Pioneers of Science

[Illustration: FIG. 1.--Archimedes.]

Besides this, however, many of their discoveries were ultimately lost to the world, some, as at Alexandria, by fire--the bigoted work of a Mohammedan conqueror--some by irruption of barbarians; and all were buried so long and so completely by the night of the dark ages, that they had to be rediscovered almost as absolutely and completely as though they had never been. Some of the names of antiquity we shall have occasion to refer to; so I have arranged some of them in chronological order on page 4, and as a representative one I may specially emphasize Archimedes, one of the greatest men of science there has ever been, and the father of physics.

The only effective link between the old and the new science is afforded by the Arabs. The dark ages come as an utter gap in the scientific history of Europe, and fo