Doubtless, the price system had much to do with the rise of the machine technology in modern times; not only in that the accountancy of price offered a practical form and method of statistical computation, such as is indispensable to anything that may fairly be classed as engineering, but also and immediately and substantially in that its discipline has greatly conduced to the apprehension of mechanical facts in terms not coloured by an imputed anthropomorphic bent. It has probably been the most powerful factor acting positively in early modern times to divest mechanical facts of that imputed workmanlike bent given them by habits of thought induced by the handicrafts. This reduction of the facts of observation to quantitative and objective terms is perhaps most visible not in the changes that come over the technology of industry directly, in early modern times, but rather in that growth of material science that runs along as a concomitant of the expansion of the mechanical industry during the later era of handicraft. The material sciences, particularly those occupied with mechanical phenomena, are closely related to the technology of the mechanical industries, both in their subject matter and in the scope and method of the systematisation of knowledge at which they aim; and it is in these material sciences that the concomitance is best seen, at the same time that it is the advance achieved in these sciences that most unequivocally marks the transition from mediæval to modern habits of thought. This modern interest in matter-of-fact knowledge and the consequent achievements in material science, comes to an effectual head wherever and so soon, as the handicraft industry has made a considerable advance, in volume and in technological mastery, sufficient to support a fair volume of trade and make thoughtful men passably familiar with the statistical conceptions of the price system. It is accordingly in the commercial republics of Italy that the modern growth of material science takes its first start, about the point of time when industry and commerce had reached their most flourishing state on the Mediterranean seaboard and when the attention of these communities was already swinging off from these material interests to high-handed politics and religious reaction. The higher interests of church and state came to the front, and science, industry, and presently commerce dwindled and decayed in the land that had promised so handsomely to lead Western civilisation out of the underbrush of piety and princely intrigue.