criticise their theories by patiently comparing them with the facts which they sought to explain. The last of the important Greek men of science, Strabo, who was alive when Christ was born, has left us writings which in quality are essentially like many of the able works of to-day. But for the interruption in the development of Greek learning, natural science would probably have been fifteen hundred years ahead of its present stage. This interruption came in two ways. In one, through the conquest of Greece and the destruction of its intellectual life by the Romans, a people who were singularly incapable of appreciating natural science, and who had no other interest in it except now and then a vacant and unprofitable curiosity as to the processes of the natural world. A second destructive influence came through the fact that Christianity, in its energetic protest against the sins of the pagan civilization, absolutely neglected and in a way despised all forms of science. The early indifference of Christians to natural learning is partly to be explained by the fact that their religion was developed among the Hebrews, a people remarkable for their lack of interest in the scientific aspects of Nature. To them it was a sufficient explanation that one omnipotent God ruled all things at his will, the heavens and the earth alike being held in the hollow of his hand. Finding the centre of its development among the Romans, Christianity came mainly into the control of a people who, as we have before remarked, had no scientific interest in the natural world. This condition prolonged the separation of our faith from science for fifteen hundred years after its beginning. In this time the records of Greek scientific learning mostly disappeared. The writings of Aristotle were preserved in part for the reason that the Church adopted many of his views concerning questions in moral philosophy and in politics. The rest of Greek learning was, so far as Europe was concerned, quite neglected.