"Our generation, in this no more self-concentrated than many another, has prided itself so much on the progress it has achieved in science that it has in its interest in the insistent present rather neglected the claims of the histor y of science. There has been the feeling that our contemporaries and immediate predecessors have accomplished so much as to put us far beyond the past and its workers, so that it would seem almost a waste of time to rehearse the crude notions with which they occupie ...