I respect the discoveries of wise men and do reverence to the inventors ... but let us also act the part of good parents: let us increase the inheritance of these things; let the property go to our successors with some increment. Much still remains to be done and will remain; nor will the man born a thousand years hence lack the opportunity to add to what he has received. Surely Bury has quite missed the point when he holds that the ancient idea of progress failed to look to the future. Lucretius also responded to Roman temperamental inclinations when he stressed the importance of observation and inductive logic in philosophy. The Romans of the Republic disliked mysticism and were ripe for a cosmology that substituted sense perception for vague mystery. They were also impatient of abstractions, and made little progress with such deductive sciences as mathematics. Their immense experiences in practical affairs of government had accustomed them to the habit of organizing committees to gather data on which to base charters for cities, treaties with neighbors, and forms of government for provinces. Formal plans shaped on a priori ratiocination they had learned to distrust. They always felt their way slowly through experiments to generalizations. It is characteristic of them that without formulating a general principle of equity they shaped a court of equity for the cases of foreigners a hundred years before they found that they were putting into practice the principles that Greek theory had deduced from philosophy without the ability to realize them in actuality. Democritus had long ago proposed the hypothesis of natural creation, and Lucretius accepted the theory from Epicurus. What Lucretius himself saw was the need of emphasizing to the Romans the approach by induction from observable data to the theories, and the need of presenting these data in a succession of arresting pictures. In his first book, when arguing that there is no creation by miracle, he leads up to the generalization by a series of carefully established facts that give a sound basis for the final induction: Plants germinate from seeds, they always require time for growth, they require plant-food and the cultivation of the soil that makes that food available, and they invariably grow into the same species as that of the parent plant.