Excerpt from 2000 Years of Science, Hippocrates to Leonardo: October 17, 1952 to January 3, 1953The arrangement of the exhibition is chronological rather than by branches of knowledge; this enables the visitor more easily to understand the distinct contributions of the several eras and of the separate national groups. Beginning with the age of classical antiquity, scientific thought was dominated for nearly a thousand years by the encyclopaedic learning of the ancient Greeks. After the downfall of the Roman Empire, the mantle of Hellenic supremacy fell upon the shoulders of the Muslim scientists. As the Greeks had controlled scientific thought in classical days, so the Arab men of science held swayover the learning of the Dark Ages. With the advent of the thirteenth century, Western Europe contributed its own original researchers. Though the promise held forth by this greatest of centuries was not fulfilled in the two succeeding ones, this brilliant era laid the foundations for the scientific thought of the sixteenth century from which all modern learning has stemmed in practically unbroken succession.Since this exhibition itself provides a survey of what the several successive cultures produced, it may be well to refer briefly to certain disciplines as a whole. Some fields of knowl edge were specially favored in these two thousand years; there is, for example, a remarkable continuity in the history and development of medicine and astronomy. Hardly a decade passed without some great discovery being made. With other sciences it was quite a different matter; chemistry (unless alchemy be included here) and physics made precious little progress from the theorizing of Empedocles or the practical application of theoretical principles by Archimedes until comparatively modern times.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.