To speak of what our own English language and literature owe to the sixteenth century seems superfluous. The popular writings of Chaucer in the fourteenth century were historically important, but the presence of very many archaic words makes them now difficult to read. But in England, from the appearance in 1551 of the English version of Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_, [Footnote: Originally published in Latin in 1516.] a representation of an ideal state, to the publication of Milton's grandiose epic, _Paradise Lost_, in 1667, there was a continuity of great literature. There were Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and the King James Version of the Bible; Edmund Spenser's graceful _Faerie Queene_; [Footnote: For its scenery and mechanism, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto furnished the framework; and it similarly shows the influence of Tasso.] the supreme Shakespeare; Ben Jonson and Marlowe; Francis Bacon and Richard Hooker; Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Taylor; and the somber Milton himself. BEGINNINGS OF MODERN NATURAL SCIENCE [Sidenote: Two-fold Development of Culture, Science and Art] Human civilization, or culture, always depends upon progress in two directions--the reason, and the feelings or emotions. Art is the expression of the latter, and science of the former. Every great period in the world's history, therefore, is marked by a high appreciation of aesthetics and an advance in knowledge. To this general rule, the sixteenth century was no exception, for it was distinguished not only by a wonderful development of architecture, sculpture, painting, engraving, music, and literature,--whether Roman, Greek, or vernacular,--but it is the most obvious starting point of our modern ideas of natural and experimental science. Nowadays, we believe that science is at once the legitimate means and the proper goal of the progress of the race, and we fill our school curricula with scientific studies. But this spirit is essentially modern: it owes its chief stimulus to important achievements in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. [Sidenote: Characteristics of the Sixteenth Century] Five elements contributed to impress the period that we are now reviewing with a scientific character. In the first place, the humanists encouraged a critical spirit in comparing and contrasting ancient manuscripts and in investigating the history of the distant past; and their discovery and application of pagan writings served to bring clearly and abruptly before the educated people of the sixteenth century all that the Greeks and Romans had done in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and medicine, as well as in philosophy, art, and literature. Secondly, the invention of printing itself was a scientific feat, and its extended use enabled scientists, no less than artists, immediately to acquaint the whole civilized world with their ideas and demonstrations.