A Short History of Science

The present book, while in part a revision of Sedgwick and Tyler's Short History of Science, is to a great extent new. Like the earlier work, it is the outgrowth of a course of lectures given for a number of years to undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Doctor Sedgwick having died some years after the publication of the first edition, the surviving author undertook the preparation of a revised edition and invited R. P. Bigelow, who had taken part in the lecture course, to share the editorial responsibility in cooperation with colleagues verse in other fields. BEGINNINGS OF SCIENCE A history of science might be based on some more or less logical system of definitions and classification. Such systems and such points of view belong to relatively recent and mature periods. Science has grown without much self-consciousness as to how it is defined, without any great concern as to the distinction between pure and applied science, or as to the boundaries between the different sciences. The periods at which primitive man of different races began to have conscious appreciation of the phenomena of nature, of number, magnitude, and geometric forms..