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GREAT MEN OF SCIENCE
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/greatmenofsciencO000grov
GREAT MEN OF SCIENCE
Their Lives and Discoveries
By GROVE WILSON
Originally Published as THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
THE NEW HOME LIBRARY New York
Tre New Hons Lrsrary Enron Pusiisnep SSPTEMBER, 1942 REPRINTED NOVEMBER, 1042 REPRINTED FEBRUARY, 1945 Reprintren May, 1944
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY GROVE WILSON
All Rights Reserved, Including That of Translation into Foreign Lar- guages, Including the Scandinaman.
Tse New Howe Lisrary, 14 West Forty-ninth Street New York, N. Y:
cL ¢
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Contents
FOREWORD THALES
PYTHAGORAS AND ANAXAGORAS DEMOCRITUS
HIPPOCRATES
ARISTOTLE
ARCHIMEDES
GALEN
PTOLEMY
INTO THE DARK AGES—AND OUT ROGER BACON COSTER AND GUTENBERG COPERNICUS
PARACELSUS
TYCHO BRAHE
WILLIAM HARVEY
JOHN KEPLER
GALILEO GALILEI
ISAAC NEWTON
FROM LEEUWENHOEK TO LAPLACE LAVOISIER
105 11g 129 157 189 208 222
XXVIII
CONTENTS
LAMARCK FARADAY PASTEUR CHARLES DARWIN GREGOR MENDEL HERTZ
LANGLEY EINSTEIN BIBLIOGRAPHY
234 249 275 306 334 346 358 367 391
Foreword
NCE upon a time a strange and hairy creature
gouged out a log and launched it upon a primeval
lake. The monster ships that today fret the oceans trace
their descent in a straight, unbroken line from that first crude canoe.
Thousands of years ago an inspired genius fashioned a clumsy wheel out of the trunk of a fallen tree— and every wheel, big and little, that turns in the world sprang directly from that ugly, remote ancestor.
The Old Man of the Tribe who held up his ten fingers to indicate the number of enemies he had mur- dered, suggested a system that now makes it possible to express in numbers the size of distant stars or the speed at which light travels.
What of the savage who first drew on a bit of bark a strange picture, in an effort to warn a friend or frighten a foe? Did not the alphabet evolve from that barbaric designe And did it not, therefore, make pos- sible all the books, magazines, newspapers and circu- lars that threaten to bury the earth under an avalanche of paper?
Thus in the bitter fight for existence originated the thing we call science. If all the details could be gath- ered up, all the gaps filled in, the trail of science would be found leading back to half-human creatures who, in terror and confusion, were seeking to be men. Those details are lost, those gaps can never be filled, and all memory of the origin of fire, of clay modeling, of the bow and arrow, has vanished forever.
15
x FOREWORD
The story of science, then, is without a beginning and without an end, but it is forever unfolding. Nations rise and fall, dynasties rule and pass away, religions wax and wane, but science, building upon failure and inhumanity and aspiration, moves steadily forward. Its rate of advance is uneven, but for twenty-five cen- turies it has not come to a dead stop.
Man has made his science, and in turn science has made man. He is thus, in the midst of this thing he calls civilization, literally the product of what he has thought in his head and done with his hands. To know his science, to know the lives of the men who have made his science, is to know Man. To follow the thin, irregular line of searchers after strange truths that leads from antiquity to Einstein, is to find and to under- stand the finest and most inspiring side of a human nature that is not always exalted, not always kind, not always unselfish,
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A golden thread has run through the history of the world, consecutive and continuous, the work of the best men in successive ages. From point to point it still runs, and when near you feel it as the clear and bright and searchingly irresistible light which Truth throws forth when great minds conceive it.
—WALTER Moxon, Pilocereus Senilis and Other Papers
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Chapter One (AHeAeiIsE Sk
HEN the light of history begins to shine across
the plains of Attica, there stands Thales. He was
born about the middle of the seventh century before
Christ, say 640, and everyone agrees that he lived to be
somewhere between ninety and one hundred and ten
years old. What he looked like, what kind of every-day
life he lived, there is now no way of knowing. Even his
nationality is uncertain. Herodotus calls him a Pheeni-
cian, but Zeller thinks he was a Greek of Asia Minor extraction.
Examyus was his father, and Cleobuline was his mother. These names are immortal through the acci- dent of parentage. It is assumed that they belonged to the nobility and were wealthy. If so Thales had an ex- cellent heritage—and he justified it.
Some think he was a trader and that it was business that drew him to Egypt. But who were his teachers be- fore he made that excursion into a foreign country? If Examyus was a noble he must have been educated and naturally he would give his son the benefit of his learn- ing. Anyway it is certain that Thales sat at the feet of Egyptian wisdom.
But he was an original. He could accept no man’s word as final. He had to know things for himself. The answers furnished by religion were not satisfactory. As he could not live in a world bristling with question- marks, he set out to lay a foundation for his universe.
3 ;
2 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
In laying this foundation he won for himself the title of Father of Science.
Z
A few years ago a total eclipse of the sun was vis- ible in some parts of the United States. This is a striking, awe-inspiring phenomenon. After once seeing it, it’s easy to understand the terror with which primi- tive people view it. The sun, they think, is being de- stroyed, and in order to prevent the calamity they fire innumerable arrows into the air to slay the monster that has attacked the sun. Or they kindle enormous fires to restore the strength of the fainting luminary. They try thus to head off nature by recourse to magic.
Thales, who as a pioneer was scoffed at and ridiculed, wanted to convince the doubters. He knew what caused an eclipse and he computed the time of the next one. In the year 585, he said that the sun would be darkened on the twenty-eighth of May. No one believed him, and the public gave him sneers for his pains. Least of all did the Medes and the Lydians believe him. So on May twenty-eighth, they staged one of their best battles.
But, at the time specified, the sun disappeared, the warring factions were frightened into peace—and the skeptics were convinced.
In spite of his success with the eclipse, astronomy was not his forte. Still he did some things in this field that were worth while. He didn’t believe that the sun was a small thing about a foot in diameter—a common belief in his time. He set out to measure it, and his computation showed that it was enormous—one 720th part of the zodiac in diameter. This is considerably less than the true diameter, 864,000 miles, but it -gave a much larger sun than anyone before Thales had dared imagine.
THALES 3
He also called the sailors’ attention to the Lesser Bear as a better guide by which to steer than the Great Bear, which for centuries had been popular. Careful observation gave him the length of the year as 365 days —fair accuracy when you remember he had no instru- ments with which to work,
3
In Egypt Thales learned geometry—and proceeded to surpass his teachers. They knew geometry of surfaces —a science they used in keeping track of real estate in a region where each year an overflowing river wiped out ail landmarks. Thales passed from these concrete problems to abstractions, and created for the first time in the history of the world the science of geometry of lines. To the high-school student of today his discover- tes will seem simple but to the Greeks, twenty-five hundred years ago, they were stupendous. It was he who first stated:
“A circle is bisected by its diameter.
“Angles at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal.
‘When two straight lines cut each other, the verti- cally opposite angles are equal.
“The angle in a semicircle is a right angle.”
Each of these is practically self-evident, isn’t it? Yet it was out of theorems of this nature that our elaborate geometry grew. And it took a wise man to formulate these when he had to dig them out of his head, without precedent and without rules. The Egyptians had been dealing with this science for cen- turies, but they never produced, in all their history, so abstract and basic a theorem as any one of these.
But Thales had a practical side to his nature, and he wasn’t above instructing the Egyptians in their own field. The priests of the Nile Valley had never beep
4 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
able to figure out a way of measuring the height of their own pyramids.
“Measure the length of the pyramid’s shadow,” said Thales, “when your own shadow exactly equals your height.” Simple, wasn’t it? But the process of reason- ing, before Thales arrived at this conclusion, was highly involved, and no one before him had made just the right association of ideas.
4
Great as he was, this first of the scientists dropped into quaint absurdities. He was foolish enough to think his eyes told him the truth. The reasonably wise mod- ern man knew, even before Einstein and Relativity ap- peared, that sight cannot be trusted. Thales didn’t know this. As a result he thought the world was a tiny, some- what saucer-shaped affair, around which the sun and the moon and the stars revolved. Small and circum- scribed as it was, he made his bit of earth occupy the center of the majestic universe.
He was led into another foolishness in his effort to answer the “Howe” of creation. To satisfy himself on this point he made water the principle, or primary element, of all things. The importance of water had been forced upon his attention in Egypt where life depended directly upon the annual rise of the Nile. Indeed, Thales lived in a water-bound world. Is it sur- prising, then, that he should have reasoned that life came out of water and was dependent upon it?
5
With his hypothesis about water as the primary ele- ment, Thales started something.
Anaximander, a contemporary of Thales, had ideas that were rather vague, but he was a philosopher whe
THALES F
thought obscurity was a proof of genius. As his pri- mary element he chose chaos, that is, a mixture of air, water, fire, and earth. An internal energy caused a separation in this “Infinite,” and hence arose the ele- ments and everything that the world contains.
This old scientist's idea of the earth has never been matched for originality. He taught that the earth is cylindrical, with a base one-third its altitude, and that it is held in the center of the universe by the equal pressure of the air upon all sides. Around his cylin- drical, motionless earth revolved the stars and planets, each fixed to a crystalline ring. Beyond them was the moon, and beyond the moon was the sun, all conscien- tiously moving around the earth.
Life, said Anaximander, came out of the primary miry earth upon which the sun’s heat raised blisters, and when these blisters broke, animals appeared as chickens come from eggs. At first these animals were ill-formed, but in time they developed towards per- fection.
Man was ejected from such a blister as a fish and as a fish he lived until he was capable of supporting himself on land. How he learned to walk by swim- ming, Anaximander does not say. This is the theory that has been called the first groping towards evolu- tion. But it’s a far cry from blisters in the mud to Darwin’s “Origin of Species.”
6
Anaximenes, who came a century after Thales, chose air as the primary source of all things. “The earth,” he said, “floats like a broad leaf on the air.” To him the soul of man was composed of air, since life con- sists in inhaling and exhaling air and stops when we stop breathing. Warmth and cold resulted from a rare
6 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
or condensed state of the air. He even went so far as to call the air infinite and therefore God.
-
Heraclitus of Ephesus was known as the “Obscure Philosopher.” This was because he jumbled ethics, theology, physics, and politics in one mess and left his reader to sort it out if he could. Heraclitus made fire the primary element, though by fire he did not mean flame. He meant something more nearly synonymous with our word heat. Still he says, “All is convertible into fire, and fire into all.” This principle is in a state of perpetual activity, making and unmaking every- thing in life.
“No one,” he says, “has ever been twice on the same stream, for different waters are constantly flowing down.” Which probably is no more than the truth. But he finds that ‘“‘all is ordered by reason and intelli- gence, though all is subject to Fate.”
He made one contribution to thought upon which later philosophers and scientists have greatly elabo- rated: “Man’s mind can produce no certain knowledge from its own interior resources.”
These various schools, celebrated enough in their time, have for centuries been little more than curiosi- ties. They are mentioned as incidents in man’s fight away from the Many toward the One. But none of these theories could stand since none of them embodies a truth. Still they served as rounds in the ladder that twenty-five centuries later led to the illuminating theory of the electron.
Chapter Two
Reygig eG: @RVA Seek Nob AUNAOCA GORAS
NE name among the ancient Greeks still sings
—Pythagoras. In one way or another that name is familiar to almost everyone. If you are inclined to believe in astrology, your favorite seer will din “Pythagoras” into your ears. If you like to probe the future with numerology, you will be told that Pytha- goras invented that fortune-telling science. He didn’t, but that doesn’t matter. In school you heard of him as the man who found out that in a right-angle triangle the square on the hypotenuse 1s equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. You didn’t thank him for that and you’ve probably forgotten what it means. But you haven’t forgotten Pythagoras’s name.
He was born in 582 B.c. at Samos. Pythagoras made himself immortal by his personality. He had genius, too. But first of all he had the power of winning and holding friends. He was a great talker—and let it go at that. The drudgery of writing was not for him.
His father, the rich Greek Mnesarchus, wanted his son to be educated; so he got hold of the great men of that time, Pherecydes and Hermodamas, and made them teach the youngster. He learned quickly and in less than no time he was beating his teachers at mathe- matics and philosophy. No use wasting any more time with them.
When only a boy, certainly under twenty, he set out
?
8 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
to see all the wonders of the world from the high places.
2
Picture him then, ready for his journey: a fine laugh- ing boy; tall and straight; an eager face, lighted from within by his hopes, ideals, and burning curiosity. Without worry and without fear, he set out for the East. He carried with him a fat purse—and the dreams of youth.
He went first to Babylon and sat long at the feet of wise men—men who belonged to a race that was old in culture when the Greeks were still savages. There he learned much, but the peace he sought was not in their wisdom. The East still beckoned.
So he penetrated India. The lore of centuries was spread before him. He found much in science, in phil- osophy, and he also found that which molded all the rest of his life—he found Buddha.
It is not true that Pythagoras was ever an avowed Buddhist. But his mysticism, his stress of the spiritual quality, his impractical dreaming—all showed the in- fluence of Buddha.
At last his feet turned back westward, and he wan- dered into Egypt. It may well be that it was from the priests of the Nile country that he learned his geometry. Legend says it was there that he first solved his famous right-angle triangle theorem.
3
Back in Greece at last! And what had become of the laughing boy who had set out on travels? He who returned was a quiet, serious man, fifty-three years old. Had he died during those thirty-odd years in the East, the world would never have known his name.
PYTHAGORAS AND ANAXAGORAS 9
But he lived and came home to talk, to form a brother- hood, to become immortal.
This brotherhood idea he probably picked up in the East where the Buddhists had organizations similar to the later monastic orders in Europe. Pythagoras in- troduced rites of abstinence and purity and meditation. These were meant, as a retreat is among the Catholics, to cleanse the soul and provide an escape from the “wheel of Birth”—that is, the Fate that tosses one into life and keeps on tossing one.
4
Pythagoras got mixed up in politics in the Italian town of Crotona, where he was making his home. And no good came of it. Most likely he wanted to establish a perfect state, but with all his wisdom, he should have known that was impossible. His friends gained a brief victory, but when the hard-headed business men joined hands, Pythagoras and his idealists were turned out.
The sage, with what was left of the brotherhood, went to Metapontum and settled down to a quiet life. There he taught his disciples and passed on by word of mouth the strange mystic philosophy he had loved.
What did Pythagoras teach that could be of interest to a twentieth-century scientist? First he was an as- tronomer, and his system was the best the world ever heard until Copernicus came along.
He said the world was round and hung in space, and did not stand still but revolved around a central fire, called Hestia. This fire was not the sun, for the sun was illuminated by reflection from Hestia. It was a big thing for any man at that time to say the world wasn’t flat and didn’t stand still. The planets, of course, were also swinging around this central fire. And in their movement through space they gave off high clear
10 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
notes—which we don’t hear only because we are so accustomed to them.
5
Pythagoras was mad over numbers—as the numerol- ogists will tell you. But they don’t know, and no one else knows, what he really taught about numbers. He had been dead and buried for over a century before any account of his number system was written down. Philo- laus of Thebes was the first who tried to tell people what it was about. He knew it only by hearsay, and his report couldn’t be accurate and was far from clear. At any rate Pythagoras is said to have declared, “All things are numbers.” This might be stretched to fit the modern electron theory—if you add movement, but Pythagoras knew nothing of electrons, and that cer- tainly isn’t what he meant.
“He thought the elements of numbers to be the ele- ments of all things,” wrote Aristotle, long afterwards. Sweeping along this line he is said to have believed that the universe is simply a musical scale and a num- ber. To “one” he gave the very essence of numbers and made it the basis of all others. So, logically, he could teach, “All comes from one. God embraces all and actuates all and yet is but one.”
6
His number theory had one good result. It led him to experiment with musical notes and so discover that vibrating cords omit tones dependent on their length. Out of this grew his statement of harmonic intervals. The instrument he made to test and prove this theory is believed to have been the first bit of physical-science apparatus ever made in the world.
He showed how arithmetic should be joined to
PYTHAGORAS AND ANAXAGORAS 11
geometry and thus created a new branch of mathe- matics. He gave, it is said, weights and measures to Greece.
In astronomy, he identified the evening and morning stars, and he was the first to teach that the moon is lighted by reflection.
Of course all of these things were lost but in the fulness of time, when the right man came along, they were unearthed, and Pythagoras helped the world to push ahead.
iA
After his retirement to Metapontum, he gave up politics, having had enough of that nonsense. There, surrounded by his friends, who made a fine audience, he was happy. That’s enough to make any man happy —if he likes to talk, and you may be sure Pythagoras did.
There is no hint of any dissension among his fol- lowers. Probably there were no women there. In fact there is nothing in all Pythagoras’s long life to indicate that he ever so much as spoke to a woman. Most of the Greek philosophers had their say about women —and much of what they said wasn’t flattering. Pythagoras was silent on this subject. Did he leave his love in Babylon or India or Egypt?
Grown old and wise and trembly in the limbs, Pythagoras died. His death-bed speech is lost; his grave is unknown; even the time of his death is uncer- tain. It is thought to have been early in the fifth century B.C.
8
Pythagoras the talker was dead; but Pythagoras the teacher lived on. For fifty years his friends carried on
12 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
his work. To the man in the street these Pythagoreans were strange people, and therefore to be hated. It was whispered that they did not believe in the gods; that they were infidels and worse. To the wise men the old gods were dying, but to the common people they were fresh in eternal youth.
So the mob could not endure the impiety of men who dared to doubt. The Pythagoreans were in the habit of meeting together at the house of one of their number. There they talked of the Master, rehearsed his theories, planned for the further spread of his ideas.
But to the devout worshipers of Zeus these meetings had a devilish air. They could not be decent. Why tolerate them? Outside of Milo’s house, in which the brotherhood was gathered, a mob assembled. Milo and his friends ignored them. The mob pressed forward. It was but the work of a minute to smash down the door. The mob found them, those heretics, Milo and the others, and massacred them, burning the house above the fifty and more mutilated bodies.
So ended the school of Pythagoras. Victims and as- sassins have for centuries mingled their dust. The gods in whose honor the murders were done have passed from the Olympian heights. They themselves have be- come dust of myths. But Pythagoras lives, and every student sits at his feet, listening for an overtone from the ‘music of the spheres.”
9
Pythagoras, with his weird theory of numbers and his obscure references to an unknown future, gave place to Anaxagoras and an almost stark reality.
This scientist of Clazomene, born in 500 B.Cc., came
PYTHAGORAS AND ANAXAGORAS 13
into the world about the time Pythagoras was leaving it. The son of a rich father, doubtless he was given every chance to develop his natural ability. Where he studied and with whom is unknown, as the first forty years of his life are wrapped in obscurity. Probably he traveled—that was the one sure way of learning, at a time when books were bulky and far from plentiful.
He is first clearly seen when he enters Athens about 460 B.c. The Athens he invaded had only just become the intellectual center of Greece. Pericles, Euripides and Protagoras were the great men of the time and with them Anaxagoras formed friendships. For thirty years he was a powerful influence in the city’s intellec- tual life.
Devoting his time and money to science and philoso- phy he came at last to feel the pinch of poverty and want. Other troubles, also, crowded upon him. He was out of sympathy with, if not actually opposed to, the popular religion. And that, at any time in the history of man, has been a dangerous position to occupy. The common people will not have their gods slighted. When Anaxagoras said the sun and moon were composed of earth and stone he was blasphemous; when in addition he scorned the miracles, praise of which was in every- one’s mouth, he was flirting with death.
After enduring him for thirty years the mob decided it had heard enough of this fellow. He was accord- ingly arrested, thrown into prison, condemned to die. Pericles, whose power was waning, still had enough influence to save his friend’s life but not enough to secure his safety if he remained in A'thens. So Anaxagoras went away from there, found a refuge at Lampsacus where he died, full of years but empty of fame and honor.
14 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
Afterwards those who had been ready to stone him busied themselves weaving legends around his name.
ie)
Anaxagoras introduced an Intelligence, a Mind, to start matter whirling. After that the elements took care of themselves. These elements were changeless and in- destructible—this idea closely elbows a modern belief. He also foreshadowed the atomic theory with his no- tion that in the chaos stirred up by Mind were the germs, infinitely small, that were later, by internal affinity, to combine into the substances that make the visible universe.
He came close to anticipating a theory that made Kant and Laplace famous when he said that the sun, moon, and stars had been torn away from the common center of the earth by the violence of the original revolutions.
Like Pythagoras, he said the moon shines by reflected light, and he pointed out that when the moon is eclipsed the earth is between it and the sun. He anticipated Galileo and insisted that there are mountains and val- leys on the moon like those on this earth. He taught that there have been great epochs in the history of the earth and that during the ages the globe had been greatly changed by fire and flood. He was bold enough to say that one day the hills of Lampsacus would be under the sea—if only there were time enough.
In biology he used his eyes to some purpose, and found out that fish breathe through their gills—a fact that no one before him had noticed. He said that plants were living creatures and had some form of breathing. He also thought they suffered joy and pain—joy when the buds came out and pain when the leaves fell.
PebiAGORAS AND TANAXAGORAS. 15
II
He was something of an anatomist and was first to call attention to the lateral ventricles of the brain, which he thought was the first thing developed in the embryo. He taught that the male child is matured on the right side of the mother and the female on the left. Acute diseases he attributed to the movement of gall to the lungs and pleura.
As you see, Anaxagoras’s ideas were a jumble of fact and fancy. What he didn’t know he guessed at. That was the genius of Greece—it had to have an answer, even though the answer was wrong. Many things, of course, he could not know. He had nothing to help his eye to see the very small or the very distant, and he knew nothing of chemistry. In the main, however, he was moving right, and his name deservedly lingers in the histories of science,
Chapter Three DEMO GREE Urs
BDERA, in 460 B.C., was a poky, uninteresting
town in Thrace. Its inhabitants had decided there was nothing left in the world to think about, so they stopped thinking and gave their attention exclusively to business. Into the midst of these complacent traders Democritus, sage and scientist, was born. He was born into a home in which the great Xerxes had been enter- tained. As a gracious exchange of courtesies, the king left behind, to act as teachers for the boy, some of the wise men who were attached to his court. This story may not be true, but it is true that Democritus was taught—-and taught well. It is also true that given his genius, nothing on earth could have kept him from learning.
Whoever his teachers were, travel, as usual, was his main instructor. Indeed, he traveled so much that Democritus could say of himself:
“T am the most traveled of all my countrymen. I have extended my field of inquiry farther than anyone else. I have seen more countries and climes and have heard more speeches by wise men.”
Probably he was not just boasting when he said this.
He had no interest in property and when his father died he gave the land to his brothers, taking for his share the ready cash. Thus he was fixed to satisfy his craving to see the world. He visited Egypt, Ethiopia,
16
DEMOCRITUS 17
Persia, and India. He met officials, priests, and laymen and listened to the “speeches of many learned men.”
Doubtless his adventures were not all confined to the pursuit of knowledge—but over these human-interest trifles history has drawn a veil. When he returned home time and many changes had chastened him, had drawn his brows together and lowered heavy lids over eyes that had seen too much.
2
Not long after his return the dull traders of Abdera were calling him the “laughing philosopher,” a term given in mockery because to those Abderians, Demo- critus was mad. He had squandered his substance in fruitless travel, and when he settled down he refused to busy himself with a “useful” occupation. Instead, he spent his time laughing at the feeble little folk who wasted their lives gathering goods that could not pass the portals of the grave. He laughed at their ways, at their seriousness, at their blazing egotism, which told them they were worth while in the scheme of the uaiverse.
Democritus did not believe they were worth while— not to the universe. The universe could get along very well without them. They had a right, he felt, to be serious in their human relations. He admitted each one was important to the home, the city, and the state. But to the universe, to that majestic parade of stars and planets, to the swift-winging meteors, to Time and Space, they were no more, individually or collectively, than the motes that danced in the sunbeam.
He laughed at the little ways of men who counted themselves big in the presence of Infinity.
And the people of Abdera, honest worshipers of all the gods, called Democritus mad.
1% #THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
3
His perfectly sane friends sent for Hippocrates, the world’s greatest doctor, and submitted to him the proposition that “this Democritus isn’t just right.” Probably this professional visit was the first meeting of these two men.
Hippocrates came as a physician to minister to a madman; he left as a worshiper hailing a genius.
Of what did they talk, these two? Of medicine? Doubtless, for Democritus knew something of medicine and wrote on it. Of the far East and the places Hippo- crates had never visited? Of politics and the fast-grow- ing importance of Athens? Of the patient’s supposed madness? Probably not. Hippocrates must have known instantly that here was no need for a physician.
After endless talk the doctor went back to those who had called him to Abdera, and voiced his admiration of their famous townsman, telling them: “If there is insanity here you yourselves are the victims and not Democritus.”
In after years, it seems likely that there were other meetings between these two and tradition says they ex- changed many letters. Those in existence are not thought to be authentic.
Ninety years old, impoverished, famous, and still laughing at the folly and futility of men, this jolly old philosopher died.
4
Democritus believed in the atom. To him it was an infinitely small, invisible particle that moved about through space. His atom had size, but it was physically indestructible and could not be divided. Of these atoms, which differed in size and form, the sub-
DEMOCRITUS 19
stances of the sensory universe were composed, the heaviest atoms naturally sinking and the lighter rising to form the atmosphere. Some of the atoms he said were smooth and rounded; those that compose the soul being the finest, smoothest, and most active.
He taught that there is nothing in the universe ex- cept atoms and the void—by void he meant room for the atoms to move. He regarded the sensations of spe- cial senses, as taste and touch, as objectively false. “By use there is sweet, by use there is warmth, by use there is color. But in truth there are only atoms and the void.” Again: “By the senses we in truth know nothing. We cannot know reality in this way. For truth is in the depths.”
He taught that the brain is the seat of thought, the fMeart of anger, and the liver of desire. There were zreat men after his time who did not locate thought in the brain, but considered that organ merely a medium for cooling the blood.
Democritus wrote on diseases and their causes, on prognostics and on diet. He knew of the pulse and called it the “beating of the veins.” He had the highly original notion that the unborn infant gets nourishment by sucking the placenta and hence knows what to do when brought to the breast!
Epidemics, he thought, were caused by the bursting of heavenly bodies and the falling to earth of the atoms that composed them. These atoms, being of the heavens, were, naturally, enemies of mankind and brought sick- ness. This theory might be strained to hint at the mod- ern discovery of microbes.
He is credited with saying: “All men ought to know the art of medicine. The mind grows as long as health is present, which the wise man should take care of. When the body suffers the mind no longer troubles
20 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
about the practice of virtue, for disease darkens the soul.”
Sleep he said was caused by the escape of a certain number of atoms. When a great many of them escape, a deathlike state ensues. If all of them get away, we die. The atoms do not die, but they cease to function as a human body, and our immortality consists in the in- destructibility of the atom.
5
Democritus taught the existence of a multiplicity of elements. Thus he struck at the egotism that made this earth unique. His atoms extended space—they made possible solar system after solar system. To him the geocentric design—that is the earth at the center of the universe—was unnecessary. But vanity is the last thing to die in the human race, and many centuries were to pass before men became sufficiently humble to admit that their earth was a bit of dust whirling through space, held to its course by a central sun.
He pictured a finely formed soul, fitted to the physi- cal body and composed of atoms which he identified as those composing fire. These atoms, he said, permeate the whole body and in specialized organs perform specialized functions.
The moral character, he said, is determined not by a man’s acts but by his will. Was he there leaning to- ward motive as the test of morality? He believed that wisdom lay in trying to attain calm of the body, that is, health, and calm of the soul, that is, cheerfulness. The good of the soul, he thought, was infinitely better than the good of the body. The dominant principle of his mental life is found in the phrase:
“Wealth of thought, not wealth of learning, is the thing to be coveted.”
Chapter Four ter OCR ATES
AN’S fight for health has been strangely inter-
mingled with his religion. It is still thus entan-
gled; and prayers for the recovery of the sick are of
every-day occurrence. This is natural, for much bodily
suffering exists only in the mind, and when that is set right physical health results.
Man’s fight for health began in the jungle where accident played a leading role in limiting his years on earth. Even in prehistory days science was taking its part in this grim fight. Fossils have been found which prove that men of the Stone Age knew enough to set broken bones and bore a hole in the skull to let out the devil that was torturing the victim.
When history begins, the priests were the doctors, and their gods were directly responsible for cures or fatalities. So religion and faith in the few struck hands with superstition and ignorance in the many and side- tracked the science in which men should have been first of all interested.
2
In Greece Hsculapius was the god of healing. Ruins of temples erected to him still exist. He was a great god and a popular one, for what is more desirable than health and freedom from painr At his shrine prayed the weak and the suffering and then laid them down to sleep.
21
22 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
In their dreams the god sent miraculous agents to lay hands on them, so that they woke cured—some- times. Often the god was deaf, and the poor wretches dragged themselves homeward to die.
That the god was kindly and efficacious is proved by the countless testimonials left by those who found health at his shrine. A man whose fingers were para- lyzed prayed to Asculapius. In a dream the god took the victim by the hand, and in the morning he woke cured.
Blind Alcetas dreamed that the god’s hands were laid on his eyes. In the morning Alcetas could see. A dog at the temple of /Esculapius licked the blinded eyes of Thyson and they were made well. Arata’s daughter was afflicted with dropsy. Arata prayed at the temple at Epidaurus and then dreamed a strange dream. When she returned home she found her daughter had dreamed the same dream—and was cured.
Are these testimonials authentic? Certainly they give 7Esculapius a fair reputation as a healer. But don’t forget that all of the medical knowledge of that time was in possession of the priests of the temple. Isn’t it likely that these learned men occasionally gave a help- ing hand to the benignant god?
Free-will offerings on the part of cured votaries were the sole means of support for the temple. The priests seldom looked kindly upon a scientific practitioner who threatened their income. The cult of the god had to be maintained, and the efforts of the vulgar doctors were frowned upon.
And then appeared Hippocrates. He didn’t care a rap about the priests and probably he wasn’t especially interested in /Esculapius. He wanted, before all else, to make men well, and in order to do that he had to find out why they were sick.
PE Ro CR AMIIE:S 23
3
Hippocrates was born on the Island of Cos about 460 B.C. Legend traces his ancestry through his father to /Esculapius and through his mother to Hercules. If this line of descent is accepted, he certainly proved an ungrateful son, for he dethroned /Msculapius and by so doing threw a shadow over the labors of Hercules.
The physician Heraclides was his real father, and Phenarete was his mother. At first he studied medicine with his father, but went later to sit at the feet of the -great doctor, Herodicus of Selymbria. It was this Herodicus who used to make his patients walk twenty miles in an effort to rid them of objectionable “humors.”
Then he rounded off his studies by traveling, but his wanderings were much more limited than those of his predecessors. The Far East he did not see, and it is probable that he never got to Egypt. He practiced his profession on the Island of Thasos and in various towns of Thessaly.
His first distinguished patient was Perdiccas II, king of Macedonia. His next was Democritus. While he was in Macedon he decided that Greece was threat- ened with a plague, and nothing that Perdiccas could say would induce him to remain abroad when his native land was in danger. He went at once to Athens, and by causing large fires to be lighted throughout the town averted the epidemic. He noticed that blacksmiths escaped the plague, and this, it is said, gave him the idea for the purifying flames.
4
Born of a family of physician-priests he broke clearly and finally with that cult, He threw away amulets and
24 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
refused to admit the power of prayer. He was a rebel against the camp of A‘sculapius. What the priests in the temple thought of all this it is now impossible to say. However, it does not appear that he was perse- cuted and it is not on record that any attempts were made upon his life. After all he was only one man, and the sick were plentiful.
Only one man! But he shook down the temple of the god and started a reformation that is still sweeping mankind into clearer conceptions of disease and health.
He was fearless and he was honest. ‘There were many, many things he did not know; but one thing he clung to: his desire to know. He was another of those original skeptics who must see with their own eyes and touch with their own hands—and who even then are not quite sure.
His ethics were most exalted, and out of the regard he had for his profession and for men he evolved the “Hippocratic Oath,” in taking which the young physi- cian of 1929 swears:
“With purity and holiness I will pass my life and practice my art. ... Whatever in my professional practice I see or hear in the lives of men which ought not to be spoken abroad, I will not divulge.”
At the age of ninety or more Hippocrates died at Larissa in Thessaly. He passed on into the ages, and around his name legend and romance have woven strange tales.
5
Hippocrates was the first in medicine to see and to reason about what he saw. He threw away legend and vulgar beliefs and tried to dig his way into the secret of health.
He wanted to know, but he wanted to know for the
ECVE PO:G-R AGES 25
purpose of curing the sick. He had no desire to dazzle his patients, to deal in the mysterious, to bluff. Of two systems of treatment, he made it a rule to choose the less spectacular and impressive. He said exhibitions of skill done to impress the patient were a form of deceit, and above all he wanted to be honest with those who visited him. He carried this honesty to the point of refusing to treat those whose condition he considered hopeless.
He tore medicine away from philosophy and made it a science. He created a sound method of procedure and made it possible for those who came after him to take up the work where he dropped it. It was not his fault that for many centuries advance practically ended with his great successor, Galen. He had shown the way, and later man returned to start where he stopped.
6
Hippocrates taught that the human body is warmed with a natural, internal heat and the loss of this heat causes death. This heat, he thought, was most prevalent in the baby and throughout life slowly diminished unti! at death it vanished. This heat he ascribed to the heart —a surprising guess on the part of one who had dis- sected no human body and who knew nothing of the circulation of the blood.
The bases of his diagnoses were the four humors— blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. In health these are mingled in the proper proportion—that is, the right “mixture.” Just exactly what the right pro- portions are Hippocrates does not say. But the wrong mixture means sickness and the right means health.
When Hippocrates was called to attend a sick man he at once began his treatment. This, however natural it may seem to us, was a radical break with precedent.
26 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
In Egypt and elsewhere it had been usual to let the sufferer lie and do nothing until the fifth day. At the end of that time, if the patient still lived, an effort to relieve him would be made. Under such a system, death probably would save the doctor a lot of trouble. At any rate, Hippocrates saw no sense in this practice and en- tirely abandoned it.
He watched carefully what his patient ate and was thus the first of dieticians. To eat sensibly was to be healthy and to diet wisely was to regain health. To him the difference between good and bad doctors consisted in how the remedies were administered and with what skill the diet was prescribed.
In his time there was no generally accepted system of treatment for acute diseases. Hippocrates had to pioneer his way. His contemporaries not infrequently let their patients starve to death. Hippocrates de- nounced this foolish practice. Barley water, sweet wine, and hydromel were employed by him where the patient was too weak to take heavier nourishment. Hydromei made by boiling honey in a large proportion of water would provide considerable food, and yet people who let themselves die of hunger were in the habit of taking only hydromel. If they took enough of it, death from starvation must have been long in coming.
Hippocrates upset all previous notions of treatment in cases of fever. He said that when the system was weakened by fever, great care should be exercised in the matter of food and exercise—all changes at that time being dangerous. In this he approached rather close to modern ideas. Before his time many had been killed by the fever treatment which called for violent exercise and heavy food—a sort of exorcising regimen, suggesting a religious origin.
In general, he seemed to feel that an excess of health
HIPPOCRATES 27
was Close kin to sickness. This idea is expressed in the axiom, ‘““The well know not of their health, but the sick only.” As a result of this theory, he strongly advised moderation in all things—the golden mean was his con- ception of a wise life.
vi
Though he had inherited from the physician-priests who preceded him 265 drugs, he used them sparingly. In the main he was content to rest on climate, water, and diet and—let nature take its course. He wrote of the influence of winds, waters, and stars, and his anal- ysis of the effects of climate is still considered sound. As to the stars—well, he was not wholly weaned from the dark past that so closely shouldered him, and he thought that at the rising of Sirius and Arcturus and at the setting of the Pleiades disease was more than ordinarily rampant.
He repudiated the ancient notion that disease was sent by the gods as punishment. Even to the ‘Sacred Disease,” epilepsy, he denied divine origin. No disease, he said, is more divine than another. All of them are caused by natural agents, and among these natural agents he enumerates heat and cold, wind and sun.
He knew something of the bones, their relations and positions. Of the muscles and the internal organs his ideas are confused and often wrong. Of nerves he knew nothing; the “nerves” to which he refers are really sinews or tendons.
The brain he thought was a gland which exudes a viscid fluid, and it is by no means certain that he identi- fied thought with activity in the brain. He describes the kidneys as glands, but thought they had an attrac- tive faculty by which the water was drawn from the fluids drunk and then descended to the bladder.
28 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
8
As you smile at Hippocrates’s blunders don’t forget that he had never seen a human body dissected, that he had no microscope and no chemistry. He knew nothing of microbes and nothing of the subtle processes of the glands. He was as one in an unlighted room trying, without tools, to mend a delicate apparatus. His efforts were crude and clumsy—but he did not ruin the ma- chine over which he labored.
On every side of him he toppled over the images of superstition, for he declared disease to be born of natu- ral causes. He plucked away its false mystery and thereby robbed it of much of its terror. He found medi- cine dying in the temples of a worn-out religion. He left it dominant and vital, set upon its high mission of relieving pain.
Chapter Five PSR Sy ln©) 1 Le RISTOTLE, the Stagirite, was the first of the
students of nature and among the last to combine science and metaphysics.
During his lifetime Philip subdued Athens, Alex- ander conquered the world—and the glory that was Greece forever passed away. Henceforth Rome over- shadowed Europe, and the scene of history moved westward to the peninsula of Italy.
Aristotle was born at Stagira on the Soe Gulf in 384 B.C. His father, Nicomachus, traced his descent to Machaon, who was said to be a son of A‘sculapius. One can throw out this divine ancestry and still account for Aristotle’s natural bent towards science. His father was physician and friend to Amyntas, king of Macedon and grandfather of the world-conqueror whom Aris- totle was destined to teach.
Probably his father was the scientist’s first teacher. At any rate it seems certain that he learned something of medicine and became a member of the Asclepiads— a medical fraternity. When did he get time to study his profession? Historians give him a wild youth, and even those who send him to Athens at eighteen do not picture his boyhood as above reproach. Some say he squandered his money in riotous living, joined the army to ward off starvation, and after many wanderings returned to Stagira to recoup his fortunes with the practice of medicine.
But all agree that he studied with Plato, whether
29
30 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
eight or twenty years is uncertain; that he was a shining pupil and referred to by the great philosopher as “the intelligence of the school.” This delightful harmony between the two geniuses did not last. “Plato is dear but truth is dearer,” said Aristotle. Plato wrote, “He has spurned me as colts spurn their mothers.” Unfor- tunately for Plato, but fortunately for the world, Aris- totle was a man who would disagree with divinity itself until divinity convinced his intelligence.
2
During his residence in Athens, Aristotle attracted the attention of Hermias, king of the city-state of Atar- neus, and was invited to that ruler’s court. The result of the visit was a wife, Pythias, daughter or niece of Hermias. By this princess wife he had one daughter, Pythias; and by Herpyllis, his common-law wife, after the death of Pythias, he had a son, Nicomachus.
Upon the death of Plato in May, 347, Aristotle went ‘o stay with Hermias with whom he remained for three years. Afterwards he went to Mitylene for a year. While there he was summoned by Philip of Macedon to take charge of the thirteen-year-old Alexander, for whom the king entertained the most exalted plans.
Here rises a question that has been asked over and over for two thousand years: What did Aristotle teach the future tyrant and conqueror of the world? What was there in the after life of the ruler to show that he had come under the influence of one of time’s great men? Did Aristotle feed that uncontrollable ambition? Did he give to Alexander the training that made it pos- sible for him to think himself of divine origin? Where were the temperance, the control, the self-discipline, the humility in the presence of the Unknown, that one would expect a philosopher to inculcate?
ARISTOTLE 31
Doubtless the truth is that no one could teach Alex- ander. He was an original, probably with a diseased mind. His chief delight was to tame horses that no other man could tame. That is the keynote of his nature. To such a boy no philosophy would appeal and only the science of war would interest him.
3
For seven years Aristotle was in Macedon. When the murder of Philip called Alexander to the throne, the teacher returned to Athens. He was fifty years old, and had he died then his name hardly would have lived in history. The great bulk of his immortal writing was still to be done. Fifty! And Aristotle had lived hard. In the statue in the Palazzo Spada at Rome, the face is etched, but the arm is sinewy and powerful; the mouth is touched with bitterness, and illusion no longer animates him. He has looked deeply into the hearts of men, and as a result his writings about the soul and immortality will be vague and tinged with skepticism. What did he expect that has not come to him and now, at fifty, will never come? Hope and ideals and trust that have gone have drawn lines on his face, and some- thing of pain and something of a divine despair are on his lips and in his eyes.
4
In Athens Aristotle set up a school for himself and became the head of the Peripatetics—walking philoso- phers. His lectures in this Lyceum, reduced to writing, probably constitute the bulk of his books. Unlike his predecessors he did not confine his work to metaphysics, but he had to start with this uncertain subject, and his hardest job was to get away from it. Every manifesta- tion of life was alive with interest for him. He took the
32. THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
whole province of science for his subject and he pro- posed to write the last word on each branch from his own observations and reflections.
Striking a new line he threw away hypotheses and looked before he talked. Thus he gave to the world its first great lesson in inductive thinking. He made mis- takes, but his mistakes were transitory; he blazed a trail in the search for truth.
During the twelve years that he lived and taught in his school he was a busy man. The world was his garden and from the ends of the known earth he brought strange animals to furnish him with data for his natu- ral history; he collected books all his life with such avidity that Plato referred to his residence as “the house of the reader.” He studied plants and climate and astronomy—and he wrote. He must have written at top speed if he was the author of the thousand vol- umes credited to him by the ancients.
All of this work was carried on in the midst of an alien people. Not for a moment did Athens accept Aristotle. To them he belonged to the camp of the Macedonian tyrant, and they hated Alexander. During this time Demosthenes was denouncing Alexander and railing against the party in Athens that supported the tyrant. And in this party, head and shoulders above them all, stood Aristotle. It was impossible for him to contend that he was a philosopher and indifferent to politics. Was not Alexander his pupil—his product?
There were no quiet days for this first of inductive scientists. The peace and veneration that were Plato’s were denied to him. He worked at fever-heat in an atmosphere that was electric. Probably, during all of those years, there was not one minute when the Athen- ian mob would not, gladly, have torn him to pieces.
After his break with Alexander his condition was
ARISTOTLE 33
not improved and it may even have been wotse. Callis- thenes, nephew to Aristotle, was the cause of this break. For some reason known only to himself Callisthenes refused to treat Alexander as a god. The conqueror, while in Egypt, had got the notion into his head that he was divine and insisted upon having his divinity respected. For his impiety Callisthenes was condemned to die.
Aristotle interceded in his behalf. Possibly, in so serious a matter, he was importunate. He may have pointed out to Alexander the fact that his godship was highly questionable. At any rate, Aristotle was unable to save Callisthenes and only succeeded in bringing down upon himself the wrath of his former pupil and the threat that Alexander might yet prove his omnipo- tence by killing a sage.
5
This exchange ended relations between master and pupil. Still, while Alexander lived, the Macedonian party in Athens could hold its head up—and Aristotle along with the rest. But in 323 Alexander died—and the political pot in Athens boiled over. Antipater, who succeeded to the throne, was defied, and the Greeks rushed into the Lamian War.
Then it was that the enemies of Aristotle dared assert themselves.
The blow against the great scientist was struck by the chief priest Eurymedon, who charged him with having taught that prayers and sacrifice were worth- less.
When that indictment was read Aristotle knew that the end of the fight had come.
For years he had shouldered his way against the hatred of the Athenians. Bent only on truth, he had left
34 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
in peace the ways that were Grecian, but the Greeks would not leave him in peace. Now it was over. Hence- forth this scene would know him no more.
The priests had murdered Socrates. Aristotle said he would save the Athenians from further crime against philosophy and fled. Chalcis, where his mother’s people had lived, welcomed kim as a wanderer returned, but there was no cheer for the great teacher in this recep- tion. For nearly a third of a century he had lived in Athens. There he was known and there were the friends whom he loved. There were his plants and his animals and his books. There were the scattered leaves of his writings. Here in Chalcis he was alone without the “tools of his trade’ —and he was very tired.
Back in Athens his enemy Demosthenes was also tired and sadly discouraged.
So it came about that Athens’s greatest orator and her greatest teacher, in the same year, 322 B.C., one in Athens and one in Chalcis, drank poison, and their busy troubled lives were ended.
6
Aristotle was a tireless writer, but the bulk of his work is lost; enough remains to stagger the imagina- tion.
He wrote on metaphysics, logic, astronomy, meteor- ology, natural history, on “The Parts of Animals,” “The Movements of Animals,” “The Generation of Animals,” on rhetoric, poetics, and politics. Who to- day would dare to attack that wide field? And he had none of the modern apparatus. He had no watch, no thermometer, no exact measure of weight and size, no microscope, no knowledge of gravity or of the. weight of the air.
With almost nothing to guide him, he at first de-
ARISTOTLE 35
stroyed the landmarks that existed. He demanded a sort of solitary grandeur. He wanted Aristotle to fill the universe and embrace all of the wisdom of man- kind.
He denied the atomic theory of Democritus.
He scoffed at the hints of evolution put forth by Empedocles.
He repudiated the theory of Anaxagoras that the development of man’s hand had sharpened man’s wits. He said it was the other way round, and a bigger brain had called for a better hand.
He threw out Pythagoras’s idea that the earth re- volved around a central fire and flattered his ego with the old concept that the earth was the center of the universe.
He would not accept Democritus’s idea that sensa- tions center in the brain; he gave that function to the heart.
Yet in spite of this effort to parade his originality he was emphatically a scientist. His work justified Renan’s observation that “Aristotle gave the world science.” Certainly he gave embryology to the world. He discov- ered the early development of the heart in the embryo and he marched straight toward the great modern law, made famous by the embryologist von Baer, that in the embryo characteristics common to the genus appear first, traits of the species next, and individual markings latest of all.
Zi
He anticipated Gregor Mendel’s work on heredity by raising a pointed question. A certain white woman married a negro. Her children were white, but among her grandchildren were negroes. Aristotle asked: Where was the black strain hidden in the white
36 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
woman’s children? Two thousand years later Mendel answered that question.
In the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer stated, . didactically, that the higher the development of the animal, the fewer the offspring. Aristotle, three hun- dred years before Christ, made this same discovery.
He said the line of life was from plants to the ani- mals on the border line, through the lower forms to the higher, and so to man. Darwin, in the middle of the nineteenth century, developed much the same idea and called it Evolution. Aristotle was not an evolutionist, and he never got a glimpse of that great theory, but he was trailing an idea that, logically, should have led to Darwin’s conclusion.
Aristotle practically created the science of Logic. People who find the subject interesting and would like to know more than this about it, should read John Stuart Mill, who touched it with genius.
In classifying animals Aristotle’s powers had full scope. He was almost a pioneer in this field, and he did so well that his scheme lasted until Linnzus came along with something better. He divided animals into san- guineous and bloodless, the present vertebrate and in- vertebrate. In doing this work he got the idea of simi- larity between arm, fore-leg, wing, fin—a likeness now established by microscopic work on embryos.
He put men in a class with the viviparous—those animals that have enough vital heat to produce off- spring without recourse to an egg developed outside the female’s body. Still, Aristotle’s man was distinct; he placed him in no subdivision that included anthro- poid apes.
To all animals, at least to those that had the power of free motion, he gave a soul—but he reserved for man alone a sensitive and reasoning soul. This, probably, in
ARISTOTLE 37
part accounts for his popularity during the Middle Ages.
8
Reproduction particularly interested him, and he found out a number of things about the lower animals that were true; but when it came to the human embryo he did not know, though he wouldn’t admit it, and sd wrote a pack of nonsense. Thus he says that the sex of the child is governed by the strength or weakness of the father. If he is strong the child is a boy; if he’s weak, it is a girl. He formed no idea of sex cells, but attributed semen and ovum to surplusage; he says that the male property imparts movement to the ovum and guides and dictates the growth of the embryo.
Indeed, Aristotle had a low opinion of women—and he knew at least two of them intimately. The whole purpose of nature, he says, was to produce man—and by man he means the human male. Woman is an ex- pression of nature’s weakness. He admits that nature, perfect in its aims, makes mistakes because the material with which it works is occasionally faulty. Getting hold of a piece of raw material not good enough to make into a man, nature turned out a woman, and so bungled things that woman became necessary to the immortality of man—a condition that Aristotle bitterly regrets.
But it isn’t necessary for modern women to take Aris- totle too seriously. His knowledge of the female of the species was limited. He says, for instance, that man has more sutures in the skull than woman; that man has fewer ribs than woman, and woman has fewer teeth than man.
He thought populations should be limited—ten thousand to a city-state seemed to be about his idea. So, while he opposed infanticide, he favored birth control
38 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
by means of abortion. This was for the purpose, appar- ently, of giving the male a better chance—and he wasn’t interested in how the women felt about it. He applauded the line, “Silence is a woman’s glory.”
It had been suggested that in the ideal state women should be trained as men were trained, so that the sexes might grow together. Aristotle spurned this idea. He didn’t want women to become more like men; he wanted the differences emphasized that women might the more readily fulfil their one purpose—the mother- ing of male children.
“Young men are easily deceived, for they are quick to hope.” Therefore no man, in Aristotle’s ideal state, should marry until he was thirty-seven. Then he was to marry a girl of twenty. So they could grow old together —not for the sake of beautiful companionship, but be- cause, with that difference in age, the reproductive organs would fail at about the same time.
9
Aristotle’s god was an intangible, remote something, dragged in simply to set the universe going. He was the Mover without himself experiencing motion. Hav- ing imparted motion to matter, he could retire from the scene. And did.
The last word in physics will tell you that as far as motion was concerned, this old Stagirite, three hundred years before Christ, made a shrewd guess. Material substance, the things you see and touch, the extra wise ones say, in this year of grace 1929, are only vibrations —movement set up in the atom by the electron flying about in its orbit. Electrical? Maybe. Everything in the universe merely an electrical manifestation? Even if that’s true, “things” remain real, just as they did with Aristotle’s Mover who was unmoved.
ARASH O TLE 39
But this motion was not imparted to the earth. The earth stood still, but it was spherical because the sphere approximated to the perfection of the circle—the form that stood highest in the eyes of Nature. Around this earth the sun, moon, and planets moved. All his life Aristotle trusted his eyes: he couldn’t believe they de- ceived him when he saw the sun rise.
Though he listened to weird tales of travelers, and set down their reports for facts, he seems not to have been really interested in geography. He tells of strange and far-away monsters, but he does not describe the other side of the earth or try to picture what happened to the sun when it disappeared below the horizon.
Expanding his theory of motion Aristotle saw the world in a state of constant change. The endless circle of the shrinking sea and the falling rain; the coast sinking at one point and rising at another; the toppling of mountains and the building of new heights; the green of spring and the fading of autumn; the plains becoming desert and the deserts becoming plains; the rise and the fall of nations; the birth and the death of man—all of this he saw with the eye of a cosmic philosopher, and all of this he set down with the hard understanding of one who has seen, in the unfolding of a rose leaf and the disappearance of a drop of dew, the endless repetition of life in Eternity.
10)
Aristotle studied animals, and he cut them up to be sure he didn’t miss anything. Probably he would have done the same thing to the human body if law and religion had not joined to put that notion out of his head. As a result he didn’t know much about his own inner organs, but he was fairly intimate with the hidden parts of five or six hundred of the lower animals.
40 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
He was perfectly willing to guess if he didn’t know, but he would far rather know than guess. So, when he said there were some species of shark that produced their young alive and did not lay eggs, he knew what he was talking about. For several centuries this shark story was told as an evidence of Aristotle’s credulity. It was supposed some sailor had convinced him with a rare fish story. But at last it developed that Aristotle was right.
It was a common belief, before Aristotle and since, that the embryo contains the future animal in minia- ture. The human fetus, it was supposed, would, if it could be seen, look exactly like a newborn baby—only very small—“about the size of a little finger.” Aristotle upset this idea—but he did not kill it. There were many people living in the nineteenth century who believed it; maybe there are people now living who believe it.
Aristotle watched the development of the chick in the egg, and he saw the germ grow, take on form, add new parts. “The heart appears,” he writes, “like a speck of blood in the white of the egg [after three days’ incubation]. This point beats and moves, and from it two vein-ducts with blood in them trend in a convo- luted course; and a membrane carrying bloody fibers now envelops the yolk. ... A little afterwards the body is differentiated, at first very small and white.”
In this study of the egg he saw all that could be seen without a microscope. But having given this fine and accurate description he passes to the statement of an error that lasted for centuries and died hard at the hands of Spallanzani, the Italian embryologist of the eighteenth century.
Aristotle saw things come into existence where, as far as he could make out, there had been no life. So, he, said, among the lower forms spontaneous generation
ARISTOTLE 4X
occurs. For two thousand years his word was taken as final. Probably boys still think a horse hair, put in rain water and left in the sun, will turn into a snake. Anyway, they believed that forty years ago. It won’t, of course, and ever since Spallanzani, or at any rate Pasteur, scientists have felt sure that only life begets life and that not even the tiniest germ comes into being without some kind of father and mother or something just as good.
Aristotle had another pet error that lasted until the time of Galileo and was supposed by everybody to be a statement of truth. The rate at which objects fall, he said, is in proportion to their weight. Ten pounds of iron will thus fall ten times as fast as a pound of iron. That seemed reasonable, because the big weight would make a bigger hole when it hit than the small weight. A big man comes down harder on the ice than a little man. Everybody knows now that Aristotle was wrong. The amazing thing is that he should have been satisfied to be wrong. He liked to get a lot of data and make his theory afterwards. But in this case he made no effort to experiment. He believed what he was told—and passed the error on.
If
Don’t remember Aristotle for his mistakes. Darwin did not. The great evolutionist of the nineteenth cen- tury was not too big to admire the Greek naturalist of whom he says:
“Linneus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways; but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.”
In more fields than one, Aristotle was a pioneer. As he says:
“T found no basis prepared; no model to copy. Mine
42 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
is the first step and therefore a small one. You, my read- ers, will acknowledge what I have achieved and pardon what I have left for others to accomplish.”
A small step? He ruled like an absolute monarch until Galileo, an Italian of the first years of the seven- teenth century, rebelled against the tyrant—and was not at once struck dead for lese-majesty. Since then Aristotle has had to take his chances with the rest. At all times he has crowded the front runners. As science has moved ahead, gaining a new position, it has often enough found Aristotle occupying the post and wait- ing for the modern giants to come up.
This is not surprising if we remember that Aris- totle was:
The first of the world’s great biologists;
The first embryologist;
Creator of the science of logic;
The first classifier in the realm of natural history;
The first great inductive reasoner.
Is it any wonder, then, that no other man, in science, has exercised so great an influence for so long a time?
Chapter Six ARGHIMEDES
RCHIMEDES, the cleverest juggler with figures Greece ever produced, was born at Syracuse, on the island of Sicily, in 287 B.c. The glory of the city- state had passed before his birth, and during all of the seventy-five years of his life war and the alarums of war were about him. He was only nine years old when Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, came to Syracuse to help fight the Carthaginians who occupied the western half of the island and who had been having rather the better of an age-old strife. He was eleven when Pyrrhus, dis- gusted with the petty jealousies and intrigues around him, shook the dust of Syracuse from his feet forever. It may have been at about that time that the boy Archimedes was sent to school at Alexandria, which, robbing Athens of its prestige, had become the intellec- tual center of the world. Of his life there absolutely nothing is known. There are hints that suggest many years spent in study but what kind of boy and young man he was will now never be known. There is no xossip that loads him with the sins of youth. His later life indicates a serious and profound mind, given to sly humor.
The chances are even that he was connected with the ‘oyal family. Many of his writings are lost, and even f they were all in existence probable questions about iis life would remain unanswered. Anyway he surely 1ad a home in Syracuse and there’s no harm in sup-
43
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posing he had a wife. It’s highly unlikely that so absent- minded a man of good family—and famous—would be able to keep single. He was the kind of man women would want to take care of—for his own good.
2
His fame spread. All the world knew Archimedes for his cleverness as an inventor. He was the first Yankee, and his ingenuity has elbowed and fed every Yankee who has lived since his time. But Archimedes sneered at his mechanical “toys.” Invention was be- neath the dignity of a real mathematician. Or so he said. But he was proud of his skill, just the same. He never boasted of his work in mathematics. In that field, where he must have known he was a master, he was modest, diffident. He writes of a friend whose early death he mourned:
“Conon died before he had time to investigate these theorems. Otherwise he would have discovered and made manifest all these things, and would have en- riched geometry by many other discoveries besides.”
Yet the same man who could write thus modestly of his real life’s work could turn arrogant and boast:
“Give me a place to stand on and I will move the world.”
“You're a boastful fellow,” said King Hiero, “Prove your words by moving for me some great weight.”
Archimedes was the only one in all the world who knew the principles of the lever and pulleys. He saw his way so clearly that it was mere child’s play to him. Now just at that minute Hiero had a serious problem on his hands, for the ship he had built for King Ptol- emy could not be launched. All the men in Syracuse had worked at the job, but their combined strength and ingenuity had not been equal to the task.
ARCHIMeDES 46
“T’ll launch your ship for you,” said Archimedes, and he went about devising a system of pulleys so that with slight effort one could move a great weight. When it was all ready he put the end of the rope in Hiero’s hand and told him to pull. The king did so, and the ship moved steadily down into the water. ~ It must have looked like magic to the king and his subjects. The king immediately issued a proclamation saying:
“From this day forth Archimedes is to be believed in everything that he may say.”
It isn’t on record that Archimedes took unfair ad- vantage of this royal edict—and probably it gave him very little advantage in his slight differences with his wife. He must have been constantly getting into trouble with that good woman—and she must have been very, very patient.
3
What could one do with a man who when you said, “Dinner’s on the table,” didn’t even hear you, but went on drawing triangles, squares, and circles in the ashes on the hearth? She had to watch him all the time be- cause when he was rubbing oil on himself, in lieu of bathing, he’d forget what he was doing and there he’d lie drawing diagrams on himself in the oil!
But even that was better than sending him to the public bath. She stopped that after the terrible spec- tacle he once made of himself.
It all started with the king’s new crown.
4 . Hiero wanted to know if any alloy had been mixed with the pure gold. He asked Archimedes to find out. That was a poser. Apparently there was no way of
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teaching a solution. Just at the moment when he felt he should have to tell the king it couldn’t be done, Archimedes stepped into his bath. The water rose. When he sat down it ran over the edge. At the same time he noticed that the more nearly he submerged, the lighter his body seemed to be. “Eureka,” he cried and sprang out of the bath. He knew how to weigh the king’s crown, and his first thought was to rush out to demonstrate it.
So he went right out into the street. It must have embarrassed his wife.
For thousands and thousands of years men had seen the water rise when they stepped into it. For thousands and thousands of years they had known that the body was lighter, or felt lighter, in water than out. But these two facts had not meant anything to them. They meant something to Archimedes. When he found that the water displaced by the crown did not weigh as much as the water displaced by gold weighing the same as the amount of that metal given to the goldsmith by the king, he knew that base metal had been substituted. He told the king he was sure it would be easy to get a confession from the goldsmith. It was.
That was the first move in the development of hydro- statics and led to the discovery by Archimedes of a number of fundamental theorems published in his book “On Floating Bodies.”
At some time, probably during Archimedes’s stay in Alexandria, the Egyptians appealed to him for help in handling the water of the Nile. They wanted some simple way of giving it a fairer distribution. The result was the development of Archimedes’s screw. Probably this consisted of a tube wound in the form of a long spiral, set in the water at a very easy grade, and so arranged as to be constantly revolved on its long axis.
ARCHIMEDES 47
it was so set that the submerged end of the tube would clear the surface on each revolution, and the water be lifted. Gravity is actually the propelling force in this apparatus.
In his leisure moments Archimedes busied himself inventing a sphere so constructed as to imitate the movements of the sun, moon, and five planets. The con- trivance was operated by water and was made with such accuracy that it would even show the eclipses of the sun and moon.
5
Archimedes was growing old. Conon, the friend of his schooldays, was gone. His friend King Hiero was gone, and in his place ruled the rash and vain Hiero- nymus. This young man broke with precedent and threw the fortunes of Syracuse into the scale with Carthage against Rome. That was the beginning of the end. It was not long before an army under Mar-
cellus was hammering at the city’s gates while Roman ships blocked the harbor.
It is easy to believe that Archimedes did not favor the union with Carthage, but now that the harm had been done he drew on the resources of his genius to help his countrymen.
And he helped them. Almost single-handed he kept Marcellus at bay. He made the Roman engineers a laughing stock. They were little children by compari- son with this man who “with something to stand on was ready to move the world.”
When you see a crane swinging a railway locomotive into the air, remember that, in defense of Syracuse, two thousand, one hundred and fifty years ago Archimedes used a similar apparatus. With his cranes, he grappled the Roman ships, raised them high in the air, and let
48 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
them fall to smash to pieces against the waters of the harbor; or he swung ship and crew over the wall and lowered it to be dealt with by the Syracusians.
He arranged catapults that hurled great rocks against the Roman ships. He devised machines for throwing showers of metal and small rock through holes in the walls.
Indeed, he made things so hot for the Romans that Marcellus taunted his men saying:
“When will you make an end of fighting against this mathematician, who, sitting at ease by the sea, plays pitch and toss with our ships, and by the multitude of missiles that he hurls at us outdoes the hundred-handed giants of mythology?”
But Marcellus found that his men were in terror of their lives at the hands of a mere scientist, an old man with a sly sense of humor. Things got so bad that a bit of rope thrown over the wall was enough to cause a panic among the Romans. So Marcellus did the only wise thing; he gave up all idea of taking the town by assault and settled down to starve out the enemy. This was a plan that even Archimedes could not thwart.
At last in 212 B.c., Syracuse surrendered, and two years later Rome held all of Sicily.
6
“Spare that mathematician,” Marcellus told his men as they rushed to the sack of helpless Syracuse. When the attack on the place settled into a siege, Archimedes returned to his studies. At the right moment he had come out of his dreams, and had put powerful weapons in the hands of his friends. Then he returned to the world of abstract thought—and forgot all about the war.
There was no smoke of combat in those days, and the
ARCHIMEDES 49
air over Syracuse was clear—clear and still, for the small noises of defense and attack were not enough to disturb a philosopher. Of what was he dreaming in those last days? What problem was he pondering? Had he a new theorem involving a sphere circum- scribed by a cylinder? That was his pet! That he wanted to be his epitaph!
So he dreamed, an old man with his head full of squares and cubes ‘and spheres—and strange and beau- tiful angles. Maybe he pondered the relation of the earth to that vastness that curved above him. This earth, which he knew was round and which, he be- lieved, circled the sun, was not to him the huge and dominant thing it had been to Aristotle. To Archi- medes it was a small stopping-place in an enormous universe. Even in his astronomy, this mathematician was a modern.
Did he hear the shouts of the Romans as they in- vaded the city? Did he hear the death-cries of his friends? Probably not. He may have been, in that awful moment, dreaming of the Force that let loose the earth and set the planets whirling in their ap- pointed paths. He was drawing, in the dust of the flag- stone, a pattern of the stars in their courses.
A shadow fell across his work; a foot disturbed his diagram.
The intrusion snapped him back to earth.
“Stand away, fellow, from my diagram,” he shouted.
As always, Ignorance, infuriated, swung the sword. ...
“Marcellus,” says Plutarch, “was most of all af- flicted at the death of Archimedes.” And rightly so. The others who fell on that day were as grass of the field; but it required nearly two thousand years for
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Nature to produce in Isaac Newton the equal of the dreaming Yankee of Syracuse.
Years later, when Cicero was questor in Sicily, he found a neglected tomb, overgrown and weed-hidden, which bore as sign a cylinder circumscribing a sphere. Cicero restored that tomb; he knew that all that was mortal of Archimedes was resting in that obscure spot.
i
Archimedes ties up closely with the every-day life of the modern man. The laws he found and proved are in constant use everywhere. For eighteen hundred years after his death the world made no advance in the theory of mechanics. When it began to progress it was supported by the facts Archimedes had given it.
Out of the episode of the king’s crown he discovered and stated the law: A body immersed. in water loses in weight as much as the water which it displaces weighs.
Out of this first discovery grew his whole science of hydrostatics—a science of which he was the originator. Every man who builds a ship or depends in any way upon the buoyancy of water accepts as final the primary facts of “floating bodies” as given by Archimedes. When you speak of the displacement of a ship you mean the weight of the water that would be necessary to fill the space occupied by the hull of the boat.
Another of his hydrostatic laws says: A solid lighter than water, forcibly immersed, is driven upwards by a force equal to the difference between its weight and the weight of the water displaced.
In two books on “Floating Bodies” he developed his laws, and the shipbuilders of the world can thank him for the correctness of the principles upon which they lay down their hulls.
ARCHIMEDES 51
In mechanics he also formulated laws that are basi- cally sound and in constant use. ‘“Weights which bal- ance at equal distances are equal.” “Unequal weights at equal distances will not balance.” “Unequal weights at unequal distances will balance, the greater weight being at the lesser distance.” These laws are simple and self-evident, yet they are the basis of all our mechanics whether it is operating an elevator, a steam crane or with a system of pulleys and ropes hoisting a steel safe up to the twentieth floor.
8
His work in geometry proves Archimedes was one of the world’s greatest mathematicians. He was no worker-up of old material. He was constantly on the trail of something new. He attacked the sphere, conic sections, spiral—indeed, he came as near discovering differential calculus as was possible without a knowl- edge of algebra.
He wrote one treatise, ‘“The Sand-Reckoner,” in which he proved that he could number the grains of sand necessary to fill the visible universe. He sent this little book to King Gelon, and apparently his Majesty was willing to take the demonstration as final and not ask for a graphic illustration. This of course was merely as Draper says, “the sport of a geometrical giant amusing himself with his strength.”
In order to see just how big this man’s head was when it came to figures, it should be remembered that the Greeks had no number characters as we have and did not use the cipher. The first nine letters of the alphabet, accented, stood for the figures from one to nine; the next nine from ten to ninety, and the next nine from one hundred to nine hundred. They wrote their numbers as we do with the largest on the left, but
52 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
they knew nothing of decimals, their fractions were cumbersome, and their processes of division and mul- tiplication were laborious.
These difficulties were as nothing to Archimedes. Imagine what he would have done with the Arabic system and the algebraic characters! Yet in spite of handicaps he was able to state and prove, at least in part, the “Cattle Problem.” This problem, probably, was as much satire and fun as mathematics.
Apollonius, a rival, had come nearer to hitting upon the correct ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle than Archimedes. So this Yankee of Syra- cuse decided to give Apollonius something to keep him busy. In that spirit he sent out the Cattle Problem, which calls for the discovery of eight unknowns, each of which must obviously be a very great number.
“Compute the number of the oxen of the Sun,” Archimedes writes, “giving thy mind thereto—if thou hast a share of wisdom. . . . It is required to find the number of bulls and cows of each of four colors. When the white bulls joined in number with the black they stood firm with depth and breadth of equal measure- ment; and the plains of Thrinakia, far-stretching all ways, were filled with their multitude.”
Amthor, the German mathematician, worked on it and arrived at some curious conclusions. He found that to give the number standing for one of the un- knowns would require fifty lines with fifty figures in each line, or eighty-two and a half pages a little larger than the average book size. To write out the answers for each of the eight unknowns, then, would require a volume of six hundred and sixty pages!
Chapter Seven GALEN
ERGAMUS, in Mysia, isn’t much of a place now. About twenty thousand folks live there and make a living by trading between the East and the West. It never was large, but it had some importance about 197 B.C. After that it began to decline, and in time it became famous for only one thing: the site of Satan’s seat, as described by St. John in Revelation. Satan’s Seat probably was the beautiful throne erected by the pious Greeks to Zeus.
Pergamus was founded by a eunuch, Phileterus, who, sent there to guard a fortune, rebelled against his master and set up a state of his own. But the fact that Pergamus lingers in history is because of St. John, and of Galen, the last of the great Greek doctors.
Galen was born at Pergamus in 130 A.D. Nicon, his father, was an educated and cultured Greek, probably an architect. Galen’s mother doesn’t get so flattering a record. She looms out of the past as a second Xanthippe —a shrew, a nagger. Maybe there was a reason for this. Her husband may have been a bit of a rounder, and as her son turned out to be a genius, life couldn’t have been very easy for her.
When Galen was twenty, Nicon died and the boy set out to see the world and learn medicine. There is no careful record of his travels, but he certainly was in Smyrna and studied there. He was also in Alexandria and heard lectures on medicine by Stratonicus and
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/Eschrion and on anatomy by Heraclianus—famous teachers of the time.
What kind of youth did he have? What romance? One guess is as good as another, because Galen never told. At worst, he must have been fairly industrious, since he was only twenty-eight when he returned to Pergamus and started practicing medicine. Of course he was successful; he was head and shoulders above his contemporaries. For some time he was busy getting ex- perience, and during this time there is no mention of his mother.
Pergamus was too small a field for this genius, and he set out for the New York of the times, that is to say, Rome. At first he was rather coolly received, for he would have nothing to do with any of the orthodox schools of medicine. Hippocrates was his hero, and he tossed aside all that the moderns tried to tell him.
However, luck was with him. And when he healed Eudemus, supposed to be afflicted with an incurable disease, he became famous. Rome accepted him—and paid him high fees. A rich lady whom he attended for two weeks paid him the equivalent of $2,000 for his services, and money was worth more then than it is now.
2
Marcus Aurelius, gentle philosopher-king, had to follow the fashion, and Galen treated his majesty for the stomach ache, following a too hearty diet of cheese, with satisfactory results, apparently—for Mar- cus, when he went to war, put his son Commodus in Galen’s charge.
All of this did not hurt Galen with the fashionable world, but it brought out severe criticism by his brother doctors. Maybe they were jealous of the handsome
GALEN 55
Greek, who dressed like a fop and worked like a stevedore. Galen could afford to ignore these critics as long as the court was with him.
He was too busy to waste much time on them. He studied constantly, and not from books. Nature was his school. He was deeply interested in knowing what went on inside the human body. How could he find out? To dissect a dead man was a capital offense. Even the in- fluence of the court couldn’t save Galen if he com- mitted so heinous a crime. But Galen was resourceful. He reflected that there wasn’t such a lot of difference between men and monkeys. So he studied human physi- ology and anatomy by cutting up monkeys, or if he ran short of them he tackled pigs. In this way he learned a good many things of which his contemporaries were blandly ignorant.
Aristotle had taught that the arteries contained air. Galen’s work showed him this was nonsense. The ar- teries contained blood. In fact, he just missed discov- ering the circulation of the blood. His dissecting lacked something in technique, and so, while he found there was a circulation through the lungs and a circu- lation in the veins, he never connected the two. His venous system seemed to originate in the liver, and he was not at all clear as to how the blood got back— the existence of capillaries always evading him.
Also he had a queer notion about the heart. He found the valves, but he did not associate them with the movement of the blood, and it never occurred to him that the heart was a pumping engine.
These false theories wouldn’t have mattered if Galen had not so completely overshadowed everyone else that his word was taken as final for many centuries.
As to the bones, he was better informed. Luck fa- vored him there. On a mountain he came across a
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skeleton of a robber who had been killed. Galen studied those bones.
From his apes he got a fair notion of the muscles and nerves, but naturally his work here was far from accu- rate. He taught that nerves of sensation originated in the brain, and motor nerves in the spinal cord. He was among the first to find out that there are two kinds of nerves, and he wrote intelligently of this discovery. He described the organs in the chest and abdomen and knew pretty well the function of each.
3
In spite of his practice and his studies, Galen found time to write down all that he had learned and a lot that he hadn’t. In all he wrote seventy-eight books and fourteen essays. He had nine books on anatomy, seven- teen on physiology, six on pathology, sixteen on thera- peutics, and thirty on pharmacy.
You will notice he wrote nothing on obstetrics. The birth of a child was something in which a really wise man had no interest. That was a condition that lasted for many, many centuries. Indeed, it was only yester- day that the work was taken away from the midwife— if it really has been taken away from her.
With all this writing, Galen mixed up a lot of silli- ness. He had a theory for everything and he carefully wrote down all his theories. One of his most sweeping and inclusive theories said that everything in nature shows an intelligent design and is evidence of the good- ness of the Creator. It never occurred to him that life is very greatly modified by the action of the two great forces: heredity and environment.
He had three other theories, set down by him soberly as facts, that for centuries raised hob with the medical profession.
GALEN 57
First, that the blood gets “natural” spirits in the liver, “vital” spirits in the left ventricle, and “animal” spirits in the brain. The whole organism, he said, was animated by the “pneuma.” This apparently is what is now called the spirit or soul.
Second, that the blood passed from the right to the left ventricle through imaginary pores in the dividing partition.
Third, that pus must form in the healing of wounds, a theory that was long afterwards known as “healing by second intention.” This foolish notion held surgery back for a long time and claimed thousands and thou- sands of victims. ;
4
Galen was a born wanderer, driven by a fierce thirst to know. He stayed in Rome longer than anywhere else, but not even Rome could hold him permanently. A vague rumor says he fled the imperial city to escape the plague. Not likely. Certainly his idol, Hippocrates, did just the opposite. ;
At any rate he gave up his practice and set out on far journeys. No one knows all the places he visited, but he is seen clearly on the Island of Lemnos, drawn there by reports that the mineral, terra lemnia, had great curative properties. It is unlikely that he stayed there long, but it is reasonably certain he never re- visited Rome.
His last years are shadowy. There are faint signs of him here and there, delving at nature, writing, telling his friends of his discoveries—going on into the twi- light. So he fades out. Even the date and place of his death are uncertain. It seems probable that he died on the island of Sicily at eighty years of age.
Strange that a man who had shone so brightly in
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Rome’s eyes, who had flaunted it so near the throne, should have passed into such absolute obscurity during the last twenty years of his life!
5
Though Galen vanished, Galen’s work and influence lived on. After him for a thousand years there arose no master. In time he became legendary, his name fit to conjure with. He became more than that: he became infallible, divine. In the popular mind he was canon- ized. For a thousand years he ruled with a rod of iron. To the Dark Ages he was an oracle. He had seen all, known all. He left no secrets. To learn Galen was to learn the perfection of medicine. He was to the pro- fession what Aristotle was to the scientists.
For a thousand years the world lay at his feet, giving to his errors the same veneration it paid his truths, It is because of this adoration, this blind worship, that Galen has been endowed with immortality. Unmean- ingly, he dealt medicine many hard blows, and he lives today largely because of the reverence paid his errors.
Chapter Eight PercO 1 Bs Maye
OME’S rise was the death of science. Greece, in decline, ceased to breed genius. Athens lan- guished, and the center of learning was pushed to Alex- andria. There the grammarian flourished, and form and symbol crushed originality. It was exactly as though, with the death of Galen, a curtain were low- ered over the intelligence of man.
There were efforts to push on, but they were futile. Compilation and criticism took the place of research and deduction. The spirit passed. It did not shine forth even in Ptolemy, against whom the world still holds a grudge.
Ptolemy gets into the picture because he crystallized an ancient idea—an idea that fitted biblical lore, just then coming into the West on the lips of Jewish fa- natics. Ptolemy had a chance to choose between the right and the wrong. From the time of Pythagoras on, the notion of a world circling the sun was in the minds of scientists. The masses, of course, believed the world stood still while the sun and stars flew around it. Our astronomer, trained in Alexandria in the world’s leara- ing, considered these two ideas, weighed the evidence in favor of each, and chose the wrong.
With all the authority of his great learning he voiced, as final, the dictum: The world stands still while around it revolve the sun and stars. He intro- duced weird circles and crystalline globes in an effort
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to account for the phases of the moon and the shifting positions of the planets. He did it all rather well and, when at last he died, he had no doubt that he had solved forever one of the great natural problems.
2
Nobody knows much about Ptolemy. He had no ready-writing biographer, and the details of his life are gone. Probably he was born in Egypt, of Greek par- ents, either late in the first or early in the second cen- tury, A.D. One gets the time from the date of his first recorded observation of the stars—127 A.D. His last record was made in 151. What he looked like, how he lived, who his parents were no one now knows. Maybe he belonged to the royal house of Ptolemy—a student prince. But at that time in Egypt the name Ptolemy was about like Smith in America. That he studied at Alexandria is certain, because that was the only place in the world where he could have learned the things he knew. |
3
Ptolemy made a fool guess at the riddle of the uni- verse, but he was no fool. On one thing, at least, he was right: he said the world was round and hung in space with no props to hold it up.
This was rank iconoclasm. It was knocking away the underpinning and, to the man in the street, sheer non- sense. The world was flat, as could be seen with even the poorest pair of eyes, and there were some sort of pillars at the edges to support it. The foundation for the pillars? Oh, well, it was enough to know that the earth wasn’t going to fall. So both of Ptolémy’s con- clusions were thrown out by the public until Columbus dreamed a dream and proved the truth of it.
PTOLEMY 61
4
When he came to consider what made the sun rise and set, Ptolemy went wrong. His error here was due to another problem he couldn’t solve. He seems to have felt that the world ought to move. The simplicity of this arrangement appealed to him. The earth could turn on its axis a good deal easier than the sun and stars sould race around the heavens at an incalculable speed. But if the world moved what about the furious wind that would sweep everything off into space? There wasn’t any such wind. The air was placid, or reason- ably so, and that, for him, killed the idea of a revolving earth.
Ptolemy had a notion there was something silly about his theory, but he couldn’t convince himself it was basically wrong. The bad feature, as he saw, lay in the speed at which the sun and stars would have to move in making their trip around the world every twenty-four hours. He got around this by talking of a great sphere, in the inner surface of which the stars were set like jewels. This sphere, with the stationary earth at its center, whirled itself around carrying the heavenly bodies along with it.
When it came to the planets, or wanderers, he was momentarily stumped. They were not set in this great and convenient sphere, but went racing around, doing about as they pleased and upsetting the whole fine theory.
That made him give them motions of their own about a fixed point and thus epicycles got into astro- nomical jargon and stuck there until Copernicus came along and knocked them out.
So Ptolemy, having done the world all the damage he could, sank into the grave, but his theory went
62 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
marching on. Even today you'll have no trouble finding people who think his ideas are sound and sensible, and many of them would still like to know what holds the world up.
Chapter Nine
ENGL Ogg iptibe A. Rak AGES = FIN DO: UeT
T any rate, Ptolemy had told the public what it wanted to believe. The public believed it. The evidence was before their eyes. They could see the sun climb up in the morning and the stars sweep across the sky at night. To them this evidence was final. Besides it was what they wanted to believe. It tickled their vanity. This world of theirs was far and away the greatest and most important thing in the universe, and to that thought they clung.
Christianity swept in. Its teachings meshed perfectly with the Ptolemaic theory. Man and his home, the world, were the results of direct, special creation at the hands and mind of the Ruler of the Universe. It was all very simple and clear. Man was exalted by his own interpretation of nature.
The idea crystallized; it became a tenet of the church; to doubt it was heresy. For fourteen centuries no one of importance did doubt. For fourteen centuries. Note the power of a false idea. The church cemented itself on a firm foundation; it spread over all Europe; it added temporal to spiritual power. It flourished— and science, even learning, died.
Rome triumphed, but you can’t look to the Romans for science, for an advance of culture. The degenera- tion, roughly matching the fall of Athens and the rise of Alexandria, gained speed swiftly during the first
63
64 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
centuries after Christ. The twilight deepened, until in the fifth century all light vanished and darkness settled over Europe.
Rome, as a world-power had passed. The church had gained a militant position. Out of the North had come the hordes of barbarians, crushing culture, destroying schools, beating back civilization. But, though they wiped out pagan attainments, they halted at the foot of the cross.
There was performed the miracle of the church. These wanderers were molded by her hands; they were guided by her love; they were slowly enlightened by her policy. All that is Europe today lay in the heart and brains of those invaders. When they rushed across the Roman borders, only two courses were open to civ- ilization: exterminate them or civilize them. They could not be exterminated. They were much more likely to exterminate the peoples of Southern Europe.
The church was the only institution capable of in- fluencing them. She set herself the mighty task of con. version. It was a death grapple. The hordes must kiss the cross or the church was doomed. They kissed.
2
But the struggle threw all Europe into chaos and brought about the eclipse that is called the Dark Ages. Don’t speak slightingly of the Dark Ages. They were the birth pangs of the twentieth century. During them the wilderness of human ignorance was slowly invaded.
If no great tracks were cleared, at least trails were blazed. Those who entered the Dark Ages as barba- rians reappeared, with the revival of learning, as men and women set in the ways of culture and fired with a thousand Why’s.
Alexandria was burned; schools disappeared; pro-
THE DARK AGES 65
fane learning was stigmatized as an insult to God. All wisdom was in the Bible, and all knowledge was in the possession of the Church Fathers—men more ignorant of science than any ten-year-old boy is today. The Greek writers were banned and then, for centuries, for- gotten.
There was no philosophy; there was no mathe- matics; medicine was dragged down from the high estate toward which Hippocrates and Galen had pointed it, and knaves sold amulets and bits of writings to protect the faithful from the ills handed out by the devil. Sickness came either from Satan, who was tor- menting the faithful in an effort to make them curse God, or it came from God as a visitation for sin or as an affliction to purge the soul. In either event there was nothing to do about it. To attempt to cure it was to in- sult the wisdom of the Deity and bring down punish- ment for blasphemy.
As a result Europe was a cesspool that reeked with contagion. Plague after plague swept the cities, claim- ing thousands upon thousands of victims who died hor- ribly—with the name of God mumbled in their ears. The devotees of an exacting faith were too busy pre- paring for a self-created heaven to notice the filth through which they waded.
3
Astronomy was perverted into a silly superstition, and the astrologer grew rich on the ignorance of those ' who thought the stars were mindful of the lives of little men and women. The astrologers claimed to be able to foretell the future of the suppliant and to give help to struggling creatures. There are always people in the world who are willing to coin fear and superstition intc gold.
66 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
Chemistry was caught in the general crash. It had never risen very high, but it never sank so low as it did during the Dark Ages. A strange madness fell upon men. Gold blinded them. Picking up the merest smat- tering of chemistry they attempted to perform miracles tha’ still baffle the skilled genius of the twentieth cen- tury. They were so unthinking that the practically im- possible seemed to them simple. They set out deliber- ately to change base metal into gold. Fabulous riches and power awaited the man who learned this secret. All that was necessary to insure success was to discover or compound the philosopher’s stone. The search was world-wide—and the result was weariness'and vexa- tion of spirit.
No one ever found the philosopher’s stone. Many claimed to have done so, and more than one fakir de- clared he could turn lead into gold. No one ever did it, though you’ll have no trouble finding people who still think the secret may be rediscovered. These alchemists, who boasted of their success, wrote hundreds of vol- umes in which they said they described their process and revealed their secrets. Their writings, without ex- ception, are as confused and unintelligible as the rav- ings of a madman.
4
Meanwhile the sale of relics became a vast business —and highly profitable. Bribes, designed to beat hell and insure a pass to heaven, were freely offered and freely received. Churchmen defended this by asking, “Did not Jesus accept gifts from the wise men?” Poli- tics invaded the church. Morality was only a word.
Strange and new doctrines got into the creeds. Some of these were concessions to northern idolatries. The Germanic tribes needed some visible image before
THE DARK AGES 67
which to kneel. Demanding an intensely personal god, they were given a trinity.
But the effect of all this was not wholly bad. It may well be that it worked for a final good.
Always in monastery cell or priest’s home, one could find, here and there, a scholarly monk, a wise priest. At no time was the world without its good men. It was they who saw Rome as she was, and not infrequently there came the “voice of one crying in the wilderness.” They pointed the finger of shame at the Holy City and without fear denounced the conduct of popes and car- dinals. Their words lingered in the minds of the north- ern peoples. In their denunciation lay the sleeping spirit of revolt. Time only was needed.
5
Meanwhile, out of the East had come a new power. The Moors swept into Spain. They brought with them religious fanaticism, a burning zeal to proselyte, and a culture superior to anything then in Europe. In con- quered Spain they set up a permanent government and built cities that were the admiration of the world.
They established schools into which their tolerance admitted Christians. Their scholars hunted the past, unearthed the Greek classics and translated them into Arabic. From India they had obtained the Arabic numerals, and these passed on to Europe along with algebra and a highly simplified system of notation for that science. If they produced no figure of heroic pro- portions, they did give the world great scholars at a time when even an averagely well-informed man was a curiosity.
When the intellectual leaders of Italy and the Ger- manic peoples were debating, seriously, such profound questions as how many angels could stand on the point
68 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
of a needle, Assamh, a Moor, killed in battle in 720 A.D., was writing on topography and noting, through wide travels, the changes in flora and fauna due to ele- vation. A little later, near the close of the ninth cen- tury, Mohammed Ben Musa was telling his pupils about algebra and substituting the sine for the chord in trigonometry and inventing the common method of solving quadratic equations. At this time probably not ten men in Europe had ever heard of an equation.
In the year 1000, Ebn Junis, beating Galileo to the same idea, first used the pendulum in measuring time. Before that the Moors had only clepsydre, water clocks, but these they had brought to such perfection that they did their work with rare accuracy.
6
While Europeans were living like pigs and dying like flies, and pinning their hopes for health on shrines and relics, Avicenna (980-1037) was teaching the Moors medicine and philosophy. He was a surgeon as well as a doctor and he has left a description of the instruments then in use and his methods of treatment. He was a student, free of the superstitions that were clouding Europe.
Alhazen, greatest of the Moorish school, is some- thing of a mystery. It seems impossible that some of the writings attributed to him can be authentic. He knew too much. He should have come with Newton—or later. Those who are interested have tried to sort the real from the false without much success. Some of this doubt is due to the backward European’s jealousy of the Moor’s advanced position. It doesn’t really matter. Some one, Alhazen or another, about the dawn of the twelfth century or soon after, made startling contri butions to the world’s knowledge.
THE DARK AGES 69
It’s agreed that Alhazen wrote on optics. It was he who corrected an age-old idea as to how men see. The Greeks thought the stimuli came out of the eye to the object, thus making it visible. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But the wisest of the ancients thought that was the only possible explanation.
Alhazen hit upon the truth—that rays of light come to the eye from the object. He went further, and said the retina was the seat of vision and that the impres- sion made there passed along the optic nerve to the brain. He was right; but how did he know this? By dissecting a human body? That was against the law. No matter. Alhazep was ready to face death in order to know.
The whole question of light interested him, and he was the first to realize that we don’t quite see things where they are. He worked out this refraction, and for the first time in the history of the world the curvilinear path of a ray of light was charted.
In the part of Alhazen’s writings that Europeans question, he appears to recognize gravity and to know that it diminishes with distance. However, he did not know that this diminution is as the square of the dis- tance. Also, and worse, he limited gravity to the earth, not having the vision to see this power as universal.
He was an evolutionist, or whoever wrote under his name was, and he described the progressive develop- ment of animal forms seven hundred years before Dar- win was born.
7
This is only a snapshot of the Moorish movement. After all, these scientists did not, as did the Greeks, contribute largely to European progress. When Europe woke up, she went to antiquity for her ideas or swung
70 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
into intensive research and experiment, forgetting or} ignoring the Moors. They were, because of race, reli-| gion, and later political failure, outside the main cur-} rent of world advance. They are still outside that cur-} rent; but they deserve this tribute for keeping the light| burning before the altar of science when all the rest). of the world was lost in darkness. ||
8
Now consider the condition in Europe, outside of} Italy and Spain, when the faint light of a rising sun} promised the end of the Dark Ages.
Paris and London were crowded heaps of hovels—}) with thatched roofs, straw on the floors and an opening} above to let out the smoke. There wasn’t a foot of pav-) ing in any northern city, and when it rained the streets}! were quagmires into which one sank to one’s ankles.) There were no street lights, and the late reveler car-} ried torches or crude lanterns. There was no sewage disposal, no hospitals, no schools, no roads. There were} only filth in the homes, mud in the streets, and pesti-: lence in the air. )
The Europeans were content to wallow in the mire! —and dream of heaven. They were covered with hairll shirts and vermin, but they prayed for purity of soul.) They fought and robbed and murdered in the name of! the Galilean. They scratched their tiny fields with a} wooden plow, and their finest equipage was an ox cart.|, Four oxen were a sign of royalty, and as they shambled! through the mud the peasants humbled themselves. | Their religion was as somber as their words except} when they decked themselves in flowers and welebraea pagan rites, not always chaste. |
They knew nothing of mathematics, of geography, off medicine, of astronomy. When one says nothing one}
THE DARK AGES 71
means nothing. Of mechanics their knowledge was primitive. They knew the lever and the wheel and the pulley. But in all Europe, outside of Spain, there wasn’t a man who could explain the principle upon which these devices worked. Not a man. Worldly wis- dom was despised as something that might get between one and one’s God. Ignorance, and its son Brutality ruled the human brain.
o
Then came the crusades—those monstrous night- mares that troubled the religious dreaming of a child- ish people. They were frightful, but they were cleans- ing. They served a purpose, though not the one for which they were intended. They curbed superstition, they broke down intolerance, they lessened the dread of religious authority, and they stirred vague but in- sistent inquiries into the why of things. In a word, they ended the century-long sleep, and the crusaders returned bitter and disillusioned—and awake.
The minds of men were ready, or almost ready, for the truth. And the truth-tellers were at hand.
Chapter Ten ROGER<BiAICON
UROPE was waking, and the end of her troubled
slumber brought in scholasticism. This was better than nothing but only a little better. It was empty of originality, of research. It was merely a blind rever- ence for things dead. It was this movement that made Aristotle infallible and raised Galen to the height of a god. To question either of these ancients was equivalent to a sin against the Holy Ghost. There was no such thing as experimentation. Aristotle had solved all prob- lems in metaphysics and natural history. Galen had told the world everything that could be known about the human body and the use of medicines. To know the writings of these two men was to be educated.
It seems amazing to us that anyone could be ac- cepted with such blind faith. Today when a scientist makes a statement, thousands of others make experi- ments to check his conclusions. But the average child accepts, undoubtingly, whatever it is told—whether it has to do with fairies or Santa Claus or God. The men of Europe, in the twelfth century, were children with the minds of children and the thoughtless emotional reactions of children.
But just as here and there a bright boy of ten will raise objections and ask to have things proved to him, so now and then a man arose in Europe who refused to be blinded by faith and dared to ask why. Such a man—and more—was Roger Bacon.
72
ROGER BACON 73
2
He was born in 1214 at Ilchester in Somerset. A glance at your history book, under Henry III, will show you the kind of England into which Bacon was born. His people were well to do, and as a result Roger went up to Oxford where he took orders in 1233. He was a bright boy, and even at nineteen his ability was recognized. From Oxford he went to Paris and at the university there won the degree of doctor of theology.
While in Paris he fell under the spell of the Arabic writers. He was particularly impressed with Alhazen and Avicenna, and doubtless the work of these great infidels largely influenced his life. From the first, of course, he was destined for the church but this did not dampen his interest in science, which held strong even after he became a Franciscan.
About 1250, the strangest monk that ever lived re- turned to England and lectured at Oxford. His lec- tures were not on religious subjects. They dealt with science and with education. He was tolerant of every- thing except pose and sham. When he talked of learn- ing he meant exactly what we mean today—a deep probing for the Truth. To the scholastics that wasn’t a bit what learning meant. It wasn’t what learning meant to Alexander of Hales, who was looked upon as the world’s greatest educator because he had written a book with questions and answers, telling all that any- one could ever want to know. All a student had to do was commit this book to memory.
Against this man Bacon fired his hottest shots. He said his system of education was absurd and that Hales himself had not the smatterings of an education. He said he was a hollow shell as far as knowledge was concerned, and damned him and his kind as imposters.
74. THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
3
Naturally this, in connection with his refusal to bow to ancient authority, was enough to ruin him. Promptly, Bonaventura, general of the Franciscans, ordered Bacon to stop his heretical lecturing and go to Paris. Friends pointed out to Bacon that if he obeyed he would be putting his head into the lion’s jaws. In England he was safe. In Paris God knew what would happen to him.
Bacon was a simple and a trusting soul and more than that he was a conscientious man. His vows made it necessary for him to obey.
He went to Paris. And for ten years he was held a prisoner. He was not permitted to have books or instru- ments or writing material. His associates were brother monks who were not in sympathy with his notions and who made no effort to lighten his burdens. For ten years he was subjected to the severest discipline of the order and shut off from all contact with cultivated men.
However, one imagines his mind must have been constantly at work.
In 1265 Guy de Foulques, whom Bacon had known in England, became Clement IV and head of the church. Almost at once Clement ordered Bacon to write him a book on the sciences. Bacon went at this job with whole-hearted fervor. Books were still denied him, but all that he needed was in that head of his cov- ered with a monk’s hood.
In eighteen months he wrote the pope three vol- umes. They constituted a virtual encyclopedia of all science. They were not exhaustive, for they were meant to be enlarged upon later. But in a manner somewhat more elaborate than an outline, they embraced practi-
ROGER BACON 75
cally all the scientific knowledge of the day. It was as mighty a task as any man ever performed unaided in the history of the world. It proved that his reading had been wide, and his memory faultless.
4
To Bacon’s age, and to the men who followed him, the Opus Majus, one of the three treatises written for Clement, was priceless. Here, for the first time since Archimedes, the true method for scientific research was clearly given.
Bacon’s rules were: Accept nothing on hearsay. Ac- cept nothing that results from inductive reasoning. Prove everything. There is only one guide to truth and that is experiment backed by. deduction.
This was a new voice in the modern world. We who are the heirs and beneficiaries of scientific research cannot realize how startling these words were to the thirteenth century students who were steeped in reli. gious dogma, lost in a maze of senseless quarreling ove1 silly questions. Every one of them was egocentric. At no time in the history of the world were men so self- centered, so puffed up with a schoolboy egotism. This was a by-product of their religion. Were they not di- rectly God’s charges? They were of such vast impor- tance that the Infinite Creator of the universe gave them His special and individual attention. In their minds and in their souls He had planted all knowledge. One had only to shut one’s eyes and dig.
5
Here suddenly was a man, religious, devout, honest, who said that nothing can be learned that way. At best, by this blind method, you dig a pit for your soul and fal! into it. He proved that he knew what he was talk-
706 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
ing about by analyzing some of the mysteries of nature and showing how easily the truth could be found by experiments. He took, for instance, the rainbow. Leg- ends had been woven around this phenomenon. It was a beautiful mystery, a symbol, a warning, or a bene- diction. It could not be understood because it was supernatural—the tracing of God’s fingers across the sky.
Bacon proceeded to show, so clearly that even the stupids of that time could understand him, that the bow was caused by rays of sunlight passing through rain-drops. It was simple. It was almost childish, but before him no one had thought to experiment with the bow of heaven. No one had thought that the colors in the dewdrops and the ocean’s spray were identical with those in the rainbow.
Light seemed to fascinate this monk, condemned for so many years to the gloomy walls of a monastery, and he spent much of his time experimenting with lenses. Did he make a telescope? Did he make a microscope? No one knows. At any rate he understood and wrote of the principle of adjusting lenses so as to make dis- tant objects appear near.
Why then did the world have to wait three hundred years for Galileo and the telescope? Because the church banned Bacon’s writings. It is hard now to see why this was done. How could the church suffer through a probing of Nature’s secrets?
6
Bacon’s reach vastly exceeded his grasp, for his mind bridged a chasm of seven centuries and told him of marvels that only recently have come to pass. He fore: told of ships driven by mechanical means and of horse- less carriages and of airplanes. And this was not simply
ROGER BACON 77
a shot in the dark. Bacon knew something about a steam-engine and probably built one in his laboratory. What other monsters he constructed no one knows. However, he built enough to set the fools cackling and swearing he dealt in black magic.
All the books will tell you Bacon was an alchemist and believed in the philosopher’s stone. He himself says of alchemy: “The problem here is not merely to transmute the baser into the more precious metals, but to promote gold to its highest degree of perfection.” Note that he hangs an honest scientific problem, the purification of gold, onto the old, old problem, which, though he did not go to the length of denying it, must have seemed to him rather silly.
Indeed, when Bacon tackles one of the current super- stitions he handles it gently—exactly as many agnostics do today when touching on religion. Some mild con- cession seems due to public opinion. So when this monk wrote of prolonging life he says, wisely enough:
“As yet we have nothing to rely on but ordinary rules of health. These are observed by but few, and usually not till the close of life, when it is too late. If suitable regimen were observed by all, no doubt life would be much prolonged.”
This is modern enough and scientifically sound, but he went on to give a prescription that could only have been tossed out in a spirit of sardonic mirth. He writes: ‘‘A combination of gold, pearl, flower of sea-dew, sper- maceti, aloes, bone of stag’s heart, flesh of Tyrian snake and of Ethiopian dragon, properly prepared in due proportions, might promote longevity to an extent hitherto undreamed of.”
You may if you like think Roger Bacon was per- fectly serious when he wrote that; but it seems more probable that he was ridiculing his credulous foes.
78 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
All his life he was black magic to his neighbors. They hadn’t the least idea what went on in that devil’s smithy of his—but they believed the worst. His engine, his lenses, his eternal pottering with strange forms of life and strange elements were enough to send him te the stake. Giordano Bruno, three hundred years later, burned for less than that. So it is not surprising that the wise friar went as far as he could to countenance the time’s popular superstitions. But even this could not save him.
wh
Nicholas III lacked the courage and the learning of Clement IV. When Bacon’s works were called to his attention he found them full of the most frightful heresy, and promptly condemned them. Once more the scientist was ordered to surrender himself to the Fran- ciscans. He had seen this attack coming and had pre- pared a defense, in “De Nullitate Magiae.” After all his defense could not help him much, for his enemies would never admit the wisdom of his words when he wrote:
“Because these things are beyond your comprehen- sion, you call them the works of the devil; your theolo- gians and canonists abhor them as the productions of magic, regarding them as unworthy of a Christian.”
Naturally, talk of that sort wouldn’t get him far with people who were already determined on silencing and destroying him. In 1278 he was thrown into prison, escaping with his life only because of powerful friends.
Imagine this man, already old, the greatest thinker then living, and the most learned, shut up alone and deprived of all means of carrying on his studies and limited to intercourse only with inferior minds, which were fired with hatred. This treatment he endured for
ROGER BACON 79
fourteen years, until, after he was broken in health and spirit, his friends secured his release.
But his work was done. He lingered for about two years and then sank into the sickness that proved fatal.
One feels that Bacon, realizing that twenty-four years of his life had been spent in prison, should have felt satisfied with the much he did while at liberty. Not so; for he says:
“Tt is on account of the ignorance of those with whom I have had to deal that I have not been able to accomplish more.”
Dreams! And then at the very last, bitterness and disillusion, so that on his death-bed he said:
“T repent me now that I have given myself so much trouble for the love of science.”
Chapter Eleven COSTER AND GUTENBERG
UT this new fifteenth century is, indeed, a great
period. There was a stirring in men’s breasts—a reaching-out to gather in curious knowledge. Monks and scriveners filled the world with the scratching of their quill pens, feverishly copying musty philosophy, soul-strangling theology. And of the “making of many books there was no end.”
But monks and clerks, working in dark cells, inter- rupting their labors to praise God, turn books out slowly. And when finished they are great volumes, each book an armful; costly, hard on the eyes, necessarily limited in output and circulation. Is there not for this divinely stirred animal, man, some readier way of manufacturing books?
2
Even now, and for a long time past, China has known a way, adopted later by aping Japan. Cut your characters on separate pieces of wood; there you have something enduring, that can be used over and over— multiplying by one operation the number of books a workman can produce.
But China, grown old before Europe took to a breechclout, is far away, little known and much hated and feared. Can any good thing come out of. that rat- eating country? But Europe listens to the scratching of those quill pens and asks: “Is there no better way than
80
COSTE RAN D'GUAIENBERG 81
this?’ Better? Who knows? Certainly there is a dif- ferent and a rapider way.
Haarlem town, in North Holland, sprawls contented among its canals. Stolid and respectable burghers move along its streets. Little Dutch children, likely to grow web-footed from paddling in its waters, laugh into Holland’s gay air. No thought in the mind of Haarlem that five centuries later savants will strive to get at the truth of a strange little incident taking place right now before the eyes of the Haarlemites.
Lourens Janszoon Coster was an innkeeper—and a man with a head on his shoulders. A kindly man, full of cheer, and well liked by all children. This last fact is important. He and these children, his own or an- other’s, went for a picnic, finding their way through the gates of the town into the neighboring woods. There, idly, for the pleasure of his little ones, Lourens cuts letters in bits of wood, and then finding paper in his pockets, he prints a couple of words for each child—using for ink one knows not what.
The children are delighted, as your youngster is today with his name set on a slug from a linotype machine. But Coster, being a man with a head on his shoulders, strolled back to town thoughtfully.
“Ts there not,” he asked himself, “the germ of an idea in this trick I have made for these children? Bet- ter turn it over in your head, Lourens, and sleep on it.”
3 “Movable type? Why not? Set up your page, print it; take your type and set another page. There is no end to this thing,” ran Coster’s thoughts. “You printers who, trying to beat the scratching monks at their own trade, have laboriously carved on a block of wood a page of manuscript, are you not wasting time? Your
82 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
copies once printed, your block of wood is useless, fit only for the fire. A slow job, this carving, and all to be done over again for each page of your book. Now with my movable type...
“To get these letters even and readable in wood and small enough to be usable, will not that prove a task too great? It seems likely. But there are other things. Metal, for instance, which can be heated and poured into molds. Could we not get our letter set on the end of a punch of steel, and drive this into a bit of soft metal, which could then be used in casting our type? One punch for each letter, and thousands of letters from each mold!”
This innkeeper, with a head on his shoulders, pon- dered the problem, set about making an experiment, actually produced type, much in the way indicated. With his own hands, most likely, he designed the letter on his steel punch; and with his own hands, certainly, he cast the type and set it into words, and the words into a page from which he hammered out an impres- sion on his paper. A slow process slowly repeated for each page of his book.
Finished at last, and there it stood—the first printed book in the long history of Europe.
What was the date? Some say 1420 or 1428, others 1440, or 1446. At any rate appear it did, the first book printed from movable type and certainly given to the world before the middle of the fifteenth century.
4
What of Coster, this innkeeper who turned printer? Faint hints appear in old Haarlem’s records. Confus- ing, these, for there was more than one of that name. For long his identity was lost behind that of an im- poster, Laurens Janszoon—never surnamed Coster.
COSTER AND GUTENBERG 83
From behind this false prophet, the real Coster finally appears.
Looming through the murk of five centuries, he stands silently protesting that it was he, and none other, who first cast separate type and arranged them into a printed book. Let him have his way. At least he appears as a symbol of man’s hatred of scratching pens in monks’ cells and man’s insistence upon making his books in a cheaper, faster fashion.
5
From German Mainz-on-the-Rhine come cries of ‘Gmposter and fraud.” Never shall the honor of freeing this giant go to Haarlem. To Mainz it belongs, to our own Johann Gutenberg. To prove it was right, Mainz, in 1900, staged a great celebration in honor of Guten- berg, inventor of printing.
Did Mainz steal the idea from Haarlem or was it the other way round? Was there no such person as Lourens Janszoon Coster or was Gutenberg never a printer? Lovers of fine points may fight it out, and much good may their decision do Mainz and Haarlem —or Coster and Gutenberg!
6
Certain it is that printing was improved at Mainz. That Gutenberg had a hand in this improvement seems also certain. That he lived, and strutted through Mainz and Strassburg no one denies; not a shadowy figure of aman buta reality. At times he was prosperous, buying large quantities of wine—and drinking it. A good fel- low, one who made friends easily—and lost them; hot- headed, quick to fight for his own; a fine persuasive talker, full of ideas and large prospects; but a secretive man.
84. THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
Did he get this printing idea in 1436? Out of Haar- lem or his own head? Or did he not get it until much later? He worked on the problem for years at Strass- burg, at Mainz, say his friends. Otherwise what was he doing? Why was he borrowing all those gilders? For help on his invention? There is no mention of invention, and those who order large quantities of wine, and drink it, are apt at some time to turn borrowers.
And the gilders were not repaid. No, and the interest was not paid. Friends fall away under such circum- stances. They fell away from Gutenberg, went to law with him, got him to pledge his tools for the debts, let him drift, him and his dreams, into poverty, into the mists of time, so that one knows not the date of his death.
The first Mainz printer of books thus disappears, passes out, and his name no longer is found in the town records of Mainz.
Z,
But printing is born and movable metal type has come into existence and is to endure forever—or for as long as civilization can stand it. Printing spread rapidly, and before the beginning of the sixteenth cen- tury almost every large town had its busy printing- press grinding out books, and literacy was abroad in the world. The art of penmanship, fallen on hard days, was to fall on ever harder, until pens were mere curi- osities, remnants of a dead age.
William Caxton, apprenticed to a silk merchant, and sent to Bruges in the way of business, found printing for England. He left the silk trade in 1473, and set about learning all there was to learn of type and presses. Full of these facts, and with the experience of two books published by him at Bruges, he returned to
COSTER AND GUTENBERG 85
England in 1476 and set up a printing-press at West- minster at the sign of the Red Pale. There, for fifteen years, he busied himself writing and printing.
Being a reactionary, Caxton bitterly complained of the changes taking place in the English language. In an effort to head off this deplorable tendency he pub- lished Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. There are many who, once caught by the swing of Chaucer’s words, deeply wish Caxton had won that fight.
Having done his work as an evangel of a free press, Caxton was gathered to his fathers in 1491.
8
Printing crept into Scotland about 1507 and into Irish Dublin a little later. It crossed the ocean fifty years after Columbus’s first voyage, and a press was set up in Mexico in 1544. It came into United States territory hard on the heels of the Pilgrims, and a printer was busy at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638. Writing and publishing, however, was not to be con- fined, and it swept on through all the colonies, crossed the Pacific, girdled the globe.
If all the books that have been printed since that fateful day when Lourens Janszoon Coster cut letters in wood to amuse children were laid end to end— But what’s the use? Of the making of many books there is indeed no end.
The age of paper arrived and threatens now to con- tinue—pointing toward no certain Utopia. Coster or another freed the goose, and the cackling of that eman- cipated bird has for five centuries filled the ears of men and has been found musical by the many, discordant only to the few.
Chapter Twelve COPERNICUS
3 ACON’s genius died with him, and the bulk of
his work was lost. He was a light in the midst of Europe’s darkness, and the darkness extinguished the light. He left the world as he found it. It was an age of fanatics, and power was in their hands. For another two hundred years no giant stepped across the plains of Europe.
And then came Copernicus.
Nicolaus Copernicus, born in 1473, was, like Bacon, a churchman. That is not surprising. In that age there were only two trades open to ambitious young men: the army and the church. Copernicus was too wise to be - a soldier.
Thorn, on the Vistula, was his birthplace and he was a Pole; some think, a Prussian. If so, he was far from the popular idea of a Prussian. He was sickly, studious, kind-hearted, religious, and modest. His de- sire for knowledge was insatiable. As a result he studied medicine at Cracow, then went to the universities of Vienna, Bologna, Padua, Ferrara, and Rome. In each of these schools he pursued mathematics like a zealot and devoured every book on astronomy that he could find.
When he was twenty-four years old he went to Frauenburg as canon and for most of his life remained there.
86
COPERNICUS 84
2
No superstition fettered this priest. He practiced medicine gratuitously and did not believe disease came from God and could be most easily cured by praying at a shrine or adoring a relic. He dared to look Nature in the face and he did not let his devotion persuade him the Bible was a book on science. This means that here was another man born to use his brains.
Everybody in that day, popes, emperors, and the common of commonest, believed the world stood still. They didn’t all think it was flat, though most of them did; but they all said the earth was the center of the universe, around which everything else revolved. Whoever denied this was a heretic, and the quicker he was sent to hell the better. That was the fine heritage old Ptolemy gave to Europe.
Copernicus believed in hell as fiercely as the best of them. But he didn’t expect a man would be damned simply for using his eyes and his brain. If he had any doubts, he put them aside and was willing to run the chance.
3
Some of the Greeks, you remember, Pythagoras for instance, taught that the sun stood still and the earth moved around it. Copernicus came across this idea, and it seemed reasonable to him. The more he thought, the more likely it seemed that the earth did the moving. He began making calculations and he found that on this theory things fitted somewhat better than they did on Ptolemy’s plan. He had to use epicycles to make the changes of the planets come right, but that was due to his belief that everything moved in a circle. This per-
88 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
fection of the circle idea he also got from the Greeks— chiefly from Aristotle.
Copernicus did not at once make his data public. Two things stopped him: he wasn’t absolutely certain he was right; he was afraid of the Bible.
No one alive at that time could forget that Joshua had commanded the sun to stand still—and it had so stood. But Copernicus did not believe the Bible was a textbook in science. It was a religious revelation, it was inspired, and it presented a fine code of morals. These things he believed, just as he believed in a per- sonal God.
He realized that the vast majority of people believed the Bible from cover to cover, doubted the existence of any knowledge outside of it, and certainly would not accept anything that was opposed to a biblical state- ment. They were tolerant as long as one agreed with them. Copernicus didn’t want to get into trouble; and getting into trouble was one of the easiest things in the world for one who did a little thinking on his own. He worked out his theory, with mathematical proof, and then put the manuscript away and forgot it. He went about taking care of the sick and tending to his church duties—and thinking.
4
He didn’t care a rap about fame. He wanted to know the truth, and he was willing to pass this truth on when found. So when George Joachim came asking, he told the young man all he had discovered and showed him his book. Joachim was a professor of math- ematics at the Lutheran University of Wittenberg, and he also was a searcher after truth. Not that the Luther- ans ever doubted the scientific wisdom of the Bible. Luther, who had read widely, thought much and defied
COPERNICUS 89
all the devils in Worms, would have nothing to do with the new idea, and called Copernicus a fool, which is an easy word to say in any language, including the German.
Joachim didn’t agree with the head of his church, and he gobbled up the Copernican theory instantly. More than that he insisted upon the publication of Copernicus’s life work, “The Revolution of the Heav- enly Bodies.” Copernicus yielded. He was growing old, and his health was bad. There wasn’t much that the church fathers could do to him. Death would step in directly and end it all. Even so he took no unneces- sary chances. He wrote a preface addressed to Pope Paul IIT which was of a highly conciliatory and apol- ogetic tone.
“T can easily conceive, most Holy Father,” he wrote, “that, as soon as people learn that in this book I ascribe certain motions to the earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected. I am not so much in love with my conclusions as not to weigh what others will think about them. . . . Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my viewpoint nearly induced me to abandon the work had becun.”
Near the end of this strange preface, Copernicus sounded a freer and more defiant note:
“Tf perchance there shall be idle talkers who, though they are ignorant of all mathematical science, never- theless assume the right to pass judgment in these things, and if they should dare to criticize and attack this theory of mine because of some passage of Scrip- ture which they have falsely distorted for their own purpose, I care not at all; I will even despise theif judgment as foolish.”
90 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
So prefaced, the epoch-making book was given to the world. You mustn’t imagine that it made an instant hit and became a best-seller. No, indeed! It was scorned and rejected of men, and long after Copernicus was dead it was damned by the church. Tycho Brahe, of whom you will hear more, and Francis Bacon re- fused to accept it. More people laughed at it, than be- lieved it. To the average man it seemed downright idiotic and rank heresy. Copernicus, however, was spared the gibes and the praise.
5
Imagine, for a moment, this old doctor-priest, going about his simple duties in Frauenburg. He has grown old in the service of God and of man. He has thought much, worked hard, and is nearly through. When Joachim insisted upon publishing the book, doubtless the old man was thrilled. In all the years of his life, few things out of the ordinary had happened to him. He had lived close to the pains of men. A doctor and 2 priest see men at their saddest. It is quite likely that for thirty years he had borne on his shoulders the burdens of half the people of Frauenburg.
Never had Copernicus thought of himself as a great man. Aristotle was alive with conceit, and Roger Bacon sensed his own genius. But not for an instant did Copernicus dream that his name would last as long as the world stands. His book was to be published, and he was thrilled and he was scared and he was a little saddened. He knew what intolerance can do to a man who dares to walk alone.
Probably he whispered to a crony here and there that big things for him were going on and, God help him, he didn’t know what would happen when the cardinals got hold of his book.
COPERNICUS 91
He was in a fever of excitement, and fever sent him to bed. He lay there waiting, waiting—and the book did not come. And death did not come. He wanted his book, and the process of making it was so slow. He grew weaker, but he still hoped. Hope died. The spirit was draining out of him. And then—
Post-haste, a copy of the book was rushed to the dying man’s bedside. It was put into his hands. His fingers caressed what his éyes could no longer see. In an hour Copernicus was dead.
6
For more than a thousand years, Ptolemy had reigned. This priest and doctor, lying forever silent, with a freshly printed book clasped in his hands, had dethroned the pretender and joined that small group of rebels that has greatly influenced the world’s history.
Francis Bacon, known to science as the man who was always wrong, wrote fifty years after Copernicus’s death:
“The many strange things which he assumes, are proceedings which mark a man who thinks nothing of introducing fictions of any kind into nature, providing his calculations turn out well.”
Bacon was one of the “idle talkers ignorant of mathe- matics” at whom Copernicus had thrown his words of scorn. A truer estimate of the great astronomer was made by E. F. C. Morton who wrote:
“The dim Titanic figure of the old monk seems to rear itself out of the dull flats around it, pierces with its head the mists that overshadow them and catches the first gleam of the rising sun.”
Simple, courageous, patient, Copernicus dug for the truth and recognized it when it came to light. He had
92 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
not the flaming genius of Galileo nor the mathematical power of Kepler, but he was brave when that was the only virtue worth while; and he was honest when all around him were corrupt. He was born to be a sturdy iconoclast and with hard blows he labored to destroy Ptolemy and drive one more error out of the world.
Chapter Thirteen PARACELSUS
ASEL and the University of Basel were living the
staid and respectable lives of the self-satisfied. The citizens were God-fearing and church-fearing folk. The professors were old fogies—who accepted what the books set down as fact, and among these facts were the thousand and one errors immortalized by Aristotle and Galen. Were they questioned? Were they checked up? On the contrary, they were passed on as absolute truths.
And all this passing was done in Latin. Nobody knew why, but it had always been that way, and there- fore must be right. The mysteries of science and phil- osophy were too sacred to be discussed in vulgar Ger- man.
2
It is summer in Basel in the year 1526. Something of a ripple has run through the learned circles of the town. A famous doctor is coming to see them. They chatter among themselves as to what kind of man this Paracelsus will prove to be. Reports of his cures have spread before him. He is a miracle-worker. No mere doctor could do the things he does. They decide he is either in the service of the devil or endowed by his Creator with the great gift of faith.
While they gossip, Paracelsus arrives.
At first sight he is rather overwhelming. A velvet
93
94 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
cap is cocked jauntily on the side of his large head. His long hair frames a face alive with animation. His eyes are dark and glowing and around them run laugh- ing wrinkles. He is heavy, with broad shoulders and he sets his feet down firmly, as is the habit of one who knows where he is going and why. With sword clanking at his side and his cloak blown back by the wind, he looks more like a swashbuckling roisterer than a great physician. He is a good deal of each.
The professors and the big-wigs of the town stare, but when Paracelsus speaks to them, they lose their reserve. There is the magic instrument of the man— his voice. It is full of warmth and music and a fine, persuasive friendliness. With it he makes friends and draws the crowd after him; with it, he bewitches the red-cheeked German girls and talks himself into and out of many a scrape.
It is nothing to wonder at then that he has no trouble talking himself into the job of town physician. Once in office, Paracelsus is busy. Only thirty-six, he is still young enough to have a fine zeal for his task. And the authorities help him. Never lived a man who could make friends so quickly. Or so completely and swiftly lose them. It is only a matter of a few days and Para- celsus is all the rage.
That’s how it happens that he is asked to lecture at the university. Those lectures are to be a great thing for medicine and the mental growth of Europe. But they are to ruin Paracelsus.
3 On the door of the university, Paracelsus posted a notice of his lectures. This was not a modest notice. He announced that he was the great and only Auriolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, most learned
PARACELSUS 95 of physicians. He would not, he said, lecture from the books of Galen and Avicenna, the Arab. He would lec- ture from the Book of Nature, whose pages he had trod and whose secrets he had won.
He capitalized the effrontery of this notice, and his lecture room was crowded. Then, to the amazement of everyone, Paracelsus spoke in German! It was un- believable. It was sacrilege! The students were de- lighted, but the professors were shocked and that was only part of the shock they got.
Paracelsus, whose egotism was expressed in this self- assumed name, which meant he was as great as Celsus, attacked the doctors and the sour-faced professors. He said he hated and despised men who spent their lives in the grip of a dead hand. None of that for him. Books were dead things. Nature was alive, fascinating and truthful. Books were packed with lies and errors. Those who read books were ignorant and self-satisfied. As for himself he read no books, but he knew more than all the other doctors put together. Then he fired facts at them. He told them things about medicine and chemistry they had never dreamed of. The fury of his conviction that he was right drove his words home. He not only held his classes, he flamed out as the great man of the age.
4
Where did Paracelsus get the data he tossed to his students and hurled at the heads of the doctors? From Nature, from an inheritance that gave him that kind of mind.
His father was the bastard son of a nobleman, and trained as a physician. His mother was a nurse, super- intendent of the hospital at Einsiedeln. When she met and married William Bombastus von Hohenheim. she
96 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
gave up her nursing and settled down to the task of being a doctor’s wife.
So fathered and so mothered, Paracelsus was born in 1490. As a mere child he studied medicine with his father, who obviously belonged to the old school and had none of his son’s fierce individuality. At six- teen he entered the University of Basel where, twenty years later, he was to lecture.
Even at sixteen, the school routine sickened him. He left the place in disgust and went to Sponheim where he studied chemistry with J. Trithemius, who at that time was the last word in this science. It was a science only by courtesy. It was still alchemy. The philoso- pher’s stone was the object of all work in the labora- tory.
What Paracelsus thought of all this, nobody knows, but he learned something of chemistry and used it all his life.
This inquiring boy did not find at Sponheim, any more than at Basel, that for which he craved. He wanted to tear Nature apart and see what made the wheels go round. He wanted life in the raw. Life was about as raw in the mines at Tyrol as it was anywhere in the accessible world. These mines were owned by the rich Fuggers, and through the help of this power- ful family, Paracelsus was able to visit them.
There he found what he sought. He saw the effort with which Nature gave up her gold and silver. He learned a lesson from the struggle necessary to refine those metals. He saw men, beaten, exhausted, dying. He saw them crushed by accidents. He studied Na- ture’s way of repairing these ravages. In short, he learned in Tyrol to be a physician.
It was there he resolved to read no more books but to go direct to the crude material for all his knowl-
PARACELSUS 97
edge. This determination sent him on far wanderings. He said, “One must read the book of Nature and walk over her leaves.” He walked. For years he wandered across the face of Europe. He may even, as he claimed, have penetrated the East and have sat at the feet of wisdom in Syria, in India.
It was during this period that he won the title of “the ignorant vagabond.” Probably the vagabond part fitted. It is doubtful if he had any money save the little he could earn as an itinerant doctor. At best, small pick- ings. And he couldn’t get along without cash as easily as some. He liked a good time. He liked his liquor. He liked to parade in fancy clothes with an expensive sword on his hip.
5
Thus he swaggered through Europe. But no matter what he did with his boon companions, he was, for the most part, a poet and a student. Wherever he went, he gathered knowledge. His memory was perfect. If he did not classify his facts, he still held them in mind ready for instant use. He studied the diseases to which men were subject in the various countries. He analyzed the local treatments—and improved on them. He said truly: “To know my own people, I must know all peo- ple.’ This was the task he set himself, and he wan- dered, seeing his course “as birds their trackless way.”
He bluffed. Fooling others he fooled himself. The time came when he more than half believed his often repeated claim to all the wisdom in the world. But if he deluded himself along that line, he was rigidly honest about other things. He had a fine idealism toward his profession. He saw the doctor as a man who braved all for truth and who hesitated before no sacri- fice in his service of humanity.
98 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
This profession, which he wanted to honor and ele- vate, had been fouled and degraded by ignorance and superstition. So he hated ignorance and superstition. He hated the men whose minds were locked and whose aims were low. The fire of.a crusader was in him. He sought facts and truths with which to attack his ene- mies, with which to wage and win his fight for refor- mation.
6
This was the man who set Basel roaring with his lectures in German, his tirades against the doctors.
But, if Basel shouted as Paracelsus hurled his ana- themas, it was shocked into silence by one of his most astounding and dramatic gestures:
The students, holding a celebration, built a bon- fire, and as they danced and sang around it, through the front door of the university came Paracelsus. His cap was cocked at as jaunty an angle as ever, but on his face flamed the light of a fanatic. In his hands, raised above his head for all to see, he held two books. One was by the deified Galen and the other by the supreme Avicenna.
“Behold,” cried Paracelsus, “the death of the old and the birth of the new.” With these words he flung the two sacred books into the fire. “So let their errors and false teachings perish,” he said. “What of truth there was in them cannot be destroyed.”
In this act blazed the spirit of the man. He was ruthless: he was a truth-seeker.
This insult to the gods of medicine stirred Basel with hatred of the heretic. Even his disciples were shocked. Those who had disliked him, now loathed him. Those who had feared him took courage from the popular attitude and attacked him. He was de-
\
PARACELSUS 99
nounced as a quack. His character was spattered with mud. He was challenged to prove that he had a degree as a doctor. His methods, his claims, his vanity were ridiculed. He was riddled with lies and slander. His popularity vanished overnight, and Paracelsus stood, a lonely figure, fighting a city of enemies.
Yet he continued telling the doctors what he thought of them, continued his work as health officer, and min- istered to the sick. He wouldn’t be stopped. The odds were all against him, but he fought on. He was de- feated, but he had shaken the dry bones of medicine. He had started a fire and he fanned it into a great blaze.
7
Paracelsus was hated, but his cures spoke for his skill. He was a braggart and a nuisance, but he knew his business. When a case became desperate, and the old-time doctors failed, this “quack” was called in.
That’s what happened when Canon Cornelius von Lichtenfels thought he was dying. The doctors said so. The Canon knew that only one man could save him —and he sent for Paracelsus.
Cornelius loathed the upstart, but he wanted to live. Paracelsus looked the Canon over. He said he could cure him. But he knew he was dealing with an enemy, so before anything else he talked about a fee. He named a stiff price. “To be paid if I cure you,” he said. The Canon eagerly agreed. He was buying his life.
Paracelsus cured him.
Then he tried to collect his money. The Canon laughed at him. The fee, he said, was exorbitant, and he could prove it in a court of law. He offered Para- celsus part of the amount demanded. This was refused. The vagabond had his price—and a strict sense of
100 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
honor. He had his professional pride, and the Canon had insulted it.
He appealed to the courts. By nature and habit, judges are reactionary. Paracelsus was a firebrand. He was opposed to set form and order. Here was a chance to put him in his place. The judges sided with the Canon, and Paracelsus’s claim was thrown out.
Paracelsus had been badly treated and he knew it. He voiced his anger in bitter words. He told every- one exactly what he thought of the Canon, of the judges, of the whole system. His language was strong but tactless, It did him no good and it stirred up and united his enemies.
8
Paracelsus had been in Basel less than two years. He had won fame and popularity and had lost them. There were few left to defend or help him.
The Canon, the doctors, the professors, the judges were all against him. They talked things over and de- cided to get rid of the trouble-maker. Most of them wanted simply to run him out of town; a few desired his death. These few laid their plans. Paracelsus, in his wild way, had insulted them, their ancestors, and descendants. It was a crude age, and justice was largely a private matter. To mutilate or kill the doctor would restore self-respect and peace.
A friend discovered the plot and warned Paracelsus, when the vengeance-fired clique was ready to strike. The doctor was no coward, but he could not fight a dozen. He fled. He had no time to take with him any of his belongings. Hastily and at night, he left Basel, never to return. His few friends, his books, his instru- ments, even his clothing were lost to him. Alone ana
PARACELSUS 101
destitute he set out on long years of wandering. Never again, or only briefly at the very end, did he have a home. He could not shake off the blows Basel contin- ued to deal him.
)
Still he refused to surrender. He went on, sounding his note of defiance, rattling skeletons, damning the past and pointing to the dawn. Colmar, Nuremberg, Appenzell heard his voice and listened, until the storm from Basel blew the medical prophet into new fields. Always Basel hounded him. He could find no perma- nent abode, scandal being hot on his heels. Seldom could he stay more than a few months in a city— never so Jong as a year.
He lived in want and poverty. A few cases, a few paltry fees, then on before the pack he raced. No chance to experiment, to equip a laboratory, to write at leisure. He was a homeless wanderer. So he saw Zurich, Pfaffers, Middleheim, Meran, Villach, Augsburg. A stranger in each, a solitary intruder, who blustered and caroused and passed on. A sadder road-stained figure of genius, the world has not seen.
Hard travel and hard living aged this evangel of a new age in science. Neither time nor turmoil could dim his spirit. Defeat and poverty could not silence him. He had a truth to tell and he shouted it to the world.
He was thirty-nine when he escaped from Basel. He was past fifty when a refuge was at last offered him. For more than ten years he went up and down the ways of Europe, scoffed at and mocked. For more than ten years, bitterness ate at his heart. He knew his worth and genius; he knew the power of his message. None or few would listen to, or believe in, him.
102 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
10
In 1541, Archbishop Ernst of Salsburg beckoned the wanderer home. How gladly Paracelsus went! Here was the chance he had for long demanded. A labora- tory, leisure, freedom from worry, peace. Now he could set down on paper his thoughts. He could test his theories, he could do all the thousand things he had planned and dreamed. Do them all—if only there were time!
But time was short. Salsburg knew him for only a few months. What spark fired the last great scene in this bewildered giant’s life? It may have come from Basel—some enemy spreading old scandal in Salsburg, where Paracelsus had a right to consider himself safe. He had come to rest and he was innocent and he had found a friend. Then the old lies bobbed up. It was rather more than flesh could bear.
Paracelsus flamed anew, with his fine new cloak waving in the wind, his old sword clanking at his side, his cap still jauntily cocked, his great head now snow- covered, his face heavily lined, but his eyes still flash- ing defiance. Was he tracking a scandalmonger when he went to a public-house that fatal September 24 in 1541? Or did he go merely for a cheering drink and a word with pleasant acquaintances? Whatever his mis- sion, Death shouldered past him as he entered that room.
It was over quickly. Some slighting word, some stir- ring of an ancient insult, and there came an upflare of the fierce temper that had forced him from Basel. But now Paracelsus was old and broken. The instant swift reaction that had saved him a thousand times faltered for half a second. There was the death-thrust, and the greatest doctor of the age was a heap of dust.
PARACELSUS 103
Il
Or will you believe another version, a legend, of his death? Paracelsus out for a walk, seeking the coun- try and the kindly face of Nature that he loved. On the edge of a precipice he paused. The evening sun was in his face, and the heavy shadows were at his back. Below, far below, the waters passed over rocks and shining sand. The great man was at peace, anchored, safe. He was dreaming, not of the wasted years and the time spent in exile from his laboratory, but of the work ahead, of the hard problems to be solved.
He was dreaming of the cosmic forces. Of the uni- verse of which he was a part and which was a perfect unity. Of the divinity that swayed him, that painted the flowers at his feet and the colors in the sky. His faith was great, and there was peace in his heart.
Behind him a movement, the catch of a breath. Shadows stealing out of the shadows. The head of the old warrior came up. His hand flew to sword-hilt, too late. There was a brief conflict, and Paracelsus went over the brink of the cliff, hurtling down against the rocks, crushed, silenced in this world forever.
History does not name the wretches who in public- house or 2a the high places slaughtered this man.
But he, their victim, lives on, forever strong, forever a voice stirring the souls of men. He belongs to the small band of immortal rebels: Spinoza, Galileo, Har- vey, Lister, Faraday.
12
Paracelsus was no creative genius. He was an icono- clast. He slew ghosts. He cut off the dead hand that for more than a thousand years had held medicine in
104 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
its grip. He dethroned the stars as active agents in human affairs. He raised Nature to her feet and crowned her with new dignity. He burned the little books of men and pointed the way to the fine tablets of experiment. He was supreme as a pioneer blazing trails. He was a tireless, ceaseless, undismayed seeker after the truth.
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Chapter Fourteen - TeyeCult Om RACH.
O people bound down by superstition can grow. Ignorance finds an answer and it’s always wrong. This stops inquiry, and when you take out the “whys” you squeeze the brain dry. No people ever lived who could beat the Europeans of the Middle Ages at super- stitious fancies. These myths and ignorances were all bound up with their religion. To tackle one was to tackle the other; that meant trouble, prison, and a flam- ing bunch of fagots with the heretic in the middle of the blaze.
It was safer and more comfcrtable to be supersti- tious.
The growth of Europe’s brain ran parallel with the death of silly fears and beliefs. That’s why astronomy came out of the Dark Ages, to give birth to the mod- ern world. Astronomy was a fairly safe science. It was certainly better than trying to tell people something about their own bodies. Michael Servetus, Spanish anatomist, found that out—too late. The Inquisition got him, and he was burned alive in 1553. All he did was to try and knock out a few superstitions. That was enough.
Tycho Brahe didn’t go in for medicine or physiology. With his temper, he’d have had a bad time if he had done so. It was a good thing for him and a good thing for the world that he stuck to stars.
105
106 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
2
Tycho was born in Scania, then a Danish province, in 1546, the oldest boy in a family of ten. His father, Otto Brahe, was a lawyer, held government jobs, and at last was put in charge of the castle of Helsingborg.
But Tycho’s father did not rear him. That job was taken over by his uncle. Before Tycho was born Otto and his brother agreed that Otto’s first boy should go to George, who was childless and wanted to adopt a son. When Tycho was born, Otto and his wife refused to give him up. This led to some bitterness between the brothers. George, however, let the question ride until, a year later, Otto’s second boy was born. That was too much for the lonely man, and he promptly kidnaped Tycho. As they now had another baby, the parents apparently thought it was not worth while fighting with the rich brother, so they left Tycho in his care.
At thirteen, Tycho entered the University of Copen- hagen. He was a wild, harum-scarum sort of boy, as might be expected of one reared by a doting uncle. With no interest in his school work, he took life as it came and let it go at that.
But when he was fourteen years old something hap- pened that woke him up. On August 21, 1560, there was an eclipse of the sun, visible in Copenhagen. This
phenomenon made a deep impression on the boy. It |)
was not the wonder of the spectacle that struck his fancy—it was the fact that it had been foretold with absolute accuracy.
3 Tycho resolved then and there that he would learn enough about astronomy and mathematics to be able to make such predictions. He secured Ptolemy’s astro- nomical works and began studying them. His getting
= a = = = = = = = r=
TYCHO BRAHE 107
this notion of the heavens at that early age probably accounts for the tenacity with which he clung, all his life, to Ptolemy’s views. At no time was he able to see any sense to the theory of the “mad Copernicus.” This scientific stuff enraged his uncle. He wanted
_ his nephew to be a lawyer—and a decent member of society. In order to cure him of star gazing, he packed
Tycho off to Leipzig in 1562. Along with him, George
, sent a tutor named Vedel, four years older than Tycho.
It was Vedel’s job to see that Tycho cut out the stars and stuck to rhetoric. Vedel was a conscientious fellow and he did his best
to earn his salary. But Tycho was too smart and too
industrious for the tutor, When Vedel was safely tucked in bed, Tycho would crawl out and spend long hours watching the stars or studying mathematics. His energy was enormous. Nothing seemed to tire him, and a couple of hours sleep was all he needed.
At seventeen, Tycho began a serious study of the planets. He found that their positions differed widely from those set down in the books, This started him
_ making observations with all the accuracy possible. _ Thus he was launched upon what proved to be his life _ work. Tycho had no telescope and only rude home- | made instruments. In time he learned to make better - tools, but he never had a chance to look at the heavens
through a lens. Tutor Vedel’s espionage ended with the death of his
uncle, when Tycho was nineteen. Thereafter, having inherited a fortune, he could do as he pleased—and he did.
4. From Leipzig he went to the University of Rostock
and almost immediately jumped into an undesirable
108 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
fame. An eclipse of the moon was due, and Tycho made a public prophecy that this eclipse foretold the death of the sultan of Turkey. News of the sultan’s death arrived and, briefly, Tycho was a hero and a man of destiny. But when word came that the sultan had died before the eclipse, the young prophet’s fame was turned into notoriety and ridicule.
Tycho was no man to appreciate a joke on himself. He was easily enraged and he resented every gibe. It is quite likely that this false prophecy led to the only duel in which Tycho ever engaged. Anyway, he quar- reled with a fellow student—some say over the ques- tion of which one knew the more mathematics.
Tycho and his enemy agreed to meet in the dead of night and fight it out with swords. There was no light furnished for the duel. It was pitch-dark, and the fight- ers found each other only by ear. The combat was waged fiercely for some time with no damage done. Then Tycho got his nose in the way of his opponent’s sword. At that instant he lost the fight—and his nose. Honor was satisfied and Tycho was led to a doctor.
The Great Dane was not content to go through life without a nose. Not at all. He set about making him- self one out of silver and gold. Some say copper alloy. You may be sure it was not copper. Nothing so com- mon would suit the aristocratic Tycho. This manufac- tured nose he cemented in place, and his enemies said it looked better than the old one. Of course, occasion- ally it would drop off, but Tycho always stuck it back on again and went about his business undisturbed.
The surprising thing is that Tycho didn’t fight oftener. He had a vile temper and a bitter tongue. Sooner or later he quarreled with almost everyone he came in contact with, but in time his friends learned not to take him too seriously, and so he escaped killing.
TY GIVOuB RA ELE 109
5
Always Tycho had what we call color. That is, he was a showman, theatrical, His hasty prophecy at Ros- tock proves that, as well as his duel in the dark. This theatrical trait led him to believe in astrology and alchemy. He loved, all his life, to startle people, to do the unexpected and bewildering thing.
It was this trait, probably, as much as anything, that led him into alchemy. At that time there was no such thing as chemistry—as chemistry is known today. Alchemy was not a science, though it posed as one and aped scientific methods. Tycho thought gold might be obtained through alchemic processes, and he tried to get it. But along with this quest he studied old pre- scriptions and concocted a few new ones of his own. One of his “patent medicines” became extremely popu- lar, and no one could be considered quite healthy who hadn’t taken it. Strange and unbelievable ingredients went into this stuff. But among all the junk there was a small amount of antimony, and to this the nostrum probably owed whatever value it had.
Brahe might have gone on and wasted his life stir- ring messes in his laboratory if the stars hadn’t inter- fered. One evening in November, 1572, Tycho, look- ing up at the sky, was startled. He would not believe his eyes. He appealed to his coachman. The man con- firmed Tycho’s doubting judgment. What they saw was a brand-new star. Night after night it shone and con- stantly grew brighter. At last it rivaled Jupiter in brilliance. Then its light gradually faded and at last it disappeared. The phenomenon threw Brahe back to to his first love. It did more than that. He studied the star in all of its changes and finally wrote out carefully what he had seen. He wouldn’t, at first, publish it, be-
110 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
cause printer’s ink was beneath the dignity of a noble- man.
For the same reason he refused to lecture at the Uni- versity of Copenhagen when asked to do so. However, he changed his mind about this when the king sug- gested that he’d like to have the lecture given.
6
Tycho had returned to Denmark to settle up his uncle’s estate, but at that time he had no intention of staying there. He thought Prague or Basel would be better suited to his work. So he began getting ready to leave Denmark forever.
A queer change occurred in Tycho at just this time, and none of his biographers seems able to explain it. The aristocrat, who had been too proud to publish an article on a new star or lecture at a university, suddenly became a radical. He snubbed his high-toned friends and went about dealing out, with no charge, his medi- cines to the peasants and making friends with quite common people.
He did more than make friends: he fell in love with the daughter of a peasant. Tycho was an eccentric nobleman, but not even he ever dreamed this would happen to him. Apparently he never dreamed of falling in love at all. All the marriageable daughters of Copen- | hagen had been after him. But to Tycho they made no appeal. The peasant girl did.
All of his family and all of his friends said he was a fool—or came as near saying it as they dared to so quick-tempered a man. His relatives quarreled with him, but Brahe told them to mind their own business and then went ahead and married his peasant girl. And lived happily ever after. At least as far as his wife was concerned.
TYCHO BRAHE III
History hastn’t revealed much about this wife, but she must have been a fine, healthy, level-headed woman. Being a wife to Tycho was no snap. He was fierce, proud, self-centered, and vastly ambitious. He could be tender, forgiving, considerate, but he was seldom in the mood for these white virtues. No matter; the peasant wife endured all, bore him many children, kept his home peaceful, and passed lightly over her hus- band’s glaring faults,
7.
Just as Tycho was ready to shake the mud of Den- mark from his feet, Frederick II sent a hurry-up call to have his famous subject brought to the palace. That meeting led to great things for science.
Tycho was persuaded to stay in Denmark.
Frederick made big concessions to keep his star- gazer. He gave him the Island of Huen in the sound, as the site for an observatory and set aside a sum about equal to $100,000 to be used for buildings and appara- tus. A pension of about $2,000 was settled on Tycho along with the income from an estate in Norway.
Tycho, you see, had fallen upon fat days, for his despised science had won royal approval. Work was at once begun on the observatory, which was to be the largest and most elaborate in the world. The cornerstone was laid on August 8, 1576, and the obser- vatory of Uraniborg (the Castle of the Heavens) rose rapidly. Here for twenty years Tycho Brahe made his observations and collected the data that, long after- wards, were published as the Rudolphine Tables.
8
This was the golden age in Tycho’s life. He was doing the work he loved under conditions as nearly
112 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
ideal as he could imagine. Night after night he sat at his quadrant, making the most careful observations and painstakingly marking them down. He was, for the most part, correcting errors that had been part of the star tables for hundreds and hundreds of years. You must remember that Tycho’s instruments, judged by modern standards, were crude to the point of fool- ishness. He had no telescope—he had only his two good eyes. Yet in spite of his handicaps, his observations are still the admiration of scientists.
It is hard to believe that Tycho, watching the stars swing around in an endless procession across the sky, did not sense the truth of the Copernican theory. But he didn’t. He was a supremely vain man, and this van- ity may have blinded him to the littleness of the earth on which he stood. All his life he gave a dominant place to the world, and with this as a starting point he worked out a scheme of his own for the universe. This was largely Ptolemaic in nature. He made the earth the center of all, but he said the planets revolved around the sun, while the sun and all the stars flew around the earth; this was the Tychonian system—it died with him.
Brahe was short on theory and mathematics, but he was long on observation. Somebody had to do this work, and Tycho was the man for it. Actually, he cre- ated modern astronomy, for upon his efforts Kepler and Newton built.
9
Tycho was the best investment Frederick II ever made. Uraniborg became the scientific center of the world. Statesmen, philosophers, and students flocked to the little island of Huen. After a bit, Tycho always had half a dozen boys working with him, learning astronomy at the feet of the master.
IsYCHIO TB RAGE 113
To the visitor who honestly wanted to know, Tycho was an ideal host. To the merely curious, he was scorn- ful and refused to exhibit his serious instruments. In- stead he brought out for them only toys, automata and the like, and let them exercise their weak wits on me- chanical contrivances.
Having become a radical, Tycho remained a radi- cal. He was no respecter of persons; he’d snub a visit- ing king or the crown prince as quickly as any other busybody. He had many visitors, and naturally his guests came from the nobility and court circles, but always his peasant wife was the hostess—and those who didn’t like it could stay away.
Among the inmates of this strange observatory was a half-wit dwarf named Lep. He was Tycho’s favorite, and no one was permitted to annoy him. He sat regu- larly at the table with Tycho, and when the imbecile began to mutter the guests were ordered to shut up. Tycho believed, or pretended to believe, that the fool spoke with the voice of prophecy and his half-inco- herent words were carefully written down for future analysis.
Did Tycho really believe in this dwarfr Nobody knows. All his life, Brahe was superstitious. All his life he was a bit of a play-actor. Maybe, he merely used the idiot to show his contempt of chattering fools. Maybe there were, now and then, pearls of wisdom in the poor creature’s words. No one ever will know. But it gives one a real picture to vision the great Brahe sitting at the head of his elaborate table and command- ing his guests to be silent while a half-wit mumbled.
10
So for twenty years, Tycho viewed the stars from his little island and lorded it over the aristocratic num-
114 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
skulls who came to stare and gasp. James I, who, fat and pompous, had come down from Scotland to rule the stolid English, visited Brahe. The king was im- pressed and enthusiastic. It isn’t on record that the star-gazer cared a snap of his finger about his Majesty —hbut at any rate James got away without being fla- grantly insulted.
Among those who suffered, with results disastrous to Tycho later on, was the crown prince, afterwards Christian IV. As a child Christian followed the herd and went out to see the untamed astronomer at work. Surrounded by the usual court boot-lickers, Christian naturally got the notion he was some superior creature and wise enough to have an opinion on any subject. He tried to help Tycho by laying down the royal law on an abstruse problem. When he attempted this, he was no longer crown prince to Tycho; he was just an impertinent youngster, who needed to be put in his place. And Tycho did so. Afterwards Christian had little affection for the rough-speaking scientist. He was unable to forgive.
Another who suffered and remembered was the Chancellor of Denmark, Walchendorf. A bit of a brute, this fellow. Cold blue eyes, square jaws, broad shoulders—a hard man, useful to the soft Frederick. He, of course, went to see Tycho, though he had no more scientific interest in the stars than the stars had in him.
A dog caused the trouble. This dog is immortal. Not because James I gave him to Brahe, but because he is in the picture of Tycho’s observatory. A kind of hound dog, he lies, with a hound dog’s characteristic melancholy, at Tycho’s feet, caring as little for stars as Walchendorf did.
This dog got in the chancellor’s way. And the chan-
TYCHO BRAHE 116
cellor kicked him. He kicked him more than once and he kicked him hard.
Tycho interfered. He told the chancellor just what kind of coarse-grained lout he was. He told him in detail, taking in several generations of Walchendorfs, past and to come. When Tycho got through, the chan- cellor was for leaving Uraniborg in a hurry.
He left hurriedly, but he took time to swear he’d ruin Tycho Brahe.
_ Frederick died, and Walchendorf and Christian IV joined hands to humiliate and then crush Tycho. These
two men, who live in history merely because they hated
Brahe, were yet powerful enough to beat him.
II
Little by little, Tycho was stripped of his resources. The Norway estate was taken from him. His pension was stopped. He had spent his private fortune in fur- nishing and supporting Uraniborg. He could no longer maintain the observatory. He took a private house in Copenhagen.
Still Walchendorf wasn’t satisfied. He got a com- mission appointed to pass on the value of Tycho’s astro- nomical work. This commission was exactly like many commissions up to the present. A commission seldom brings in a report opposed to the desires of its master. Walchendorf’s body of puppets was no exception to this. Tycho’s work was found to be not only fallacious, but harmful to the moral and spiritual integrity of the Danish people.
This in plain language meant that Tycho was a heretic. That’s the way the good people in Copenhagen understood it, and they had no use for heretics.
Tycho was world-famous. Not only that; he had written his name among the immortals. No matter; a
116 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
greater than he had once been handed over to a mad mob.
The citizens of Copenhagen attacked Tycho. He was now an old man, and the trials and disappointments of the last few months had worn him, but nothing could break his hot spirit. Imagine him in this his last good fight. His fury burning up opposition, his right- eousness trampling on hypocrisy, his courage beating cowards, he pressed through the mob, head up, de- fiance in word and gesture.
So he escaped to his home; so in a fierce rage was all love for Denmark burned out of his heart. Here was no peace; here was no resting place. Here were only contention and disgrace. After twenty years he took up again his journeying. After twenty years he set his face to the south, and at Prague he found a patron and friend in the ruler, Rudolph.
12
It was in June, 1599, that Tycho reached Prague. Rudolph II gave him the castle of Benatky as a home and an observatory, and granted him a pension suffi- cient to live on—if it had been paid.
After his wanderings—he had visited Rostock and spent a winter at Wittenberg after leaving Copenhagen —Tycho had come to the end of his journey. His work was done.
Only two things of importance happened to him in Prague. One was the coming of John Kepler. But that’s ° another story. It was important to Brahe only because Kepler agreed to publish the great astronomer’s obser- vations. This he did as the Rudolphine Tables. How that was done you will learn later.
The other was the coming of death.
He became ill; sleeplessness and delirium wasted
TYCHO BRAHE 117
him. He had no spirit with which to fight his disease. He often exclaimed, “Oh, if it is only true that I have not lived in vain!”
His friends and family surrounded his death-bed —the faithful peasant wife was at his side. On October 24, 1601, the end came.
Tycho was buried, and his feied instruments were carefully put away by Rudolph in a museum. They were not allowed to remain there. When Prague was captured by the troops of the elector palatine, the museum was raided, and the instruments were scat- tered or destroyed. Thirty years later, Tycho’s great brass astronomical globe was found, recognized, and sent to the Academy of Sciences at Copenhagen. And there it remains, silently testifying that Tycho Brahe once lived and worked on this old earth.
The aristocrats who drove him from Denmark, over- ran his island of Huen. The observatory disappeared, and today only a mound of earth remains where once stood Uraniborg—the Castle of the Heavens.
13
Tycho was no dreamer. Never could his imagination match that of a Kepler or a Newton. When he moved away from facts, he was lost. For instance, of comets, of which at that time nothing was known, he wrote:
“They are formed by the ascending from the earth of human sins and wickedness, formed into a kind of gas, and ignited by the anger of God. This poisonous stuff falls down again on peoples’ heads, and causes all kinds of mischief, such as pestilence, Frenchmen, sud- den death, and bad weather.”
No, Brahe could not theorize but he could see. He fathered modern astronomy by setting the method of astronomical work. But he did more than that; he laid
118 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
the solid foundation upon which Kepler and Newton were to rear their magnificent structures. He did this by fighting always for accuracy. His records were so nearly exact that even with the most delicate modern instruments observers find it difficult to improve upon them.
Chapter Fifteen W Ce CIyMiH A RIVES
ARACELSUS, as we saw, downed Galen, but
Galen refused to stay down. The idol, however, had tottered, and the attack on the champion who had reigned for fourteen centuries was not again aban- doned.
A great Italian, who lived from 1514 to 1564, finally demolished Galen as an authority. The errors of the Greek-Roman were pitilessly exposed in Vesalius’s book, ‘Fabrica.’ Here was a new voice out of Padua the voice of one who had gone to the human body for facts.
What an uproar that book caused! Sylvius, who had taught Vesalius, turned against him, ridiculed him, heaped coarse abuse on his head. Doubtless Sylvius knew Vesalius was right, but he was playing in with the controlling faction. Columbus, a pupil of Vesalius, also knew, but Columbus was a trickster and an oppor- tunist. All the great ones of Padua, of Italy, opposed this upstart, Vesalius, who had dared to discredit Galen.
Underground schemes and lies hit at Vesalius. It was too much. He had told the truth as he saw it, and the world hated him for that telling. Vesalius threw up his job, burned his notes, went to Spain, became a courtier, and turned his back squarely upon his genius. At fifty, he died at the very instant when he was plan- ning a renewal of the contest.
119
1200 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
2
His fate was less glorious and less painful than that of Servetus, whom Calvin burned in 1553. Servetus was a skeptic, with a rare, inquisitive mind. That was something Calvin could not stand. He wanted no origi- nality in the world. So, to the stake went Servetus, one more martyr for the crime of “honest thought.”
Servetus put his finger on the pulmonary circula- tion. He taught that the blood, after being mixed with air in the lungs, passes into the heart. Just how the blood got back from the arteries to the veins on its way to the heart, of course he didn’t know. He had na microscope. But he made a shrewd guess and he paid the penalty for his daring.
Vesalius was also hot on this mystery of the blood and what it did. Half-heartedly, he accepted the Ga- lenic idea that the blood seeped through the walls of the heart from the right to the left side. He didn’t know what the blood did when it got back to the right side of the heart, and he may have been throwing a sop to his enemies when he wrote:
“We are driven to wonder at the handiwork of the Almighty, by means of which the blood sweats from the right into the left ventricle through passages which escape the human vision.”
3
No, neither Servetus nor Vesalius could bury Galen That was left for a greater man than either of them —for William Harvey, the Englishman.
Vesalius had been dead for fifteen years when Harvey was born at Folkestone in Kent in 1578. He came at exactly the right moment, and his feet were
WILLIAM HARVEY 12)
set early on the trail blazed for him by Servetus, Vesa- lius, Columbus, Gabriele Falloppio, Ambroise Paré, and Andrea Cesalpino. He had but to drive ahead, and Harvey’s every instinct was to drive.
Harvey’s father was a farmer and prosperous; a solid, intelligent man, who gave his son a good home and a chance at whatever education was then going. He was sent to the grammar school at Canterbury and at sixteen entered Cambridge, was graduated as an A.B. at nineteen, decided to be a doctor and immedi- ately went to Padua to study.
There where Vesalius had taught and been beaten and exiled, Harvey sat and learned anatomy. For the best part of five years he remained at Padua, and when, a full-fledged doctor, he returned to England, he was twenty-four years old. In this quiet young Englishman there was none of the storm and tempest of Paracelsus and Vesalius. It never occurred to him, as it did to each of his great predecessors, that he could take the world by the neck and shape it rudely to his way of thinking. Probably it didn’t occur to him that he had anything especially new to give the world. So he settled down quietly in London as a modest young physician, hoping people would fall sick and ask him to cure them.
4
It was to the London of James I that he returned. Not much of a city as cities go now but doubtless looked upon with some pride by Harvey’s contemporaries. There was still no paving, no sewage, and little or no street lighting.
But these were small inconveniences. Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were active, Jonson doing his best to make James I believe he was really welcome in Lon-
122 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
don. Romance was rife, and it was a good old world —happy for one thing because it did not know that it was on the eve of being turned sour by the Puritans. |
Yes, romance was in the air of that London, and it caught Harvey. A presentable young man, was this little doctor. He was below the average in height, slen- der, with coal-black hair, swarthy skin, little round black eyes, which sparkled, a high, prominent fore- head, and a ready, honest smile. It is not surprising that the daughter of the great Dr. Lancelot Browne, formerly physician to good Queen Bess, looked at him from behind her fan with a come-hither eye. They were married in 1605, and on the whole the sprightly daughter of a doctor seems to have made a satisfactory doctor’s wife.
There is reason to believe that Harvey took his gen- eral practice rather lightly; but he must have been fairly successful and he won his way to the bedside of patients who could pay big fees. Among others, he attended the lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, and the earl of Arundel.
A canny young man, this Harvey, with his weather eye constantly alert. He got himself made a member of the Royal College of Physicians—and that was an honor not every drug-mixer could hope to win. Then, with some effective pulling of wires, he was appointed — physician to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Pudgy James I backed him for the job, which means that Harvey had already attracted the eye either of his Majesty or of someone close to the throne.
All of this happened by the time he was thirty-two years old—a creditable record. Probably his father-in- law, old Dr. Browne, helped, but if Harvey hadn’t been a natural diplomat and courtier no one could have pushed him forward so rapidly. Especially since
WILLIAM HARVEY 123
up to this time he had done nothing in medicine to attract attention.
5
In 1616, the very year that Shakespeare’s candle sput- tered out, Harvey began a series of lectures at St. Bartholomew. Paracelsus’s radical innovations were not for him. He stuck to Latin, as if the things he had to say were too fine for the vulgar English tongue. But, while he maintained the conservative form, his lectures were as radical in thought as anything Paracelsus or Vesalius ever dreamed.
Almost at once he attacked the problem of the mo- tions of the heart and blood. Yet these lectures never caused a ripple in the quiet stream of medical conserv- atism. No course of lectures by an unknown could do much to the placid, self-satisfied English physician. Most likely what he had to say reached very little be- yond the limits of his lecture room. His was not the flaming personality that makes a professor popular, and it is not on record that he inspired a single student with a burning desire to know.
All this time Harvey must have been living a staid, conventional life. One gets this idea from the fact that in 1618 he was appointed physician extraordinary to James I. When James, full of platitudes and dulness, passed on, Harvey was made physician in ordinary to Charles I.
At fifty, Harvey’s name was almost unknown outside of London and was wholly unknown on the Continent; and yet 1628 was the very year that was to bring him fame and set him for all time among the great ones, along with Hippocrates and Galen. In that year he published his book on the movements of the heart and blood.
1244 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE 6
What was there so singular and daring about Har- vey’s theoryr That the heart and blood moved had been known since antiquity. Down in Italy, with the help of Galileo, a lot of work had been done with the pulse. Servetus, as we saw, had written of the circula- tion through the lungs. Sylvius had discovered and de- scribed the valves in the veins. What then was Har- vey’s contribution?
Simply this: He took up the work where Servetus had been obliged to leave it, where Sylvius had been unable to go forward. He said the blood flowed in a continuous stream, over and over, through all parts of the body from the heart and back again to the heart. He said the contraction of the heart forced the blood out, and that when the heart relaxed blood flowed in to fill it. And he buried Galen when he showed that there was no connection between the right and left sides of the heart except through the lungs.
This all sounds rather stale and matter of fact to- day. It was iconoclastic and heretic when Harvey put it first in print. For less than this, Vesalius had been driven into exile; for less than this, Servetus had been burned; for less than this, Paracelsus had been mobbed in Basel and at last murdered.
7
Could Harvey, going farther than any one of these, escaper Not entirely. With the appearance of his book, his practice fell off—for who would trust his life in the hands of a madman? A favorite of Charles I, Har- vey did not find this loss of business important, and at all times his income seems to have been ample. Yet | he gave his book to the world in fear, for he writes:
WILLIAM HARVEY 125
“What remains to be said upon the quantity and source of the blood is of a character so novel and un- heard of that I not only fear injury to myself from the envy of a few, but I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies, so much doth want and cus- tom become a second nature. Doctrine once sown strikes deeply its roots, and respect for antiquity in- fluences all men. Still the die is cast and my trust is in my love of truth, and the candor of cultivated minds.”
Cultivated minds? Calvin had a cultivated mind, but it did not save Servetus. Sylvius had a cultivated mind but it couldn’t stop his abuse of Vesalius. Francis Bacon had a cultivated mind, but he damned Harvey across Europe. Or did not these men have cultivated minds? René Descartes accepted the theory instantly, and as he was an experimenter and spoke as one having authority he did more for Harvey than Harvey did for himself.
By and large, Harvey, the radical, escaped with sur- prisingly little criticism. Maybe he was protected by the shadow of the throne. His sixty-seven page book, written to prove that nearly everything previously said about the heart and blood was nonsense, still stands, a readable evidence of his genius.
One concession Harvey made to the age; he felt bound to say something about the soul. But what he said was a mere fluttering on the fringe of thought; it had no connection with his sound deductions from experimental science. He said the soul was located in the blood. Harvey lacked the vision to see that the soul is not in the body, but, if anything, “the body is in the soul.” At any rate this was a small matter and should not rise as a criticism of the first of the English doctors. ,
1270 THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCIENCE
8
So things went sailingly with William Harvey, phy- sician in ordinary to good King Charles I, who needed a doctor if ever a king did. In 1630 he went as com- panion to the young duke of Lennox on the grand tour and saw most of the countries of Europe. In ’36 he was with the earl of Arundel at Prague and met great doctors, some of whom still sniffed at his “circulation of the blood.”
From that trip he came home to practice his profes- sion, but Charles took him to Scotland in 1639. After that he was left alone for two or three years, and he went about his business of doctoring the fashionable people of London and writing an occasional letter in defense of his great discovery.
That was all very well, but it couldn’t last, for merry England was turning rancid. Cromwell had ar- rived, and he and his Puritans were making a noise that was not merry. Harvey was a royalist to his finger tips, and the turmoil that boiled over in 1642 was just plain treason to him. He stuck to Charles, and at the battle of Edgehill he was with the king, behind a hedge, reading, until an intrusive bullet sent him far- ther away.*As Charles failed to score the decisive vic- tory expected, Harvey retired with his prince to Ox- ford—and thereafter let the war go its way with little help from him.
While at Oxford, he spent his time studying the growth of the chick in the shell. Every day an egg was opened, and the change that had taken place in twenty-four hours was carefully noted. In this way he gathered material for his book on generation. He put a lot of work and observation into this book, but its practical value is slight. It is worth mentioning,
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because it revived the study of a subject that had lain dormant since Aristotle’s time. One superstition he tried to kill—that of spontaneous generation. Igno- rance, however, was allied against him, and it was not until the microscope was highly developed that this silly idea was discarded.
While in Oxford—he stayed there three years—he came near losing his place at St. Bartholomew’s because he “had retired to the party in arms against Parlia- ment.” Apparently Cromwell, or someone under him, would have been glad to know something serious against the good physician in ordinary to the king. At any rate Harvey’s lodgings at Whitehall were searched after the Roundheads had occupied London. Every- thing in