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where the line is drawn between the old and the new. Once, in discussing the weight of water, he mentions the law of Archimedes regarding a floating body, but this is the only case in which a scientific principle is traced to its source or in which credit is given to any one for a discovery. This is the more to be regretted because Hero has discussed at some length the theories involved in the treatment of his subject. This reticence on the part of Hero, combined with the fact that such somewhat later writers as Pliny and Vitruvius do not mention Hero's name, while they frequently mention the name of his master, Ctesibius, has led modern critics to a somewhat sceptical attitude regarding the position of Hero as an actual discoverer.
The man who would coolly appropriate some discoveries of others under cloak of a mere prefatorial reference was perhaps an expounder rather than an innovator, and had, it is shrewdly suspected, not much of his own to offer. Meanwhile, it is tolerably certain that Ctesibius was the discoverer of the principle of the siphon, of the forcing-pump, and of a pneumatic organ. An examination of Hero's book will show that these are really the chief principles involved in most of the various interesting mechanisms which he describes. We are constrained, then, to believe that the inventive genius who was really responsible for the mechanisms we are about to describe was Ctesibius, the master. Yet we owe a debt of gratitude to Hero, the pupil, for having given wider vogue to these discoveries, and in particular for the discussion of the principles of hydrostatics and pneumatics contained in the introduction to his book. This discussion furnishes us almost our only knowledge as to the progress of Greek philosophers in the field of mechanics since the time of Archimedes.
The main purpose of Hero in his preliminary thesis has to do with the nature of matter, and recalls, therefore, the studies of Anaxagoras and Democritus. Hero, however, approaches his subject from a purely material o
A History of Science, vol 1, page 200
by Henry Smith Williams