This series of volumes on The Rise of Modern Science describes the fruition in Europe of one of these attempts to describe and analyse nature. Modern science is not merely European; even before it had entered upon its triumphant age its establishment in North America and China had begun, and the origins of the intellectual tradition from which it sprang must be sought in Egypt and Western Asia. But the revolution in ideas which made modern scientific achievements possible occurred in Europe, and there alone, creating an intellectual instrument so universal and so powerful that it has by now entirely displaced the native scientific traditions of non-European societies.