Although the disposition to scientific thought may be said to have originated in remote antiquity, it was not until the Sixteenth Century of our era that it ceased to appear spasmodically and as if by chance. The Greeks had their schools on the shores of the Ægean, in Sicily, [p236] and in Alexandria, and in them some of the conclusions and much of the spirit of scientific inquiry was imaginatively anticipated. But the conscious organized effort to relate “general principles to irreducible and stubborn facts,” as Mr. Whitehead puts it, began about three hundred years ago. The first society chiefly devoted to science seems to have been founded by della Porta at Naples in 1560, but it was closed by the ecclesiastical authorities. Forty years later the _Accademia dei Lincei_ was founded at Rome with Galileo among its early members. The Royal Society of London was chartered in 1662. The French Academy of Sciences began its meetings in 1666, the Berlin Academy in 1700, the American Philosophical Association was proposed by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 and organized in 1769. The active pursuit of science is a matter, then, of only a few hundred years. The practical consequences in the form of useful inventions are still more recent. Newcomen’s air-and-steam engine dates from 1705, but it was not until 1764 that James Watt produced a practicable steam engine. It was not until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century that invention really got under way and began to transform the structure of civilization. It was not until about 1850 that the importance of invention had impressed itself upon the English people, yet they were the first to experience the effects of the mechanical revolution. They had seen the first railway, the first steamboat, the illumination of towns by gas, and the application of power-driven machinery to manufacture. Professor Bury fixes the Exhibition of London in 1851 as the event which marks the public recognition of the role of science [p237] in modern civilization. The Prince Consort who originated the Exhibition said in his opening speech that it was designed “to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from which the nations will be able to direct their further exertions.”