From: A University Anthology. London, 1965

Раздел I. Научно-популярные статьи

Раздел содержит научно-популярные статьи, заимствованные из оригинальной литературы. Их тематика понятна и интересна читателю независимо от его специальности: жизнь известных ученых, история науки и техники с древнейших времен, отдельные проблемы науки и техники на современном этапе.

Язык статей интересен и богат. Он содержит характерные для английского научного текста лексические и фразеологические единицы, а также типичные грамматические конструкции (инфинивные, причастные, герундиальные обороты, бессоюзное соединение придаточных предложений, модальные глаголы и др.).

В течение многих лет эти статьи используются автором в группах по подготовке к экзамену кандидатского минимума по английскому языку на начальном этапе. Языковая структура текстов представляет собой эффективный материал для перехода к чтению и переводу оригинальной литературы по специальности. В результате выполнения различных видов коммуникативных заданий формируется достаточно солидный запас общенаучной лексики, а приобретенные умения работать с аутентичным научным текстом переносятся в область чтения и перевода оригинальной литературы по специальности.

Тематика статей интересна для ведения дискуссий, а следовательно для развития навыков устной речи, коммуникативных умений рассуждать, отстаивать свою точку зрения, опровергать, делать выводы и т.д.

Тексты пособия можно использовать для:

1. тренинга формальных признаков структур при изучении грамматического справочника, например, просмотрите текст и опознайте существительные по суффиксам, объясните их значения или просмотрите текст и опознайте глаголы- сказуемые по их формальным признакам, назовите модели, по которым построены эти предложения и т.д.

2. «грамматического» чтения и учебного письменного либо устного перевода;

3. «собственно» чтения без перевода на русский язык, на понимание главной мысли текста или другой информации посредством целого спектра заданий таких как множественный выбор, верное/неверное утверждение, дополнение недостающей информации и т.д.

4. чтения вслух – беглого произношения фраз с соблюдением правил ударения и ритма в связном тексте;

5. устной и письменной речи – самостоятельного построения высказываний в заданной ситуации.

Раздел II. Грамматический справочник

Изучение грамматических структур является основной составляющей любого курса обучения иностранному языку, так как оно позволяет представить различные элементы системы языка в их взаимосвязи.

Особенность предлагаемого грамматического справочника заключается в том, что

- грамматический материал представлен в системе, которая выражает одну из главных черт английского языка, его аналитический характер, сложные смыслы складываются из полнозначных слов посредством функциональных единиц;

- грамматические явления соотносятся с их формой, значением и употреблением в речи;

- многие схемы и таблицы презентации грамматического материала были разработаны автором данного пособия для практических занятий и прошли апробацию в Иркутском государственном техническом университете.

Раздел III. Грамматическое чтение

В основу этого раздела положен тезис о том, что «перевод – самый глубокий способ чтения» (Габриель Гарсия Маркес). Чтение и перевод рассматриваются как два вида речевой деятельности, которые происходят последовательно, а не параллельно: читаю и сразу же перевожу. Чтение – процесс проникновения в смысл читаемого. Перевод – процесс передачи этого смысла средствами другого языка через языковые и культурные барьеры.

Проникновение в смысл читаемого подразумевает анализ и толкование. Самый начальный этап анализа и толкования читаемого называется «грамматическим» чтением. Его задачи:

– научиться видеть «грамматический каркас» текста, то есть грамматически формы и структуры;

– уметь соотносить каждую форму с ее значением и употреблением в речи.

Раздел содержит алгоритм «грамматического» чтения. Он построен на методической концепции академика Л.В.Щербы, профессора З.М.Цветковой, доцента В.В.Милашевича и практического опыта автора данного пособия.

РАЗДЕЛ I. Научно-популярные статьи

MEN OF SCIENCE

Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel, the great Swedish inventor and industrialist, was a man of many contrasts. He was the son of a bankrupt, but became a millionaire; a scientist with a love of literatute, an industrialist who managed to remain an idealist. He made a fortune but lived a simple life, and although cheeful in company he was often sad in private. A lover of mankind, he never had a wife or family to love him; a patriotic son of his native land, he died alone on foreign soil. He invented a new explosive, dynamite, to improve the peacetime industries of mining and road building, but saw it used as a weapon of war to kill and injure his fellow men. During his useful life he often felt he was useless: “Alfred Nobel he once wrote of himself”, ought to have been put to death by a kind doctor as soon as, with a cry, he entered life. “World-famous for his works he was never personaly well known, for throughout his life he avoided publicity. "I do not see", he once said, "that I have deserved any fame and I have no taste for it," but since his death, his name has brought fame and glory to others.

He was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833 but moved to Russia with his parents in 1842, where his father, Immanuel, made a strong position for himself in the engineering industry. Immanuel Nobel invented the landmine and made a lot of money from government orders for it during the Crimean War, but went bankrupt soon after. Most of the family returned to Sweden in 1859, where Alfred rejoined them in 1863, beginning his own study of explosives in his father's laboratory. He had never been to school or university but had studied privately and by the time he was twenty was a skilful chemist and excellent linguist, speaking Swedish, Russian, German, French and English. Like his father, Alfred Nobel was imaginative and inven­tive, but he had better luck in business and showed more financial sense. He was quick to see industrial openings for his scientific inventions and built up over 80 companies in 20 different countries. Indeed his greatness lay in his out­standing ability to combine the qualities of an original scientist with those of a forward-looking industrialist.

But Nobel's main concern was never with making money or even with making scientific discoveries. Seldom happy, he was always searching for a meaning to life, and from his youth had taken a serious interest in literature and philosophy. Perhaps because he could not find ordinary human love - he never married - he came to care deeply about the whole of mankind. He was always generous to the poor: " I'd rather take care of the stomachs of the living than the glory of the dead in the form of stone memorials," he once said. His greatest wish, however, was to see an end to wars, and thus peace between nations, and he spent much time and money working for this cause untill his death in Italy in 1896. His famous will in which he left money to provide prizes for outstanding work in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Medicine, Literature and Peace, is a memorial to his interests and ideals. And so, the man, who felt he should have died at birth is remembered and respected long after his death.

The Path to Reason

By Academician Alexander Yanshin, President of the MoscowNaturalists' Society.

Throughout the entire history of mankind there have been few thinkers who could equal the Russian scientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky. He was an outstanding mineralogist, geochemist, crystallographer, theoretical geologist and the founder of many scientific establishments.

He managed to see Earth from outer space fifty years before the first space flight. He saw it not only as one of the bodies in the solar system, but distinguished continents and oceans, rocks and living things, humans, minerals, atoms and mole­cules; he saw that "humans for the first time are becoming a geological force, capable of changing the face of our planet."

V.I. Vernadsky was born on March 12, 1863 in the family of a political economy professor. He spent his early childhood in Kharkov. He entered grammar school in 1873. In 1876 the family moved to Petersburg. The teaching faculty of Petersburg University at that time included D.I. Mendeleyev. V.V. Dokuchayev, and others. These prominent scientists were to play a particularly important role in Vernadsky's becoming an outstanding scientist. The thirst for knowledge, the joy of being free of the musty grammar school pushed Vernadsky to lectures not only in the natural sciences branch of the physical-mathematical department but in other departments as well.

In 1885 V.I. Vernadsky graduated from the university and was given a job as a custodian of the mineralogical department. His independent work began.

Many of Vernadsky's achievements have not become outdated with the passage of time; indeed they have become more relevant. I am referring to his work on the biosphere and men's global and space activity. Vernadsky spoke of turning the biosphere into a new entity, an area on the planet where human will, reason, and labour would prove themselves in a radical | way (making a noosphere — a sphere of reason). According to Vernadsky, human knowledge is not only a personal and social phenomenon but also a kind of a pla­netary phenomenon adjoined to the field of life. "Being part of the biosphere, man can judge the world order only by com­paring the phenomenon which he can see in it."

Our current concept of the biosphere is based mainly on Vernadsky's theories.

After 1917 Vernadsky's scientific activity broadened. He took up new, highly difficult problems, put forward new ideas, wrote new books and articles on the history of minerals, on natural waters, on the circulation of the Earth's substances and gases, on space dust, geometry, the problem of time in modern science and on geochemical activity of living matter.

In 1927 he organized a biogeochemical laboratory.

In 1937 he addressed the international geological congress on "ihe significance of radioactivity for modern geology."

Till the very last days of his life Vernadsky remained on the frontiers of science: he pondered on the basics of the new teaching of the noosphere, directed the work of the committee on meteorites, researched isotope applications and worked a lot on the uranium problem. Owing to him, this country started to take measures to create an atomic industry and the raw materials basis for it. He attributed great significance to the use of nuclear energy for peaceful and creative purposes, for the creation of the noosphere.

At the age of almost 82 the scientist continued to work. The difficult war years, the newspaper reports about nazi atrocities seriously affected his health. He died on January 6, 1945.

He was an inspired truth-seeker.“There is nothing stronger than the thirst for knowledge, the force of doubt…”, he claimed. "We know just a small part of nature, just a tiny particle of that puzzling, murky and all-enveloping enigma, and everything that we know we have learned thanks to the dreams of the dreams, fantasy-seekers and learned poets".

Nicolas Copernicus

From: Smithsonian (Washington), 1973, March

Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473, in the busy port of Torun, which lies on the Vistula River about 100 miles from the sea.

Nicolas was the second son of a prosperous copper mer­chant, a member of the powerful, closed circle of prelates and traders who virtually ruled such cities at that time. His mother and two sisters completed the group. The young Copernicus was born into an easy life, enjoying comfort and privilege, but not so much as to excite the dangerous envy of powerful neighbors. One particular family conne­ction was to shape his whole career. His mother's brother, Lucas Waczenrode, became the bishop and prince of Warmia, a patch territory shaped like a crumpled leather bottle with a narrow neck that reached the shore of the Gulf of Gdansk.

His father died when he was ten.Uncle Lucas, then a mere canon on the cathedral staff at Frombork, promptly took charge of Nicolas and his older brother, Andreas, and the two girls.

The Bishop had it in mind to place them as canons of the cathedral at Frombork, but until a vacancy opened up it was decided that the Copernicu' brothers should use the inter­val for continuing their education in Italy.

Nicolas went to Bologna at the age of 23. Later he mo­ved to Padua, and it was nearly ten years before he came home to Poland for good. He studied a little of everything, including medicine, and he may have been the first Pole to have taken part in dissection of the human body.

Nicolas Copernicus returned to Poland in 1503 when he was 30 years old and his uncle had him seconded to the bishop's palace in the town of Lidzbark. Before the bishop's death in 1512, Copernicus had moved to Frombork Cathed­ral to lead the life of common canon.

In fact that appears that none of his fellow clergymen at Frombork regarded him as anything more than a somewhat moody and introverted colleague of no particular ta­lent. His astronomical work was of no interest to them.

Astronomy and mathematics were subjects of major con­cern to the teachers and students of all the universities atten­ded by Nicolas Copernics. But when he was a student, it was supposed that a firmament of heaven consisted of a series of spherical shells surrounding the Earth, which lay fixed and still at the center of it all. The shells revol­ved, together with the celestial lights attached to each layer.

The planets were a nuisance in an otherwise happy scheme of things, but Ptolemy the Alexandria had explained their apparent indiscipline as long ago as the second century. The Ptolemaic system satisfied both common sense, and also the percepts of an all-powerful church which taught that Man was the chief work and principal concern of a God who had fashioned the entire structure.

A full 17 centuries before Copernicus was born, the Greek, Aristarchus of Samos, had argued that the world revolves around the sun, but his theories were entirely forgotten with the decay of classical culture. A reexamination of Greek and Roman learning, with a view to reviving neglected but valuable attitudes and concepts, was a major preoccupa­tion among Renaissance scholars, and during his ten years in Italy Copernicus might have come across these early theories.

There are no means of knowing when Copernicus first be­gan to favor the idea of a sun-centered planetary system. While a student at Bologna, he had lodged and worked with a Professor Domenico Maria da Novara a famous astrono­mer, and had helped make observations needed for the compilation of astronomical tables. Novara was a widely known critic of the Ptolemaic system, because it failed to explain some of his own painstaking contemplation of the sky. They must have discussed such difficulties, but there is nothing on record to suggest that Novara had any revolu­tionary ideas of his own, or that he wanted to do more than simply improve upon the Ptolemaic pattern.

The canon's assumptions also included the facts that the Earth is not the center of the Universe, but only of the orbit of the moon, and that the sun is the center of the planetary system, and that the distance from the Earth to stars was far greater than had been supposed.

There certain other were concepts, which, together amo­unted to a nearly faultless statement of the broad geogra­phy of the universe as we now understand it. However, this brief, brilliant exposition contained no sort of proof for the fundamental assertions it suggested. There was a curt promise that proof would follow later in a larger work.

The Commentarious was not printed, but circulated in manuscript form among various unidentified scholars. And yet it was enough to excite a good deal of talk and thought within the few centers of Renaissance learning.

In the massive De revolutionibus caelestium, the ca­non argued out in detail the ideas presented in his early essay. It seems that the labor may have lasted some 20 years, spanning the time between his arrival at Frombork and about 1530, when he appears to have completed the job and then to have locked the thing away.

When the first copies of De revolutionibus came off the press Copernicus lay dying in his red-brick tower. He had suffered a series of strokes, and was helpless and almost senseless. One story has it that a copy of the Nuremberg edition of his book was put into his hands, and perhaps he was sufficiently aware to know what it was. In fact, the great work caused remarkably little stir, either from critics or supporters but it was to be another century or so before the work of men like Keppler and Newton confirmed to the world at large the supreme importance of Copernicus ideas.

Today Copernicus is a national hero of such stature that his name is magic.

Michael Faraday

From: Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technoogy.N.Y., 1972

Faraday was the discoverer of electric induction, and therefore of man’s power to generate electricity. He came of a simple Yorkshire family, his father being a blacksmith, and his brother Robert working as a gas fitter. The family had moved to Newington, then a Surrey village, and there Michael was born.

When he was five yaers old the Faradays moved to rooms over a coach-house near Manchester Square in London; here at the age of ten Michael became errand- boy at a book- seller’s shop in Blandford Street, close to his home. After a year of running errands delivering newspapers, shop-sweeping, and window-cleaning, he was apprenticed as a bookbinder in the same shop. His mind was awakening, and he began to read many of the scientific books which pas­sed through his hands for binding. Electricity and chemi­stry fascinated him; he copied into his notebooks extracts from many sources. He built an electrical machine and ele­mentary battery or «pile», and made as many experiments in chemistry as he could afford on his weekly pocket mo­ney.

When Faraday was 21, a customer of the bookshop who was a member of the Royal Institution took him to a course of four lectures on chemistry delivered there by the great scientist, Sir Humphry Davy. From one who saw him we have a record of «Faraday perched, pen in hand, his eyes starting out of his head» — so eager was he not to miss a word. Having taken full notes of these lectures, he copied them out in beautiful style, bound the sheets as a book, and sent the volume to Sir Humphry with a letter asking for help in finding more congenial work.

Davy agreed to meet Faraday, but at the first interview advised him to stick to his trade. Later on, however, when the Institution's laboratory assistant was dismissed for carelessness and rudeness, Davy remembered Faraday, wrote to him, and offered him a position. His salary was 25s a week; he lived in two rooms at the top of the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, Piccadily. Thus in 1813 began an association with that Institution which was to last for the rest of his life.

Almost at once Davy took Faraday on a continental tour as his secretary and, at first, as his manservant. Davy was then reaching the height of his fame, and he and Fara­day met many of the distinguished European scientists du­ring the 18 months' tour.

The next few years of hard work at the Institution showed Faraday to be a good scientist. At the age of 31 he had the honour of reading his first paper, on a chemical theme, be­fore the Royal Society, at 33 he was elected a Fellow of that society. He now began to concentrate on the study of ele­ctrical phenomena. He was appointed Director of the La­boratory of the Royal Institution, and one of his first acts was to start evening meetings for discussion among its mem­bers. These became very popular, and formed the origin of the Institution's well known Friday evening course. He also began the series of Christmas lectures to young people which are still an annual event.

Faraday had found his place in the world, but yet he could hardly be called famous. It was in 1831; while car­rying on his studies of electromagnetism, that he discovered a momentary current of electricity flowed in a wire whenever a magnet approached or receded from it — a discovery which has formed the basis of the great electrical industry of today. Several eminent investigators must have been on the very edge of the same discovery. They knew that electricity could produce magnetism; it was reserved for Faraday to settle the question: «If electricity can produce magnetism, cannot magnetism produce electricity?”

His success was the more striking because be knew little of mathematics. «It is in the highest degree astonishing”, wrote one scientist, «to see what a large number of general theoremes, the methodical deduction of which requires the finest powers of mathematical analysis, he found by a kind of intuition, with the security of instinct, without the help of a single mathematical formula».

The far-reaching consequencies of these fruitful years are described in the article on the history of electrical en­gineering. They meant to Faraday himself immediate re­cognition as one of the pioneers. He received many honours. The Oxford University conferred on him the degree of Doc­tor of Civil Law, the Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal; he was appointed first Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution; as the years passed and his fame spread, he was elected a Fellow of many learned societies abroad, yet he remained simple-hearted, modest and perfectly indifferent to financial reward.

Ernest Rutherford

From: Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science arid Technology. N.Y., 1972

Rutherford's father was a wheelwright and farmer, and Rutherford worked on the farm. He showed great promise at school and in his teens gained a scholarship to New Zea­land University, where he finished fourth. In the univer­sity he became interested in physics and developed a mag­netic detector of radio waves. He was completely uninte­rested in the practical applications of his discoveries.

In 1895 came the turning point, tor he received a scho­larship to Cambridge University.

At Cambridge he worked under J. J. Thomson. Then, after a short period at McGill University in Montreal, Ca­nada, and a trip back to New Zealand to get married, he returned to England.

Hard on the heels of Becquerel, Rutherford began work in the exciting new field of radioactivity. He was one of those who, along with the Curies, had decided that the rays given off by radioactive substances were of several diffe­rent kinds. He named the positively-charged ones alpha rays and the negatively-charged ones beta rays. These names are still used, except that both are now known to consist of speeding particles, so one often speaks of alpha parti­cles and beta particles instead. When in 1900 it was dis­covered that some of the radiation were not affected by a magnetic field, Rutherford was able to demonstrate them to consist of electromagnetic waves and named them gam­ma-rays.

Between 1906 and 1909 Rutherford, together with his asisstant, Geiger, studied alpha particles intensively and proved conclusively that the individual particle was a he­lium atom with its electrons removed. The alpha particles were like the positive rays that had been discovered by Goldstein, and in 1914 Rutherford suggested that the sim­plest positive rays must be those obtained from hydrogen and that these must be the fundamental positively-charged particle. He called it a proton.

Rutherford's interest in alpha particles led to something greater still. In 1906, while still at McGill in Montreal, he began to study how alpha particles are scattered by thin sheets of metal. He continued these experiments in 1908, when back in England working at Manchester University.

From his experiments Rutherford evolved the theory of the nuclear atom. He maintained that the atom contains a very tiny nucleus at its center which is positively charged and which contains all the protons of the atom and there­fore virtually all of its mass. In the outer regions of the atom are the negatively-charged electrons which are very light and which interpose no detectable barrier to the pas­sage of the alpha particles.

This view of the atom is the one accepted today. For working out the theory of radioactive disintegration of elements, for determining the nature of alpha particles, for devising the nuclear atom, Rutherford was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize 'in chemistry.

In 1917 Rutherford got to work in earnest on quantitati­ve measurements of radioactivity.

Rutherford was thus the first man ever to change one element into another as a result of the manipulations of his own hands. He had achieved the dream of the alchemists. He had also demonstrated the first man-made "nuclear re­actions". However, only one alpha particle in about 300, 000 interacted with the nuclei, so it wasn't a very practical form of transmutation. By 1924 Rutherford bad managed to knock protons out of the nuclei of most of the lighter elements.

Rutherford accepted a professorship of physics at Cam­bridge in 1919, and was President of the Royal Society from 1925 to 1930.

After 1933 he was violently anti-Nazi in his sympathies.

Toward the end of his life he expressed himself as quite doubtful that the vast energy of the atomic nucleus, as made evident in radioactivity, could ever be controlled by man. In this he was overly conservative (as he was in his reluc­tance to accept Einstein's theory of relativity). However, he died two years before the discovery of uranium fission by Hahn and so was not to know how wrong he was in this respect.

Willam Thomson

From: A University Anthology. London, 1965

It was an examination day at Glasgow University. Crowds of young men were filing into the long hall where rows of desks stood, at intervals of three paces. Among the can­didates jostling their way into the examination room was a little ten-year-old boy, who took his place with youths seven and eight years his senior.

The boy's name was William Thomson, the son of James Thomson, professor of mathematics at the universty. He was born on June 26, 1824, at Belfast, where his father had been a teacher of mathematics at the Royal Academical Institution. When William was eight years old, his father took up his appointment at Glasgow and, at the age of ten, William matriculated and thus began an association with the university that was to last until his death in his eighty-third year.

To matriculate at such an age was almost a phenomenal achievement, but it was looked upon as nothing out of the ordinary in the Thomson family. Mrs Elizabeth King, William Thomson's sister, records in her book, Lord Kel­vin's Early Home, that before he was ten years old, Wil­liam would try to solve some of the problems his father had set his class at the university, and that one day a par­ticularly difficult problem had been given. William, as usual, put his childish brain to the task, but when bedtime came no solution was forthcoming. Some hours later, when he was supposed to be fast asleep, a small voice was heard from upstairs, «Eureka! Eureka!».

The professor rushed up to see what was the matter, and there he found his small son, bare-footed in his night-gown on the landing, triumphantly holding a slate, on which he had scribbled, by the scanty light of the stair gas, the solution of the problem.

But William Thomson's was a versatile mind, and he assimilated and loved the classics as well as solving the most abstruse mathematical problems. He once said,”I never found that the small amount of Greek I learned was a hindrance to my acquiring some knowledge of natural philosophy”. At the age of twelve he won a prize for trans­lating from the Latin Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods, and he won the university medal at sixteen for his essay On the Figure of the Earth, on the title page of which he wrote a quotation which aptly describes his own life: —

«Mount where science guides,

Go measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;

Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,

Correct old time and regulate the sun».

When he was nearly seventeen, Thomson went up to Peterhouse College, Cambridge. While he was up, though he never neglected his work, he found time to row his col­lege. He once said, «I simply rowed for exercise every day, as I found it better exercise than walking». But that he was no mean oarsman is shown by the fact that he won the Colquhoun Silver Sculls. Though he regretted «the three weeks clean cut out of the time for working at Cambridge», through training for Peterhouse boat, he ended by being second wrangler, gaining the first Smith's Prize, and beco­ming a Fellow of his college. After going down from Cam­bridge, he went to Paris, where he studied under Professor Regnault, then engaged in his famous researches on the thermal properties of steam.

This apprenticeship was to set Thomson on his future career in life. He determined to specialize in research work in physics and so great was his knowledge and so much promise did he show, that in 1846, when only twenty-two, he became professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow University. He was to hold his chair for fifty-three years, during which time he was to gain universal recognition as one of the greatest physicists of his time.

Many of the greatest researches of other physicists of the nineteenth century came from suggestions that Pro­fessor Thomson threw out at his lectures. One of his earliest papers was concerned with the age of the earth, and in these speculations he came up against what was known as the Uniformitarian school of thought. The Uniformitarians supposed that the earth existed in very much its present form some thousands of millions of years ago. Thomson showed conclusively by his calculations and ex­periments on heat and the dissipation of energy, that the sun had not illuminated the earth for more than about one hundred to five hundred million years.

These calculations were of inestimable value not only to geologists, but also to navigators, for in the course of arriving at his conclusions he had investigated the action of the tides, and had described in particular those in the Straits of Dover and the Mediterranean. A meeting with Joule in 1847, whose theories on heat interested Thomson, led him to the enunciation, in 1851, of the now absolutely established dynamical theory of heat, and the law of Conservation of Energy, which states that the earth retains the heat it derives from the sun, and that no energy is entirely lost, but must be developed or absorbed into some other kind of energy. Thomson showed this by giving instances of energy being transfor­med in all the major branches of physics, such as mecha­nics, heat, electro-statics and magnetism.

HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The Beginnings of Technology

From: A. E. E. McKenzie. The Major Achievements of Science.Cambridge, 1967

The beginnings of technology can be traced to what is known as palaeolithic or old stone age, when the earliest men made tools of flint, wood and bone, such as axes, knives, needles, spears and bows. The palaeolithic age was succeeded, about 5000 B.C., by the neolithic or new stone age, in which men still used mainly stone for their tools, but tur­ned from hunting to agriculture. A wooden hoe and a wooden sickle with a flint edge were invented, and also pottery for their storage and cooking of cereals. Neolithic man invented textiles to clothe himself, instead of skins, and produced the first primitive machines for spinning thread and weaving cloth.

Some time in the millenium before 3000 B. C., the smelt­ing and casting of metals were discovered. By heating cer­tain types of stone with charcoal, copper was produced and later it was found that the addition of a small quantity of tin to copper gave rise to a harder metal, bronze.

The earliest civilizations arose in the river valleys of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus. Here were the plough, the domestication and harnessing of systems of ir­rigation, the wheeled card and the ship. The agricultural wor­kers were able to produce a sufficient surplus of food to maintain the ruling castes of nobles and priests and also smiths, potters and other specialist craftsmen. The virtual cessation about 2500 B. C. of the prodigious technical ad­vances made in the previous millenium has been ascribed to the class structure of these early urban societies; the manual workers were peasants and slaves and they had no incentive or leisure to devise and apply improvements in their crafts.

The Sumerians, whose bronze-age civilisation flourished about 3000 B. C. in the valley of the Tigris-Euphrates, devised a system of writing, consisting of triangular wedges indented in soft clay tables, known as cuneiform script, and the Egyptians developed a hieroglyphic script, written with ink on papyrus, made from the pith of reeds. Simple methods of calculation, representing the earliest form of arithmetic, were invented, and several geometrical facts useful in surveying were discovered, for example the pro­perties of a right-angle triangle. The Babylonians divided the circle into 360 degrees, and it is to them,that we owe the fact that there are sixty minutes in an hour, and sixty seconds in a minute.

The clear and glittering skies of Babylonia and Egypt attracted men's attention to the notions of the heavenly bo­dies and it was in astronomy that empirical knowledge was first systematized so as to make possible the prediction of future events. It is not difficult to understand why astro­nomy should have been the first branch of science to be de­veloped successfully. The data are points of light in the sky, which are simple and isolated; their periodic motion enables observations to be repeated over and over again. Astrono­mical observations were used to construct a calendar, neces­sary for the seasonal operation of seed sowing. The Babylo­nians achieved a remarkable accuracy and refinement; they estimated the length of the year, which is the time ta­ken by the sun to return to the same position among the stars, to an error of only four and a half minutes, and they knew that lunar eclipses form sequences recurring at inter­vals of about eighteen years.

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