he made many curious mistakes, which ham-strung the human mind
for ages. One was the assertion that two objects of different weight,
dropped from the same height to the earth, would strike the earth at
different intervals of time, the heavier first; when Galileo denied this
theory and offered to disprove it by experiment, the pious Christians
of Pisa scouted and scorned him; when he ascended the Leaning Tower
and dropped two iron balls, one of one pound weight, the other of one
hundred, and both struck the ground at the same instant, they refused
to accept the demonstration, and drove him out of the city; so strong
was the hold of even the errors of Pagan Aristotle on Christian credulity.
Aristotle had not read the cosmic revelations of Moses, and was
ignorant of the true history of Creation as revealed through him. He
discovered sea shells and the fossil remains of marine animals on the
tops of the mountains of Greece, and embedded far down from the
surface in the sides of the mountain gorges; he noted that the rocks lay
in great layers or strata one above another, with different kinds of
fossils in the several strata. In his Pagan imagination Aristotle
commented on this: that if sea-shells were on the tops of mountains far
from the sea, why, to get there the tops of the mountains must once have
been in the bottom of the sea, the rocks formed under the sea, and
the shells and other animal remains embedded in them must once have
lived and died in the sea and there have been deposited in the mud of
the bottom before it hardened into rock. If Aristotle had climbed Pike’s
Peak, he would have found great beds of ocean coral in the rocks there;
sea shell-fish and sponges — (which Aristotle himself first discovered
to be animals) — in the rocky walls of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.
Theophrastus (c. 373-287 B.C.), disciple and successor of Aristotle
as head of the Peripatetic School of philosophy; his chief renown
was as the first of the botanists, on which study he left some sixteen
books; for 1800 years after his death the science lay dormant; not a
single new discovery in that subject was made until after the close of
the millennium of the Christian Ages of Faith.
Aristarchus (c. 220-143 B.C.) was a celebrated astronomer of the
new school at Alexandria. From his predecessors he knew that the
earth revolved around the sun, and how the plane of the ecliptic was
designed; he calculated the inclination of earth’s axis to the pole as the
angle of 23 1/2 degrees, and thus verified the obliquity of the ecliptic,
and explained the succession of the seasons. Aristarchus had not read
Moses on the solid firmament and flat earth; he clearly maintained that
day and night were due to the spinning of the earth on its own axis
every twenty-four hours; his only extant work is “On the Sizes and
Distances of the Sun and Moon,” wherein by rigorous and elegant
geometry and reasoning he reached results inaccurate only because of
the imperfect state of knowledge in his time. By exquisite calculations
he added 1/1623 of a day to Callipsus’ estimate of 365 1/2 days for the
length of the solar year; and is said to have invented a hemispherical
sundial.
Hipparchus (c. 150 B.C.) made the first catalogue of stars, to the
number of over 1,000; but his master achievement was the discovery
and calculation of the “precession of the equinoxes” about 130 B.C.
Without telescope or instruments, and with no Mosaic Manual on
Astronomy to muddle his thought, by the powers of mathematical
reasoning from observation he detected the complex movements of
the earth, first in rapid rotation on its own axis, and a much slower
circular and irregular movement around the region of the poles, which
causes the equator to cut the plane of the ecliptic at a slightly different
point each year; this he estimated at not more than fifty seconds
of a degree each year, and that the forward revolution in “precession”
was completed in about 26,000 years. Such are the powers of the
human mind untrammeled by revelation.
Archimedes (287-212 B.C.), one of the most distinguished men of
science who ever lived. He discovered the law of specific gravity, in
connection with the fraudulent alloys put into Hiero’s crown; so excited
was he when the thought struck him that, crying “Eureka” he jumped
from his bath and ran home naked to proclaim the discovery. He
discovered the laws governing the lever, and the principles of the pulley,
and the famous endless water-screw used to this day in Egypt to
raise water from the Nile for irrigation; he was the first to determine
the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle, calculating
“pi” to be smaller than 3-1/7 and greater than 3-10/71, which is
pretty close for a heathen not having the “Book of Numbers” before
him. He made other discoveries and inventions too numerous to relate;
he disregarded his mechanical contrivances as beneath the dignity of
pure science.
Euclid (c. 300 B.C.) is too well known for his “Principles of Geometry”
to need more than mention. Erastosthenes (c. 276-194 B.C.) was
the Librarian of the great Library of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, at
Alexandria, containing some 700,000 volumes. He invented the
imaginary lines, parallels of longitude and latitude, which adorn all our
globes and maps to this day. Not knowing the revelation that the earth
is flat, he measured its circumference. Noticing that a pillar set up at
Alexandria cast a certain shadow at noon on the summer solstice,
while a similar pillar at Syene cast no shadow at that time, and was
thus on the tropic; he measured the distance between the two places,
as 5,000 stadia, about 574 miles; described a circle with a radius equal
to the height of the pillar at Alexandria, found the length of the small
are formed on it by the shadow, which was 1/50 of the circle, and
represented the arc of the earth’s circle between Alexandria and
Syene; multiplying the distance by 50 he obtained 28,700 miles as
the circumference of the earth; a figure excessive due to mismeasurement,
but a magnificent intellectual accomplishment. Erastosthenes was
also the founder of scientific chronology, calculating the dates of the
chief political and literary events back to the supposed time of the
fall of Troy; a date quite as uncertain as that of the later birth of
Jesus Christ from which the monk Dennis the Little essayed to fix
the subsequent chronology of Christian history.
Hero of Alexandria (c. 130 B.C.) discovered the principle of the
working-power of steam and devised the first steam-engines. In his
Pneumatica he describes the olipyle, which may be called a primitive
steam reaction turbine; he also mentions another device which may be
described as the prototype of the pressure engine. (Encyc. Brit. xxi, 351-2.)
Strabo (c. 63 B.C.-19 A.D.), the most famous early geographer
and a noted historian; he left a Geography of the world, as then known,
in seventeen books, and made a map of the world; travelled over much
of it, and described what he saw. From a comparison of the shape
of Vesuvius, not then a “burning mountain,” with the active +tna, he
forecast that it might some day become active, as it did in 79 A.D. to
the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, described by the Roman
philosopher and natural historian, Pliny, who overlooked the Star of
Bethlehem, and the earthquake and eclipse of Calvary. Strabo was
ignorant of the cosmogony of Moses and the Flood of Noah; so he
declared that the fossil shells which he discovered in rocks far inland from
the sea proved that those rocks had been formed under the sea by silt
brought down by rivers, in which living shell animals had become
embedded. If Moses had revealed this interesting fact, much human
persecution and suffering would have been avoided.
The principles of Evolution were discovered and taught by most
of the ancient Greek philosophers above named and many others, all of
whom were profoundly ignorant of the cosmogony of Genesis, and who
“endeavored to substitute a natural explanation of the cosmos for
the old myths.” Anaximander (588-624 B.C.), though he had not
read Genesis, anticipated to the very word “slime” used in the True
Bible as the material of animal and human creation; “he introduced
the idea of primordial terrestrial slime, a mixture of earth and water,
from which, under the influence of the sun’s heat, plants, animals, and
human beings were directly produced.” Empedocles of Agrigentum
(495-435 B.C.) “may justly be called the father of the evolution idea.
… All organisms arose through the fortuitous play of the two
great forces of Nature upon the four elements.” Anaxagoras
(500-428) “was the first to trace the origin of animals and plants
to pre-existing germs in the air and ether.” Aristotle (384-322 B.C.),
the first great naturalist, shows “in his four essays upon the parts,
locomotion, generation, and vital principles of animals, that he fully
understood adaptation in its modern sense; … he rightly conceived
of life as the function of the organism, not as a separate principle;
… he develops the idea of purposive progresses in the development of
bodily parts and functions.” The doctrine is very substantially
developed by the Roman Lucretius, 99-55 B.C. (H.F. Osborn, From the
Greeks to Darwin, pp. 50, et seq.)
The vital germs of virtually every modern science had thus their
origin and some notable development in the fertile minds of the Greek
thinkers and in their great schools of thought, in the centuries which
preceded the Advent of the “Perfect Teacher” and his divinely
instituted successors in schoolcraft. If these profound researches into
Nature had been included in the Curriculum of the Church, rather than
fire and sword employed to extirpate them and all who ventured to
pursue them, Holy Church would not have had the “Dark Ages of
Faith” to record and apologize for. To what perfection of Civilization
and Knowledge might Humanity have arrived in these 2000 years
wasted on the Supernatural, and the “Sacred Science of Christianity”!