实在巧妙不过，枯燥无味的科学常识，经他那么的一写，无论大人小孩，读他书的人都觉得娓娓忘倦了。房龙的笔，有这样一种魔力，但这也不是他的特创，这不过是将文学家的手法，拿来讲述科学而已。

图书目录

PROLOGUE
CHAPTER1 THE TYRANNY OF IGNORANCE
CHAPTER2 THE GREEKS
CHAPTER3 THE BEGINNING OF RESTRAINT
CHAPTER4 THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
CHAPTER5 IMPRISONMENT
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书摘
I have read the stories of miracles.
But one of them was lacking;the miracle of the survival of man.
How and in what manner and why the most defenseless of all mammals should have been able to maintain himself against microbes and mastodons and ice and heat and eventually become master of all creation,is something I shall not try to solve in the present chapter.
One thing, however, is certain. He never could have accomplished all this alone.
In order to succeed he was obliged to sink his individuality in the composite character of the tribe.
In such an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual freedom, in a city filled with the pungent smell of ships from all the seven seas, rich with fabrics of the Orient, merry with the laughter of a well fed and contented populace,Thales was born, In such a city he worked and taught and in such a city he died. If the conclusions which he reached differed greatly from the opinions held by most of his neighbors, remember that his ideas never penetrated beyond a very limited circle. The average Miletian may have heard the name of Thales,just as the average New Yorker has probably heard the name of Einstein. Ask him who Einstein is,and he will answer that he is a fellow with long hair who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle and who wrote something about a man walking through a railroad train, about which there once was an article in a Sunday paper.
That this strange person who smokes a pipe and plays the fiddle has got hold of a little spark of truth which eventually may upset (or at least greatly modify) the scientific conclusions of the last sixty centuries,is a matter of profound indifference to the millions of easy-going citizens whose interest in mathematics does not reach beyond the confliet which arises when their favorite batsman tries to upset the law of gravity.
The text-books of ancient history usually get rid of the difficulty by printing “Thales of Miletus (640-5
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