Six Wings: Men of Science in the Renaissance

Abstract

Wings: Men of Science in the Renaissance. By George Sarton. Price, $6.75. Pp. 318, with illustrations. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind., 1957. The late George Sarton, one of the most distinguished historians of science of our time, was founder and editor of Isis, and of Osiris. The Six Wings consists of the substance of the Patten lectures he delivered at Indiana University in 1954-1955. Professor Sarton died in 1956 and thus did not read the proofs or make an index, but someone did them well. A useful running head to the notes sections indicates the pages as well as the usual chapter headings, and so one does not have to go back and forth so much. The typography and printing do justice to the elegance of the lectures, and the beautiful illustrations, mostly portraits of the subjects of the book, are a rich example of the care and love which went into the book. Sarton spared no pains to get the best and most accurate portraits available. Part of the motivation for this searching analysis of science and the Renaissance hovers around the unhappy fact that while artists and people interested in art are anxious to learn all they can about the lives and ideas of other artists as creators of beauty, but most scientists care little for the history of science. Part of the training in art is copying masterpieces created by other artists. Sarton wants to know, Is it less natural for scientists to want to know all that he can about the lives as well as the works of his predecessors? He answers his own question by pointing out that some scientists are technicians who want merely to master facts, theories, and tricks of the trade and have no curiosity or time left for anything else. Even for a physician not interested in history, this book on men of science and the Renaissance will be a stimulus and should awaken a genuine interest in the men who have made science. Sarton apologizes for not being able to make a book of this kind all-inclusive, but he has selected wisely and in his imaginative and scholarly analysis has opened up for us the wings upon which the men of science in the Renaissance soared. The first wing deals with exploration and education. The great discoveries of the period between 1450 and 1600 brought most of the globe under observation and produced an excitement and wonder which spread like bubbling yeast through the times. To a remarkable degree, education was stimulated by men of genius and their work was organized and kept alive in institutions which enabled scholarship to thrive. The Latin language kept open the channels of communication for all learned men. But vernac¬ ulars, the peoples' tongues, were on the rise, with all the infinite possibilities of creating genuine styles possible only in a living language. Out of this period arose: the languages of English, German, French, and Italian, just to mention some of those most important in the propagation of knowledge and the advancement of learning. The second wing of the Renaissance flight of science was mathematics and astronomy. Sarton emphasizes the long painstaking struggles to deal with mathematical concepts when there was no common symbolic language even for algebra. Nevertheless, mathematics grew and had great influence in painting, where the theory and employment of perspective were being developed. This required knowledge of trigonometry. Since the symbols used in mathe¬ matics were fragmentary, arbitrary, and unstandardized to the point of chaos, mathematics

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