CHAPTER Ⅱ　THE GREEKS

How it happened that a little rocky peninsula in a remote corner of the Mediterranean was able to provide our world in less than two centuries with the complete framework for all our present day experiments in politics, literature, drama, chemistry, physics and Heaven knows what else, is a question which has puzzled a great many people for a great many centuries and to which every philosopher, at one time or another during his career, has tried to give an answer.

Respectable historians, unlike their colleagues of the chemical and physical and astronomical and medical faculties, have always looked with ill-concealed contempt upon all efforts to discover what one might call “the laws of history.” What holds good of polliwogs and microbes and shooting stars seems to have no business within the realm of human beings.

I may be very much mistaken, but it seems to me that there must be such laws. It is true that thus far we have not discovered many of them. But then again we have never looked very hard. We have been so busy accumulating facts that we have had no time to boil them and liquefy them and evaporate them and extract from them the few scraps of wisdom which might be of some real value to our particular variety of mammal.

It is with considerable trepidation that I approach this new field of research and taking a leaf out of the scientist's book, offer the following historical axiom.

According to the best knowledge of modern scientists, life（animate existence as differentiated from inanimate existence）began when for once all physical and chemical