We call ours a &dquo;Scientific and Technological Age.&dquo;We call it that, not because all of us are scientists or engineers, and certainly not because everyone can understand the workings of the technical devices which are so much a part of our daily living, but rather because we are aware, as never before, that science and technology affect our lives in many different ways.Indeed, it is this impact of science and technology upon the ways in which we live, work, think, play, and pray that frightens many people. As a result, the modem novel, contemporary drama, and today's philosophy have as one of their most insistent themes the fear that our scientific technology is taking over from mankind, as if the two were somehow opposed to each other and locked in mortal combat. I find this somewhat strange because the historical and, indeed, the prehistorical facts indicate quite the opposite: namely, that mankind is inextricably intertwined with its science and technology. Science, whether in the form of magic, superstition, or religion, was a means whereby man sought to understand the meaning and workings of the natural universe, and technology served as one of man's chief tools as he sought to achieve his goals, whether glorious or ignoble.Man as we know him probably could not have evolved or survived without tools; he is too weak and puny a creature to fight nature with only his hands and teeth. The lion is stronger, the horse is faster, the giraffe can reach higher; but tools served as extensions of man's hands and amplifiers of human muscle power, enabling him to adjust his hereditary organic equipment to an almost infinite number of operations in virtually any environment. It is not surprising, therefore, that some anthropologists define our species on the basis of tool-using and tool-making or, to be more exact, tool-dependency. Modern physiology, psychology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology all combine to demonstrate that homo sapiens (Man the Thinker) cannot be distinguished from homo faber (Man the Maker). Indeed, we now realize that man could not have become a thinker had he not at the same time been a maker. And our anthropologists find evidence that as soon as man began to think, he began to think about the whys and wherefores of the workings of nature, and how to make nature bend to his will. Thus we find that technology and science are perhaps the earliest and most basic of human cultural characteristics, and, at the same time, they have played a major role in shaping our modem world.That helps explain why we historians are interested in the development of science and technology, for we start by asking the question, &dquo;How did things get to be the way they are?&dquo; And then, as educators, we ask a second question: &dquo;What do we intend to do about it?&dquo; And that explains why we are concerned about the interactions between science-technology and the social and natural ecology in the past, so that we can utilize that knowledge to improve the lot of mankind in the future.It was not always ...