[Footnote 8: The material for this address was originally gathered for a lecture in a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, some 500 in number; teachers in the Catholic public schools of New York City, and for corresponding lectures to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood. The address was delivered substantially in its present form at the Catholic Club of Cornell University, under the title "The Relations of the Church to Science."] Probably nothing is more surprising to any one who knows the history of science and of scientific education than the attitude of mind of the present generations, educated as they are mainly along scientific lines, toward the supposed lack of interest of preceding generations in science. Our scholars and professors seem to be almost universally of the opinion that the last few generations are the first who ever devoted themselves seriously to the study of science, or who, indeed, were free enough from superstitions and persuasions and beliefs of many kinds to give themselves up freely to scientific investigation. In the light of what we know or, perhaps I should say, what we are coming to know now with regard to the educational interests of the men of the various times, this would be an amusing, if it were not an amazing, presumption on our part. Over and over again in the world's history men have been {94} interested in science, both in pure science and in applied science, in the culture sciences and in the practical sciences. Apparently men forget that philosophy is science and ethics is science and metaphysics is scientific and logic is science and there is a science of language. Of course the protest that will be heard at once is that what we now mean by science is physical science. Even taking the word science in this narrower sense, however, how can people forget that our mathematics comes to us from the old Greeks, that old Greek contributions to medicine and, above all, to the scientific side of it still remain valuable, that physical science, pure and applied, developed wonderfully at the University of Alexandria, that there was a beginning of chemistry and the great foundations of astronomy laid in the long ago, and that men evidently were quite as much interested in the problems of nature around them as they have been at any time: Archimedes insisting that if he only had some place to rest his lever he could move the world, inventing the screw pump, fashioning his great burning-mirrors, and a little later Heron inventing the first germ of the turbine engine, while all the time their colleagues and contemporaries were developing the mathematics in connection with them, are studying both pure and applied science. It is simply failure to state in terms of the present what was accomplished in the past, that has permitted people to retain {95} curious notions of the absence of science in antiquity.