Early history pictures two great Asiatic races struggling for supremacy in India. They were the Aryans, a fair-skinned people, and the Dravidians, a colored people. The Aryans succeeded in displacing the Dravidians in the great plains, upon which they settled and developed large cities, important world commerce, and contributed great art works and scientific and philosophical discoveries to the world's stores. The Dravidians retired to the hill country, where their representatives still live.
The minds of the various Indian peoples have always been strongly philosophical. This led them to the development of numerous religious sects and philosophical systems, and they made important mathematical discoveries. While the scientific bent of the ancient Greeks was of a concrete nature, which tended toward geometrical proofs for scientific problems, that of the ancient peoples of India was toward numerical symbolism and arithmetical proofs. We find that when the Greeks were developing geometry the Indians were contributing to arithmetic and algebra.
The Chinese closely resembled the ancient Indians in the philosophical tendency of their minds; but, owing perhaps to the different conditions under which they lived, they were more concrete in their ideas. They also made progress in mathematics and developed medicine, chemistry, metallurgy, and many of the sciences which were applied to commercial and industrial uses. The progress made in mathematics in China was transmitted to Egypt, and therefore to Europe, through India. Among early Chinese discoveries in mathematics were methods of solving numerical equations and the development of magic squares and circles, which gave a great stimulus to studies in geometry and astronomy.
The Arabs, Greeks, and Romans took up the discoveries of the Asiatic peoples, and the Egyptians enlarged them and passed them forward to us. The Arabs solved cubic equations by geometrical means, perfected the basic principles of trigonometry, and made great advances in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and astronomy.
A survey of the early history of science indicates that from the remotest period man was engaged in grappling with the great principle of causation. Progress was necessarily slow at first on account of the scarcity of tested data. Then it became more rapid. Soon after the founding of the great city of Babylon we find that the Babylonians were possessed of enough knowledge of the arts and sciences to enable them to become world traders and great industrial undertakers. They built many cities and lived highly civilized lives. The history of modern science may very properly be dated from the building of Babylon.
CHAPTER III
PRE-BABYLONIAN SCIENCE
The transcending wonders of the phenomena of the heavenly bodies attracted the attention of primitive man at an early period of his intellectual development. The succession of day and night, the phases of the moon, comets, meteorites, the eclipses of sun and moon, the recurrence of the seasons were observed and recorded. In this way, through long uncivilized times, many scientific facts were noticed and handed down by tradition, and probably were among the first scientific data collected. We have no means of determining when the primitive science of astronomy became systematized, although there are reasons for believing that it was roughly outlined at a remote date.
There was a tradition among the Babylonian priests that their astronomical observations and records went back to a period of more than 400,000 years. This statement was believed by the people of antiquity, and was made to Alexander the Great during his Indian campaign.