Members of three foreign nations have worked in friendly rivalry to learn the buried history of Crete . . . and Cretan soil may be said to have been found to teem with pre-Hellenic antiquities. The hopes of archaeologists have been abundantly justified. We have followed them and arrived at the home of the first European civilization. - Hawes. Crete, the Forerunner of Greece. Even at this exceedingly early stage of human progress, the various branches of industry had become fairly separated and specialized, more so, perhaps, than in the Homeric period, and a considerable variety of tools was employed in the various crafts. The carpenter was evidently a highly skilled craftsman, and the tools which have survived show the variety of work which he undertook. At Knossos a carefully hewn tomb held, along with the body of the dead artificer, specimens of the tools of his trade-a bronze saw, adze, and chisel. 'A whole carpenter's kit lay concealed in a cranny of a Gournia house left behind in the owner's hurried flight when the town was attacked and burned. He used saws long and short, heavy chisels for stone and light for wood, awls, nails, files, and axes much battered by use; and what is very important to note, they resemble in shape the tools of to-day so closely that they furnish one of the strongest links between the first great civilization of Europe and our own.' Such tools were, of course, of bronze. Probably the chief industry of the island was the manufacture and export of olive oil. The palace at Knossos has its Room of the Olive Press, and its conduit for conveying the product of the press to the place where it was to be stored for use; and probably many of the great jars now in the magazines were used for the storage of this indispensable article. - Baikie. Sea Kings of Crete. THE IRON AGE. THE GREEKS OR HELLENES. Soon after the arrival of the Iron Age, and probably not far from 1200-1000 B.C., a new people became prominent on the shores of the Egean. These were the Greeks or, as they called themselves, Hellenes, — inhabitants of Greece or Hellas. Their precise origin is unknown, but they were undoubtedly of Indo-European stock and probably came, in part at least, from the north. It has been conjectured that their conquest of the existing inhabitants was facilitated by, if not due to, their possession of weapons of iron. Of the earlier part of this new period (1200-800 B.C.) we have only the legendary accounts of the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, which are now generally believed to be based upon, if not actually descriptive of, episodes of this age. The Hellenes soon supplanted the Phoenicians as traders in the southern Ægean; and "if we now leave the monuments of the Egyptian temple or the Assyrian palace and turn to the pages of the Iliad and the Odyssey at once we are in the open air, and in the sunshine of a natural life. The human faculties have free play in word and deed. . . From the first the Greek is resolved to confront the facts of life." - Jebb. REFERENCES FOR READING OSBORN, H. F. Men of the Old Stone Age. LUBBOCK, SIR JOHN (LORD AVEBURY). Prehistoric Times (7th Edition). MYRES, J. L. The Dawn of History. TYLOR, E. B. Anthropology and Primitive Culture. HADDON, A. C. History of Anthropology. JASTROW, MORRIS, Jr. HAWES, C. H. AND H. The Civilization of Babylonia and Assyria. CHAPTER II EARLY MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE IN BABYLONIA AND EGYPT In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another destroys. In Mathematics alone each generation builds a new story to the old structure. — Hankel. A HISTORY of science may be based on some more or less definite logical system of definitions and classifications. As a matter of historical evolution, however, such systems and such points of view belong to relatively recent and mature periods. Science has grown without very much self-consciousness as to how it is itself defined, or any great concern as to the distinction between pure and applied science, or as to the boundaries between the different sciences. Mathematics, for example, has had its roots in the human need of exact statement as to both number and form in all sorts of affairs, and on the other hand in the analytical faculties of the human mind, which have shaped the development of the pure science and given it in course of time its deductive stamp. The origin of a science can seldom be precisely determined, and the more ancient the science the more difficult is the attainment of such precision. The periods at which primitive men of different races began to have conscious appreciation of the phenomena of nature, of number, magnitude, and geometric form, can never be known, nor the time at which their elementary notions began to be so classified and associated as to deserve the name of science. Very early in any civilization, however, mathematics must obviously have taken its rise in simple processes of counting and adding, of time measurement in primitive astronomy, of the geometry and arithmetic involved in land measurement and in architectural design and construction. We can safely sketch certain rough outlines of the prehistoric picture, and we can to some extent verify these, on the one hand, by archæological evidence, on the other, by present-day observations of backward races still in their prehistoric stage. PRIMITIVE ASTRONOMICAL NOTIONS. On the astronomical side the most obvious fact is the division of time into periods of light and darkness by the apparent revolution of the sun about the earth. With closer attention it must soon have been observed that the relative length of day and night gradually changes, and that this change is attended by a wide range of remarkable phenomena. At the time of shortest days, vegetable and animal life (in the north temperate zone) is checked-by severe cold. With the gradually lengthening days, however, snow and ice sooner or later disappear, vegetation is revived, birds return from the warmer south, all nature is quickened. In the symbolism of the beautiful old myth, the sleeping princess, our earth, is aroused by the kiss of the sun-prince. The longest days and those which succeed them are a period of excessive heat and of luxuriant vegetation, followed by harvests as the days shorten, towards the completion of the great annual cycle. In time, closer observers, noting the stars, discovered that corresponding with this great periodic change are gradual variations in the starry hemisphere visible at night, that in other words the sun's place among the stars is progressively changing, that it is in fact describing a path completed in a large number of days, which after repeated counting is found to be 365. It is also found that the midday height of the sun above the southern horizon shares in the annual cycle. The determination of the number of days in the year is a matter of very gradual approximation, possible only to men who have already attained some command of numbers and the habit of preserving records extending over a long series of years. For there is no well-marked beginning of the year as of the day. An erroneous determination of the number of days becomes apparent only after a number of years, increasing with the accuracy of the original approximation. If, for example, the year is assumed to be exactly 365 days, that is, about six hours too short, the festivals and other dates will slip back about 24 days in a century, and thus lose their original cor respondence with climatic conditions. A revision of the calendar will become necessary. Still another natural period is introduced by the motion of the moon, which seems like the sun to have a daily motion about the earth, and also to describe a closed path among the stars in a period of about 29 days. Unlike the sun, however, the moon has during this period a remarkable change of apparent shape and luminosity from "new" to "full" and back again. The study of the day, the year, the month, thus naturally determined by the great heavenly bodies has led to the development of the calendar with greater and greater accuracy, the most recent rectification of the length of the year dating only (in England) from 1752. The difficulty of expressing the precise length of the month and the year in days, causing the imperfection of early calendars, has, on the other hand, reacted to the advantage of mathematical astronomy by demanding the greatest possible precision both of observation and of the computation based upon it. THE PLANETS. Another celestial phenomenon, though less obvious than the foregoing, must have found wide recognition in prehistoric times. The stars vary widely in grouping and individual brilliancy, but in general their relative positions are sensibly constant. To this constancy, however, five exceptions are easily discovered in the wandering motion of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which like sun and moon have their several paths among the stars but with seemingly irregular motions. Corresponding to these seven bodies there was set up by prehistoric people an arbitrary division of time into weeks of seven days, "the most ancient monument of astronomical knowledge.' The correspondence with the planets is still preserved in the names of the days of the week in several modern languages.1 The ITALIAN lundi |