Part 6

After Archimedes the greatest mechanical genius of the University of Alexandria was Heron. To him we owe a series of inventions and discoveries in hydrostatics and the {80} construction of various mechanical toys that have been used in the laboratories since. There is even a little engine run by steam--the aeolipile--invented by him, which shows how close the old Greeks were to the underlying principles of discoveries that were destined to come only after the development of industries created a demand for them in the after time. Heron's engine is a globe of copper mounted on pivots, containing water, which on being heated produces steam that finds its way out through tubes bent so as to open in opposite directions on each side of the globe. The impact of the escaping steam on the air sets the globe revolving, and the principle of the turbine engine at work is clear. We have used steam for nearly 200 years always with a reciprocating type of movement, so that to apply energy in one direction the engine has had to move its parts backwards and forwards, but here was a direct-motion turbine engine in the long ago. Our great steamboats, the _Lusitania_ and the _Mauretania,_ now cross the ocean by the use of this principle and not by the reciprocating engine, and it is evident that it is along these lines the future developments of the application of steam are to take place.

Another extremely interesting invention made by Heron is the famous fountain called by his name, and which still is used to illustrate principles in pneumatics in our classrooms and laboratories. By means of condensed air water is made {81} to spring from a jet in a continuous stream and seems paradoxically to rise higher than its source. Probably his best work in the domain of physics is that on pneumatics in which are given not only a series of discussions, but of experiments and demonstrations on the elasticity of air and of steam. These experiments could only have been conducted in what we now call a physical laboratory. Indeed these inventions of his are still used in laboratories for demonstration purposes. While we may think, then, that the foundation of laboratories was reserved to our day, there is abundant evidence for their existence at the University of Alexandria. We shall return to this subject a little later, when the evidence from other departments has been presented, and then it will be clear, I think, that the laboratory methods were favorite modes of teaching at the University of Alexandria and were in use in nearly all departments of science both for research and for demonstration purposes.

The work of the other great teacher at Alexandria which was to influence mankind next to that of Euclid, was not destined to withstand the critical study of succeeding generations, though it served for some 1,500 years as the basis of their thinking in astronomy. This was the work of Ptolemy, the great professor of astronomy at Alexandria of the first century after Christ. It is easy for us now to see the absurdity of Ptolemy's system. It is even hard for us to {82} understand how men could have accepted it. It must not be forgotten, however, that it solved all the astronomical problems of fifteen centuries and that it even enabled men, by its application, to foretell events in the heavens, and scientific prophecy is sometimes claimed to be the highest test of the truth of a system of scientific thought. Even so late as 1620 Francis Bacon refused to accept Copernicanism, already before the world for more than a century, because it did not, as it seemed to him, solve all the difficulties, while Ptolemy's system did. As great an astronomer as Tycho Brahe living in the century after Copernicus still clung to Ptolemy's teaching. It must not be forgotten that when Galileo restated Copernicanism, the reason for the rejection of his teaching by all the astronomers of Europe almost without exception, was that his reasons were not conclusive. They preferred to hold on to the old which had been so satisfying than to accept the new which seemed dubious. Their wisdom in this will be best appreciated from the fact that none of Galileo's reasons maintained themselves.

Though his system has been rejected, still Ptolemy must be looked up to as one of the great teachers of mankind and his work the "Almagest" as one of the great contributions to human knowledge. The fact that he represented a climax of astronomical development at Alexandria some four centuries after the foundation of {83} that university, serves to show how much that first modern university occupied itself for all the centuries of its highest prestige, with physical science as well as with mathematics. Astronomy, physics, especially hydrostatics and mechanics, were all wonderfully developed. Generations of professors had given themselves to research and to the publication of important works quite as in the modern time, and Alexandria may well claim the right to be placed beside any university for what it accomplished in physical science, and rank high if not highest in the list of great research institutions adding new knowledge to old, leading men across the borderland of the unknown in science and furnishing that precious incentive to growing youth to occupy itself with the scientific problems of the world around it.

The most important part of the scientific work of the University of Alexandria to my mind remains to be spoken of, and that is the medical department. It is a well-known law in the history of medicine that, whenever medical schools are attached to universities in such a way that students who come to the medical department have been thoroughly trained by preliminary studies and have such standards of scholarship as obtain in genuine university work, then great progress in medicine and in medical education is accomplished. This was eminently the case at Alexandria. The departments of the arts, of linguistics and of philosophy were gathered {84} around the great building known in Greek as the Mouseion, a word that has come to us through the Latin under the guise of Museum. This temple of the Muses contained collections of various kinds and near it was situated the great library. Not far away was the Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, the Goddess of Life, around which were centred the biological sciences, and close by was the medical school. As teachers for this medical school some of the greatest physicians of the time were secured by the first Ptolemy and a great period in medical history began.

The practical wisdom guiding the Ptolemys in the organization of this medical school will be best appreciated from the fact that they took the first step by inviting two distinguished physicians, the products of the two greatest medical schools of the time, to lay the foundations at Alexandria. They were probably the best investigators of their time and they had behind them fine traditions of research, thorough observation and conservative reasoning and theorizing on scientific subjects. Erasistratos was a disciple of Metrodoros, the son-in-law of Aristotle. He had studied for a time under another great teacher, Chrysippos of Cnidos. We are likely to know much more of Cos than of Cnidos because of the reputation in the after time of Hippocrates, whose name is so closely connected with Cos that the two are almost invariably associated, but Cnidos was one of the great university towns of the later Greek {85} civilization. Eudoxus the astronomer, Ctesias the writer on Persian history, and Sostratos the builder of the great lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world, the Pharos at Alexandria, were products of this university. Its medical school was famous when Cos had somewhat declined, and Chrysippos was one of the leading physicians of the world and one of the acknowledged great teachers of medicine when Erasistratos studied under him at Cnidos, and obtained that scientific training and incentive to original research which was to prove so valuable to Alexandria.

His colleague, Herophilos, was quite as distinguished as Erasistratos and owed his training to the rival school of Cos. Whether it was intentional or not to secure these two products of rival schools for the healthy spirit of competition that would come from it, and because they wanted to have at Alexandria the emulation that would naturally be aroused by such a condition, is not known, but there can be no doubt of the wisdom of the choice and of the foresight which dictated it. Herophilos had studied medicine under Praxagoras, one of the best-known successors of Hippocrates. While distinguished as a surgeon he had more influence on medicine than almost any man of his time, except possibly Erasistratos. He was, however, a great anatomist and, above all, a zoologist who, according to tradition, had obtained his knowledge of animals from the most {86} careful zootomy of literally thousands of specimens. His fair fame is blackened by the other tradition that he practised vivisection on human beings--criminals being turned over to him for that purpose by the Ptolemys, who were deeply interested in his researches. The traditions in this matter, however, serve to confirm the idea of his zeal as an investigator and his ardent labors in medical science. Tertullian declares that he dissected at least 600 living persons. We know that he did much dissection of human cadavers and there is question whether Tertullian's statement was not gross exaggeration due to confusion between dissection and vivisection.

Both of these men did some magnificent work upon the brain. This being the first period in the history of humanity when human beings could be dissected freely, it is not surprising that they should take up brain anatomy with ardent devotion, in the hope to solve some of the many human problems that seemed to centre in this complex organ. Before this anatomy had been learned mainly from animals, and as human beings differ most widely from animals by their brain, naturally, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, anatomists gave themselves to thorough work on this structure where so many discoveries were waiting to be made. After the brain and nervous system the heart was studied, and Erasistratos' description of its valves, of its general structure and even of its physiology, show how much he {87} knew. To know something of the work of these two anatomists is to see at once what is accomplished in a university medical school where medical science, and not the mere practice of medicine alone, is the object of teachers and students. I have told the story of this in my address before the graduates of the St. Louis Medical University Medical School, and here I shall simply refer you to that. [Footnote 7]

[Footnote 7: The details of what was accomplished in the Medical Department at Alexandria were given to some extent at least in the lecture in Brooklyn, but are omitted here in order to avoid repetitions in the printed copy.]

Of course all these studies at the university could not be conducted without laboratory equipment. Of itself the dissecting room is a laboratory and until very recent years it was the only laboratory that most of the medical schools had. The numerous experiments in vivisection, if they really took place, required special arrangements and could only be conducted in what we now call a laboratory of physiology. This is not idle talk but represents the realities of the situation. Other laboratories there must have been. It would be quite impossible to conceive of a man like Archimedes carrying on his work, especially of the application of mathematical principles to mechanics, of the demonstration of mechanical principles themselves and of the invention of the many interesting machines which he made, without what we call laboratory facilities. The Ptolemys were {88} interested in his work, they supplied him with a place to do it, many of his advanced students at least must have been interested in this work so that, as I see it, there was what we would now call a physical laboratory in connection with his teaching at the University of Alexandria.

What we know about the development of zoology under Erasistratos and Herophilos would seem to indicate that there must have been such special facilities for the investigation of zoological problems as we would call a laboratory of physiology. A magnificent collection of plants was made for the university and these were studied and classified, and while we hear nothing of their dissection, there were at least botanical rooms for methodical study, if not botanical laboratories. Ptolemy's work represented the culmination of astronomical information which had been gathered for several centuries. This could only be brought together in what we would now call an observatory and this represents another laboratory of physical science. Our laboratory work, therefore, must have been anticipated to a great extent. We must not forget that our university laboratories are only a couple of generations old altogether and that they represent a very recent development of educational work. It is extremely interesting, therefore, to find them anticipated in germ at least, if not in actuality, at the first modern university of which we have sufficiently complete records to enable us to {89} appreciate just the sort of work that was being done and the ways and modes of its education.

I think that even this comparatively meagre description of the first university of which we have knowledge makes it very clear that Alexandria deserves the name of the First Modern University. It resembled our own in so many ways that I, for one, find it impossible to discover any essential difference between them. At Alexandria they anticipated every phase of modern university education. Their literature was studied from a scientific standpoint. They devoted themselves to an overwhelming extent to the study of the physical sciences and mathematics, their professors were inventors, developers of practical applications of science, experts to whom appeal was made when important scientific questions had to be settled, and their teaching was done with demonstrations and a laboratory system very like our own. Nothing that I know illustrates better the tendency of human achievement not to represent advance but to occur in cycles than the story of this first modern university. That is why I have tried to tell it to you as an exquisite illustration of How Old the New Is in Education.

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MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES

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"Qui ad pauca respiciunt faciliter pronuntiant." --AN OLD PHILOSOPHER.

[Those who know little readily pronounce judgment.]

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MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES [Footnote 8]

[Footnote 8: The material for this address was originally gathered for a lecture in a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, some 500 in number; teachers in the Catholic public schools of New York City, and for corresponding lectures to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood. The address was delivered substantially in its present form at the Catholic Club of Cornell University, under the title "The Relations of the Church to Science."]

Probably nothing is more surprising to any one who knows the history of science and of scientific education than the attitude of mind of the present generations, educated as they are mainly along scientific lines, toward the supposed lack of interest of preceding generations in science. Our scholars and professors seem to be almost universally of the opinion that the last few generations are the first who ever devoted themselves seriously to the study of science, or who, indeed, were free enough from superstitions and persuasions and beliefs of many kinds to give themselves up freely to scientific investigation. In the light of what we know or, perhaps I should say, what we are coming to know now with regard to the educational interests of the men of the various times, this would be an amusing, if it were not an amazing, presumption on our part. Over and over again in the world's history men have been {94} interested in science, both in pure science and in applied science, in the culture sciences and in the practical sciences.

Apparently men forget that philosophy is science and ethics is science and metaphysics is scientific and logic is science and there is a science of language. Of course the protest that will be heard at once is that what we now mean by science is physical science. Even taking the word science in this narrower sense, however, how can people forget that our mathematics comes to us from the old Greeks, that old Greek contributions to medicine and, above all, to the scientific side of it still remain valuable, that physical science, pure and applied, developed wonderfully at the University of Alexandria, that there was a beginning of chemistry and the great foundations of astronomy laid in the long ago, and that men evidently were quite as much interested in the problems of nature around them as they have been at any time: Archimedes insisting that if he only had some place to rest his lever he could move the world, inventing the screw pump, fashioning his great burning-mirrors, and a little later Heron inventing the first germ of the turbine engine, while all the time their colleagues and contemporaries were developing the mathematics in connection with them, are studying both pure and applied science. It is simply failure to state in terms of the present what was accomplished in the past, that has permitted people to retain {95} curious notions of the absence of science in antiquity.

Probably most people would be quite ready to concede, and especially after even a brief calling to their attention of some educational facts, that the old Greeks did enjoy a scientific educational development; it would probably even be admitted that the traditions of science of various kinds from Egypt, from Chaldea, from Babylonia point to previous eras of scientific development. They would probably still insist, however, that there had been a long interval of utter neglect of science lasting nearly 2,000 years and that our interest is properly a resurrection of science-study after a long burial. They do not even hesitate to blame the educational authorities of the interval for their failure to occupy themselves with scientific ideas and are prone to find reasons of various kinds to account for this failure. As the Church was dominant in education during the Middle Ages this makes a ready scapegoat, and so we have heard much of the repression of scientific study by the ecclesiastical authorities, and the determined effort made to keep men from inquiring about the problems of nature around them, because this would lead them to think for themselves and have doubts with regard to faith. Indeed this attitude of mind in the history of science is so usual that it is a commonplace, and men who are supposed to be scholars talk off-handedly of direct Church opposition to science.

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There is no doubt at all that the Church was the commanding influence in education during the Middle Ages. Whatever was studied was taken up because the Church authorities were interested in it. Whatever was not studied was absent from the curriculum because of their lack of interest. While study was magnificently encouraged there were many subjects, though not near so many as is often thought, that were repressed. The Church must certainly be held responsible in every way for the teaching of the Middle Ages, both as regards its extent and its limitations. The charters of the universities were granted by the Popes. The universities themselves usually were cathedral schools which had developed, and to which had become attached various graduate departments. The ecclesiastical authorities were in control of them. The rector of the university was usually the archdeacon of the cathedral or the chancellor of the diocese. The professors at the universities were practically all of them in clerical orders, and the great body of the students were clerics, in the sense that they had assumed at least minor orders and were supposed to be in preparation for a clerical life. This was, indeed, the one sure way to secure exemption from the military duties of the time and to prevent interference of various kinds by the civil power with the leisure necessary for study. No man had any essential rights in the Middle Ages except such as were conferred on him by some organization {97} to which he belonged, and the clerical order was particularly powerful.

Now the interesting phase of the education afforded by these universities under ecclesiastical control with clerical students and professors constituting the large majority of members, with the influence of the religious orders paramount for centuries, is that it was entirely scientific in character and largely occupied with the physical sciences, though the culture sciences formed the basis of it. Huxley, though he is surely the last man of recent times who would be suspected for a moment of exaggerating the scientific significance of mediaeval education, recognized this fact very well and stated it very emphatically. In his Inaugural Address on Universities Actual and Ideal, delivered as Rector of Aberdeen University after discussing the subject with evident careful preparation, he said:

"The scholars of the mediaeval universities seem to have studied grammar, logic and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry; astronomy, theology and music. Thus, their work, however imperfect and faulty, judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical and physical science and art. {98} _And I doubt if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does."_ (Italics mine.)

Of course Huxley says, "sometimes it may be in caricature." We must not forget, however, that first even Huxley hesitates to say that it is caricature, for he knows how easy it is to be mistaken in our estimation of the true significance of an old-time mode of thought, and then, too, he knew comparatively how little we were sure of the real thoughts and conclusions of these men of the olden time because of defective sympathy and even defective knowledge of their work. Our knowledge in this matter has greatly increased since his time. As a matter of fact, the more we know about these old masters and the mediaeval universities the less are we likely to think of their work as lacking in seriousness in any sense. The quarter of a century that has elapsed since Huxley so cogently urged this at Aberdeen has brought many facts unknown to us before and has shown us what good work, even in the physical sciences, was accomplished in these old-time universities.