New conceptions in science : with a foreword on the relations of science and progress / by Carl Snyder.

Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: New conceptions in science : with a foreword on the relations of science and progress / by Carl Snyder. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    large degree, by the lack of exact measurements. That is all that divides the astronomy of that day from our own. These two acute and resourceful Alexandrians were the immediate predecessors of the true founder of astronomical science. That honor belongs to Hip- parchus; it was he who discovered the precession of the equinoxes, who made the first catalogue of stars, who invented the planisphere, and first ap- plied the methods of spherical trigonometry to the solution of astronomical problems. Whether the great Hipparchus was actually a professor in the Alexandrian school, as had been disputed, matters little. Spiritually, if not corporeally, he was of its line; its heritage was his; his work was continued by the savants of Alexandria, and culminated in the masterly expositions of Ptolemy (a.d. 130). The latter’s conceptions of the world dominated the minds of men for 1500 years, and until Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton had come. Alexandria must have been, likewise, the seat of the first great medical school. It was founded by Philadelphus upon the sure basis of anatomy, and its professors were authorized to practise dis- section. To touch a corpse in Egypt was held to be an abomination, but the strong hand of Ptolemy resolutely carried out his design, which was to know not merely the true structure of the body but the