A History of Science, vol 4 | Page 3

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A History of Science, Volume 1, by Henry Smith Williams
Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software
A HISTORY OF SCIENCE BY HENRY SMITH WILLIAMS, M.D.,
LL.D. ASSISTED BY EDWARD H. WILLIAMS, M.D.
IN FIVE VOLUMES VOLUME IV.
MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHEMICAL AND
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
A HISTORY OF SCIENCE
BOOK IV
MODERN DEVELOPMENT OF THE CHEMICAL AND
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
AS regards chronology, the epoch covered in the present volume is
identical with that viewed in the preceding one. But now as regards
subject matter we pass on to those diverse phases of the physical world
which are the field of the chemist, and to those yet more intricate
processes which have to do with living organisms. So radical are the
changes here that we seem to be entering new worlds; and yet, here as
before, there are intimations of the new discoveries away back in the
Greek days. The solution of the problem of respiration will remind us

that Anaxagoras half guessed the secret; and in those diversified studies
which tell us of the Daltonian atom in its wonderful transmutations, we
shall be reminded again of the Clazomenian philosopher and his
successor Democritus.
Yet we should press the analogy much too far were we to intimate that
the Greek of the elder day or any thinker of a more recent period had
penetrated, even in the vaguest way, all of the mysteries that the
nineteenth century has revealed in the fields of chemistry and biology.
At the very most the insight of those great Greeks and of the wonderful
seventeenth-century philosophers who so often seemed on the verge of
our later discoveries did no more than vaguely anticipate their
successors of this later century. To gain an accurate, really specific
knowledge of the properties of elementary bodies was reserved for the
chemists of a recent epoch. The vague Greek questionings as to organic
evolution were world-wide from the precise inductions of a Darwin. If
the mediaeval Arabian endeavored to dull the knife of the surgeon with
the use of drugs, his results hardly merit to be termed even an
anticipation of modern anaesthesia. And when we speak of preventive
medicine--of bacteriology in all its phases--we have to do with a
marvellous field of which no previous generation of men had even the
slightest inkling.
All in all, then, those that lie before us are perhaps the most wonderful
and the most fascinating of all the fields of science. As the chapters of
the preceding book carried us out into a macrocosm of inconceivable
magnitude, our present studies are to reveal a microcosm of equally
inconceivable smallness. As the studies of the