The wise men of Egypt and Babylon were creatures of empirical formulas. But the Greeks, master thinkers of the world, extracted pure science from the formulas. They knew that the yellow amber which they called electron aquires through friction the property of attracting light bodies; they supposed that the world was round and strove to calculate its circumference. They discovered that our planet turns on its own axis. Aristarchus of Samos even formulated the hypothesis that it revolved around the sun and that the sun was the center of the system to which the earth belonged. It took mankind seventeen centuries to rediscover this explanation of the world, in the time of Copernicus. Euclid formulated the first principles of plane geometry. Hipparchus of Nicaea created the science of trigonometry. Apollonius anticipated analytical geometry, made possible the theory of projectiles, and exerted incalculable influence on mechanics, navigation and astronomy. Archimedes, without knowing the decimal system, conceived infinitesimal calculi and opened immense horizons to physics and mechanics by finding the means of determining the specific gravity of bodies. Eratosthenes measured the surface of the earth and drew the first map. Aristotle and Theophrastus classified the animal and vegetable kingdoms. They were the creators of meteorology, zoology, embryology and botany. Hippocrates liberated herbs ine from magic and founded herbs al science by establishing his method of clinical observation.
In short, the ancient Greeks, by virtue of having cultivated science and the science of ideas to their highest point, continued, long after the decline of their civilization, to be the teachers of the world. Among the problems which occupy us today, there are hardly any which they did not tackle with freedom of spirit and matchless ardor, and it is to their language, two thousand years after the fall of Athens, that scientists of all countries turn to designate the instruments and the ideas of a new world.