ish community made a later and slower start, coming out of barbarism at a later date and with a heavier handica^p of physical obstructions. But being, relatively, sheltered from war and politics, the British were able to take up the fund of scientific gains made by the South-European men of workday insight, to turn it to account and to carry it over the era of state-making and so prepare the way for the modern scientific, technological era.
Of course, nothing but the most meagre and sketchiest outline of this matter is practicable in this place, and even that only in its relation to the machine industry during the past one hundred years or so. What is said above of the British lead in modem science may perhaps be questioned, and it ia not necessary for the present purpose to insist on its truth ; but so much seems beyond hazard as that the lead in the material sciences lay with the British through the early machine age, and that the provenance of this modem scientific research to-day does not extend, in any pronounced degree, beyond those communities that lie within the area of the modem machine industry. '-^ In time and space the prevalence of the modem materialistic science is roughly coextensive with that of the machine process. It is, no doubt, related to it both as cause and as effect ; but that its relation to modem industry is more that of effect
CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 36S
than cause seema at least broadly suggested by th^ decay which presently overtook scientific research, t.ij., in the south of Europe when those peoples turned their attention from material to spiritual and political affairs.'
. What is of immediate interest is the change that has come over the scope and method of scientific research since the dominance of the machine