Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

Greek science. The historian of science reckons ill who leaves out Lucretius as a mere poet or abstract philosopher. Few men whose records remain have been endowed with so powerful a mind. So powerful was he, indeed, so unconventional, so unlike all Europeans who followed him, that he quickly passed out of European interest. But one manuscript of Lucretius survived in a Western monastery, by accident, unlike the Greek manuscripts which were tended and read and copied in Constantinople by men who had enough understanding to reverence them; and, when the time came, there lay the work of Lucretius to fortify men, and incite them in the direction of rationalism, science, daring speculation. A keen observer, Lucretius, a subtle speculator, a prober into the very essence of things, into the mechanics of wind, into optics and magnetism, into the chemical change of digestion, into all the questions raised by the Greek biologists, including the origin of species, into the propagation of disease, into the laws of light, heat, and sound, and all those other rays and atomic vibrations with which only the other day we began to concern ourselves again!

It will readily be seen that I have made no attempt to be comprehensive. I have tried merely to make a few things clear which are not generally made clear in historical accounts of Greek science. I have tried to show that it covered a long and laborious period, and that during this time there were few of the main problems of modern science with which the Greeks did not deal. I have carefully refrained from such exagge rated eulogies of the Greeks as one sometimes hears, to the effect that there would have been no science as we know it had the Greeks never been. That is the sort of speculation which raises more unknown quantities than the wit of man can solve. We of the modern world might have reasoned better had the Greeks not made, or seemed to have made, reasoning so easy for us. On the other side, I have tried to show that the Greeks were more like ourselves than is generally believed, and that as no Greeks preceded them the incubation of their ideas was a longer matter than ours.

In the same way, though the Greeks never fashioned for themselves such a monstrous candle-snuffer of

thought as the Medieval Church, they had with them always, as human beings always will, their Mrs Grundy and their Dogberry, and their apostles of compromise. Sixty-three years after Copernicus published the whole truth, Tycho Brahe, a more accurate observer so far as his contemporaries could see, and certainly possessed of more technical knowledge, contented himself with half the truth, and drew many after him. So was it with the Greeks.

But because the Greeks wrestled more continuously with these problems than any of their successors in Europe have yet done, there does shine through their work a truer conception of science than may be found elsewhere. They discovered the importance of number. They saw that science to be science must be abstract, pure. They demanded that all science should remain an intellectual process, at least in the schools. They would not have allowed a student to use logarithms unless he understood the principles underlying them. Further, their science had a morality and a code of honour, as the rules of the Pythagoreans and the oath of Hippocrates attest. Not that they thought any knowledge immoral or dishonourable. They followed Truth to the end; but were unselfish to a degree in sharing it, unself-seeking in the way they used it. Finally, Greek science and Greek imagination were intertwined.

Reaction came with Stoicism, which was half Phonician in origin. It was emotional, not intellectual, and consequently easier for the Romans who were invading Greece on the other side. Stoicism was the avowed enemy of science, and Stoicism triumphed. This was reinforced by what followed. Perhaps we may be as sure of this as of anything, that biology and much other curiosity stopped with the Greeks, and was never revived until recently, because during all that interval Europeans contented themselves with the Phoenician and Hebraic conception of humanity.

CARLETON W. STANLEY.

Art. 8.-THE THAMES.

IT is a remarkable fact that the Thames has never had justice done it in verse or prose; and it is even more amazing that its manifold charms and succession of beauties are ignored by those who are constantly seeking new fields to explore. Here is a stream the waters of which run through our midst; it has its origin at a spot only a little over two hundred miles from its mouth in Kent; it passes through nine of the most familiar and historic counties of England; on its banks stand such famous places as Oxford and Abingdon, Reading, Windsor and Eton, Kingston, Richmond and Kew, to say nothing of London itself; and yet if we examine its literature we find that we have nothing nearly commensurate with its claims. That many books have been written on the subject is not to be denied. Certain centres on its banks have been carefully dealt with in a specialised way, and to mention but two more or less recent examples we have the Rev. Arthur Plaisted's excellent book on Medmenham, and Sir Rickman Godlee's not less attractive volume dealing with Whitchurch. And these are the direct successors of quite a little library of monographs such as Crisp's 'Richmond' which amplified Evans' tentative work on that historic town, Pote's Windsor,' and Hedges' Wallingford,' inter multa alia. Of such places as Oxford and London, as well as of Eton, we have books in abundance. Also there are many histories of the Thames which on examination prove to be little more than a series of notes written further to illustrate special features of the subject as depicted in accompanying illustrations which, in practically every case, are the fontes et origines of the volumes. Concerning these books I shall have something further to say. But when all is said and done the complete history of the Thames, from its exiguous beginnings, whether these be as some hold at the Seven Springs in Somerset or at Thames Head (with its elusive tree and the spring beneath where you may, except in winter or flood time, seek long enough for a trace of any water) in Gloucestershire, to its gathering strength and size at London, or to where the 'longed-for splash of waves is heard' at

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

T

Sheerness, has still to be written; and for those who know the river and realise its beauty and the teeming annals on its banks, the fact is one to inspire perpetual : wonder.

The vast library of works which have been allocated to particular cities and towns on the Thames; the splendidly illustrated volumes which Boydell and Ackermann, Ireland and Westall and Cooke, and the rest, have dedicated to the perpetuation of historic and beautiful spots on its banks; the great gallery of pictures, and the poetic tributes in which the charm of the river has been I crystallised, are, as it were, so many mémoires pour E servir, as the French phrase it, for the examination of which, in these hurried days, we have little leisure. What is wanted is a complete history, in which every famous event and every notable personality; every architectural feature and every spot of natural beauty; I the fauna and the flora; the special characteristics of the banks of every county through which the river runs, should be recorded, and illustrated not merely by what great artists have left of their impressions, but what great writers have devoted, in prose and poetry, to the praise and description of this historic water.

In order to realise how pregnant with interest this theme is, it is necessary to call to mind the historic annals of the country with which the Thames has been directly connected. From the day when Cæsar crossed it with his legions it may be said to have run through our island story as it actually runs through so much of that island itself. As one places a finger on the map along which the river serpentines, hardly a town on its banks will be found in which history has not happened, or which has not been made notable by some famous man or event. Even above Oxford, where it meanders among green meadows, and the quiet of nature is so little disturbed save by the flap of a heron's rising wing or the shrill cry of a peewit, and whither so few, who travel thousands of miles in other directions in search of beauties often not comparable to those to be found among these remote haunts, ever come, you may discover much that is linked to the doings of the great past, and of which the memory remains, here in an ancient building, there in a spot whose name recalls

some outstanding historical event. Even little Cricklade can boast of an antiquity which sent members to Parliament in the time of Edward II, although bribery and corruption eventually brought it under the displeasure of the House of Commons; but it has long forgotten such happenings, and now lies peacefully enough, with the lovely tower of Cirencester rising in the distance, and Ashton Keynes (or it is the Worsted Skeynes of Mr Galsworthy's 'Country House '?) a little way above it, on the shallow and reedy stream. Past Castle Eaton and Kempsford, and Inglesham Round House, where the now disused Thames and Severn Canal joins the river, through Whitworth's 1702 scheme, Lechlade forms the focal point, as it were, of three counties-Lechlade, with its old-world inns, and its church, which seems, however, insignificant when compared with that of Fairford, whose 15th-century windows are among the sights of the neighbourhood. Eaton Hastings, Grafton, and Radcot are names which sing in the heart like birds, but it is Kelmscott that stands for something more, and never can you think of it without recalling to mind that idle singer of an empty day,' who lived in a mediæval past but whose ideas were so progressive. For there still stands the manor in which were wrought so many beautiful things, that its name connotes that splendour of typography vouchsafed to his mind through his communing with the exquisite missal-marges of the past. If Buscot on the Berkshire shore boasts its famous Burne Joneses, Kelmscott on the Oxfordshire is for ever memorable as the home of William Morris.

And as one journeys down towards the dreaming spires,' one passes under bridges-Newbridge and Radcot Bridge and the rest-which have helped to make history; for on them the contending forces during the Civil Wars came into collision, and Radcott had an earlier association with unrest when, in 1387, the Earl of Derby met here Robert de Vere, who only escaped death by plunging his horse into the river and swimming to the opposite bank. The history of the Thames that one would like to read and possess, would deal fully with these and other happenings in what are now the green pastures of cud-chewing kine and the haunt of the heron and the dabchick. One place, before we reach Oxford, has been

« VorigeDoorgaan »