ABSTRACT
The renaissance of science in the sixteenth century, and the strategic ideas of the first phase of the scientific revolution, owed little to improvements in the actual technique of investigation. Before the beginning of the seventeenth cen tury there is little evidence, except perhaps in anatomy and astronomy, of any endeavour to control narrowly the accuracy of scientific statements by the use of new procedures, still less to extend their range with the aid of techniques unknown to the existing tradition of science. Even the refinement of obser vation, begun in anatomy by Vesalius and his contemporaries and in astronomy by Tycho Brahe, hardly involved more than the natural extension and scru pulous application of familiar methods. Since the apparatus and instruments available were crude and limited the means were not at hand for gaining know ledge of new classes of phenomena, or eliciting facts more recondite than those already studied. Though greater reliance was placed on observation and exper iment, the change in the content of science could not be dramatic and other sources of information were, at least till the latter part of the sixteenth century, largely traditional. Aristotle, Pliny, Dioscorides, Theopharastus and Galen were still very highly respected. Gradually, however, the tendency to supple ment this book-learning, checked by personal examination where possible, by the experience of various groups of practical men gained ground. The wealth of fact was augmented by admitting the observations of craftsmen, navigators, travellers, physicians, surgeons and apothecaries as worthy of serious consid eration, and thus the status of purely empirical truths, hardly inferior to that of the systematic truths of physics or medicine, was in time enhanced.
