Excerpt from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 85 Greeks were scientific or not, they aimed to be scientific, and they firmly implanted along with all their error, a zeal for the scientific truth about nature and a confident belief in the possibility of its ultimate attainment. From Hippocrates down to our own times, then, we find that the ex planation of diseases of all kinds has been sought by scientific men, not in the activities of spiritual beings, but in the workings of natural law. Results were almost nil, however, so far as the communicable diseases are concerned, until the nineteenth century when a sudden and rich fruition took place here, as in all fields of the biological sciences, as a result of a simple mechanical discovery, the lens-maker's trick of the achromatic objective, which made possible the modern high power microscope and revealed all at once a new and stupendous world The world of the infinitely little. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.