ABSTRACT
Early in the nineteenth century John Playfair wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica a long article entitled ‘Dissertation; exhibiting a General View of the Progress of Mathematics and Physical Science, since the Revival of Letters in Europe’. But Giovanni was a university man, associated with the nascent humanism, and particularly that represented by Petrarch. His show of modesty may not have been shared by his less learned contemporaries: it certainly was not by their successors, and very soon humanists also were singing to the same tune. There were a few brief and vague ancient references to Archimedes' ‘method’, but rather more to the procedures of ‘analysis and synthesis’, whose exact interpretation have caused much scholarly perplexity. Francis Bacon very soon became a hero of science, and especially of British science, but it remains controversial how much substantive as opposed to rhetorical influence he exerted upon its development.
