the fall of Constantinople and the beginnings of the New Learning.'

Let it not be thought for a moment that Syracuse was the home of scientific activity during all this period. But it is worth remembering that the city in which Archimedes was born had for over half a thousand years a continuous civilisation, which began, moreover, on a very high level indeed; and that during that long period it was never invaded by a foreigner or overflowed by alien thought. Danger threatened it, during long periods, on all sides, and its mental contacts were many, but its culture was never wounded, or made impure. It is worth while to pause at this point. It gives us of the modern day a necessary perspective. It might give us a truer conception of what European science is.

Other mistakes are commonly made in dealing with Greek science. Not only is it frequently said that Greek science flourished during a very short period, but also that it was one-sided, deductive and not experimental, that it was handicapped very largely by its lack of instruments and its lack of the decimal notation, and that the one great advantage it enjoyed was the fact that religion rested lightly on the Greek people. I do not mean to suggest that all these fallacies-for they are, all of them, fallacies -are to be found within the covers of any one book.

But it is amazing how frequently one or another of them crops up even in the most recent work, and in places where one would least expect it. Even Sir Thomas Heath, the learned editor of Aristarchus, Archimedes, Diophantus, and Apollonius, and author of a monumental history of Greek mathematics, says in one place that science was short-lived among the Greeks.

We begin to see a good deal of the fantastic in the ordinary account of Greek science if, basing ourselves on the story of Syracuse and Archimedes, we ponder it with any sort of historic judgment and with any sort of discerning knowledge of the history of mankind. We reflect, almost at once, that the continuous, free, and yet unadulterate development of Syracuse was not without parallel in the Greek world; that the city of Cumæ, for one, enjoyed an even longer period under the same conditions. As we have said, it will not do to think of all Syracusan history as belonging to the history of science. Yet we remember that Hipparchus and Diophantus continued the scientific period a long while after the death of Archimedes. And as for the basis of the culture out of which science grew, we remember that Corinth and the fine culture of Samos existed before Syracuse began. Again, is it conceivable that a people sufficiently gifted to produce Archimedes, whom Sir Thomas Heath calls probably the greatest mathematical genius of all time, should not have produced scientific genius of another kind? Later we shall return to the connexion between mathematics and science. For men to undertake to write about the history of science and to be themselves so unscientific as to suppose that mathematics and other sciences dwell apart, and that a people can go on deducing, and never experimenting, for centuries--this is a thing only to be explained, I suppose, by the curse of specialisation which weighs on us. As to mechanical equipment, any boy who had read Plutarch's Life of Marcellus' would know that Archimedes at least was not stinted in that respect. A more serious student, reading Hippocrates on trepanning the skull, and his references to elaborate surgical instruments, or seeing the collection of such instruments in the museum in Naples, would be still more enlightened. But any one who attempts to work through the written

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remains of Archimedes with the help of Heiberg or Heath, will understand that he was an endlessly precise inventor of laboratory equipment; and, further, that he and other Greeks had a numerical notation which, for the subtlest calculations, in no way fell short of our own.

As to religious persecution: should it not be sufficient to ask whether any people could escape this exceedingly human trait for six or seven or eight centuries? If the Greeks were so unlike ourselves as that, could we understand them, could we study them with profit? The truth is that many a Greek sighed, with Faust: 'Und leider auch Theologie.' Let one illustration do. So far as we know, Anaximander of Miletus, born about four centuries before the death of Archimedes, was the first Greek to teach evolution. He taught, as clearly as any modern, the possibility of change from species to species, and used some of the arguments afterwards used by Charles Darwin and A, R. Wallace to support his thesis. Like Darwin he had his T. H. Huxley to confute a certain type of theologian in his day. This was his pupil, Xenophanes, who like Huxley had a ready and somewhat satiric tongue, and whose favourite argument was one which Huxley often used-that every age is incurably anthropomorphic. Some of his fragmentary sayings are remarkably like bits of Huxley's 'Life of Hume.' Huxley did distinguished work on crustaceans. It is on record that Xenophanes examined fossilised shellfish at Paros, Malta, and Syracuse, and that he recognised an extinct sea-beach when he saw one.

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The story of Thales of Miletus and Pythagoras of Samos has often been told; in the main, it must be said, with relatively too much attention to the former. Thales and many Greeks after him puzzled over the question which every child asks, Of what is the world made?' Thales answered, 'Water.' It has been pointed out that he lived on a large gulf, which since his time has become an alluvial plain, and that he had seen the Nile. If we credit him with greater subtlety we may imagine that he took the three forms of Water-solid, liquid, and invisible vapour-as a type merely of all kinds of chemical change, growth, and decay.

In Thales himself a ferment of thought was working. In two fields he had found treasure. In Babylon exceed

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