"Wollaston prophetically foretold that if once an accurate knowledge were gained of the relative weights of elementary…"

"As every person is his own best biographer, so... every age is... its own best historian."

"It is hardly doubtful that, after hundreds or thousands of years have passed, the simple, detailed, and perhaps contr…"

"Most of the great historians whom our age has produced will, centuries hence, probably be more interesting as exhibit…"

"But where the facts recorded and the mind which records them both belong to the same age, we have a double testimony …"

"The object of the book is philosophical, in the sense now accepted by many and by divergent schools—i.e., it desires …"

"Such a survey seemed to me indispensable. ...Like every survey it can claim to be merely an approximation. It gives o…"

"I... decided to complete the first part of the history which deals with scientific thought in two volumes..."

"The two last chapters of this volume, which treat of the astronomical and of the atomic views of Nature, will be foll…"

"Historians like Thucydides, Tacitus, and Machiavelli are looked upon as perfect models in the art of writing history,…"