An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

Discovery that the universe follows natural laws.

In short, observation and experimentation were leading to the most fundamental of all scientific discoveries, namely, the conviction that all the things about us follow certain natural, immutable laws. The modern scientific investigator devotes a great part of his attention to the discovery of these laws and their application. He has given up any hope of reading man's fate in the stars or of producing any results by magical combinations. Unlike the mediæval writers, he hesitates to accept as true the reports which reach him of miracles, that is, of exceptions to the general laws, because he is convinced that the natural laws have been found to work regularly in every instance where they have been carefully observed. His study of the natural laws has, however, enabled him to produce far more marvelous results than those reported of the mediæval magician.

Galileo's telescope.

276. In a previous chapter the progress of science for three hundred years after Roger Bacon has been briefly noted.[463] With the exception of Copernicus the investigators of this period are scarcely known to us. In the seventeenth century, however, progress became very rapid and has been steadily accelerating since. In astronomy, for example, the truths which had been only suspected by earlier astronomers were demonstrated to the eye by Galileo (1564–1642). By means of a little telescope, which was hardly so powerful as the best modern opera glasses, he discovered (in 1610) the spots on the sun. These made it plain that the sun was revolving on its axis as astronomers were already convinced that the earth revolved. He saw, too, that the moons of Jupiter were revolving about their planet in the same way that the planets revolve about the sun.

Sir Isaac Newton and his discovery of the law of universal gravitation.

The year that Galileo died, the famous English mathematician, Sir Isaac Newton, was born (1642–1727). He carried on the work of earlier astronomers by the application of higher mathematics, and proved that the force of attraction which we call gravitation was a universal one, and that the sun and the moon and the earth, and all the heavenly bodies, are attracted to one another inversely as the square of the distance.

Development of the microscope.

While the telescope aided the astronomer, the microscope contributed far more to the extension of practical knowledge. Rude and simple microscopes were used with advantage as early as the seventeenth century. Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch linen merchant, so far improved his lenses that he discovered the blood corpuscles and (1665) the "animalculæ" or minute organisms of various kinds found in pond water and elsewhere. The microscope has been rapidly perfected since the introduction of better kinds of lenses early in the nineteenth century, so that it is now possible to magnify minute objects to more than two thousand times their diameters.

Advance in medical science.