PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE TIME OF NERO [Illustration] MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE TIME OF NERO BEING A TRANSLATION OF THE _QUAESTIONES NATURALES_ OF SENECA BY JOHN CLARKE, M.A. LECTURER ON EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN WITH NOTES ON THE TREATISE BY SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE K.C.B., D.C.L., Sc.D., LL.D. PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1910 _Plurimum ad inveniendum contulit qui speravit posse reperiri._ SENECA, _Q.N._ VI. V. 2. PREFACE This book is intended primarily for English readers, to most of whom it will probably be at least new. Thomas Lodge, the well-known dramatist, published in 1614 a translation of the whole of Seneca’s prose works (except the _Apocolocyntosis_), but no English editor or commentator seems to have turned his attention to the _Quaestiones Naturales_, either before or since. Lodge’s translation, a folio volume of nearly a thousand pages, was probably very good for its day, but is now out of date. The Introduction is designed to give a setting to the translation, and to answer a few of the questions that would naturally occur to the mind of an intelligent reader who was not a classical scholar. In the Index also some details are included that may be helpful to those who have neither time nor opportunity for hunting up historical and other allusions in books of reference. The object has been to make the volume self-interpreting, though it may be that the course has not always been judiciously steered between too little and too much. The _Quaestiones Naturales_ must be regarded as occupying historically an important position. It was the latest deliverance of the classical world upon the subject of physical speculation. Its currency during the Middle Ages rendered it for many centuries the chief authority in science in Western Europe. Its cosmology represented not only popular but also educated opinion, and became the source of many of the accepted ideas concerning the universe that passed into early modern literature in our own and other countries.