The Greek's lofty attitude toward scientific research——and the scientists' contempt of uti

lity was a long time dying. For a millennium after Archimedes, this separation of mechanics from geometry inhibited fundamental technological progress and in some areas repressed it altogether. But there was a still greater obstacle to change until the very end of the middle ages: the organization of society. The social system of fixed class relationships that prevailed through the Middle Ages (and in some areas much longer) itself hampered improvement. Under this system, the laboring masses, in exchange for the bare necessities of life, did all the productive work, while the privileged few——priests, nobles, and kings——concerned themselves only with ownership and maintenance of their own position. In the interest of their privileges they did achieve considerable progress in defense, in warmaking, in government, in trade, in the arts of leisure, and in the extraction of labor from their dependents, but they had no familiarity with the process of production. On the other hand, the laborers, who were familiar with manufacturing techniques, had no incentive to improve or increase production to the advantage of their masters. Thus, with one class possessing the requisite knowledge and experience, but lacking incentive and leisure, and the other class lacking the knowledge and experience, there was no means by which technical progress could be achieved.

The whole ancient world was built upon this relationship——a relationship as sterile as it was inhuman. The availability of slaves nullified the need for more efficient machinery. In many of the coxnmonplace fields of human endeavor, actual stagnation prevailed for thousands of years. Not all the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome could develop the windmill or contrive so simple an instrument as the wheelbarrow——products of the tenth and thirteenth centuries respectively.

For about twenty-five centuries, two-thirds of the power of the horse was lost because he wasn't shod, and much of the strength of the ox was wasted because his harness wasn't modified to fit his shoulders. For more than five thousand years, sailors were confined to rivers and coasts by a primitive steering mechanism which required remarkably little alteration (in the thirteenth century) to become a rudder.

With any ingenuity at all, the ancient plough could have been put on wheels and the ploughshare shaped to bite and turn the sod instead of merely scratching it——but the ingenuity wasn't forthcoming. And the villager of the Middle Ages, like the men who first had fire, had a smoke hole in the center of the straw and reed thatched roof of his' one-room dwelling (which he shared with his animals), while the medieval charcoal burner (like his Stone Age ancestor) made himself a hut of small branches.

Lack of technological progress in the ancient and medieval worlds was primarily due to the absence of ______.

A．natural resources

B．inventive ability

C．people's desire for the "better things of life"

D．proper social organization