A Realization of the true import of the term Science is not so common as its general use would lead us to suppose. It is from the Latin verb scire, to know. Webster's definition is: "Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth or facts; accumulated and established knowledge which has been systematized and formulated with reference to the discovery of general truths or the operation of general laws. The ancients record seven sciences,—grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy; mathematical and physical sciences are called exact."
This is a day of science, of "classified knowledge." We may try to satisfy ourselves with theories or with partial knowledge as the ancients did, but, like them, we keep on delving for facts, for complete knowledge, for absolute order and arrangement. The child-mind of man may have been temporarily satisfied by the thoughts that Jupiter in his wrath sent the thunder, that Neptune in his revengeful spite stirred the sea; but investigation has been driven on by the unsatisfied thought, until to-day we possess more accurate knowledge in regard to the waves and winds, and the inherited belief that our fathers were wiser than we is forgotten in the growth and advance obtained over their more superficial learning.
Before the day of our "classified knowledge" were we independent of the facts which knowledge has classified? Before we knew that the earth moves in its orbit about the sun, taking the moon with it, did the earth stand still, a center for the sun and moon and planets? Before we knew that the trade-winds obeyed a definite law, did the wind blow haphazard, and all result from mere chance? Before geometrical proportion was known was there no positive relation between the diameter and circumference of a circle? What had the Egyptians and Greeks, who first recorded a knowledge of these things, to do with it all? Did they make geometry? Are they responsible for the facts, or merely for discovering and stating them as facts?
