Shen Gua 沈括

Shen Gua 沈括 [1450] Zhou's [7323] son, Gou's [1449] and Liao's [1453] cousin, and Fu's [7324] nephew. He lived in Suzhou. One of Yang(2) Gou's [7399] sons married his elder sister; I arbitrarily select #1 son, Yang(2) Chi [22615]. Zhang Yinlin, pp. 323-358; XCB, 245.3a, 17b, 249.10b, 255.8b, 256.14a, 258.3a, 261.6b, 269.16a, 283.11b; Xianchun Linan zhi, 66.11b; SHY:ZG, 42.62b, 65.43a; Suzhou FZ, 139.20b; Wang Anshi, WJ, 98.1013; YLDD, 2368.4a, 12506.8a, 20b. CBD, 1, 676-7. — RMH

Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography

SHEN Kua (b. 1031, registered at Ch’ien-t’ang [now Hangchow, Chekiang province], China; d. Ching-k’ou, Jun prefecture [now Chinkiang, Kiangsu province], China, 1095) Polymathy, astronomy.

Shen was the son of Shen Chou (ca. 978–1052) and his wife, whose maiden name was Hsü. Shen Chou came of a gentry family with neither large landholdings nor an unbroken tradition of civil service. He spent his life in minor provincial posts, with several years in the capital judiciary. Shen Kua apparently received his early education from his mother. A native of Soochow (the region of which was known for its flourishing manufactures, commerce, and agriculture), she was forty-four or forty-five years old when he was born. Shen’s background made possible his entry into the imperial bureaucracy, the only conventional road to advancement for educated people of his time. Unlike colleagues who came from the ancient great clans, he could count on few advantages save those earned by his striving and the full use of his intellectual talents. Shortly after he was assigned to the court, he became a confidant of the emperor and played a brilliant part in resolving the crises of the time. But within slightly over a decade his career in the capital was ended by impeachment. After a provincial appointment and five years of meritorious military accomplishment, he was doubly disgraced and politically burned out. The extremes of Shen’s career and the shaping of his experience and achievement in science and technology become comprehensible only if the pivotal circumstances of his time are first considered.

Historical Background. Shen’s time was in many senses the climax of a major transition in the Chinese polity, society, and economy.

Three centuries earlier the center of gravity in all these respects still lay in the north, the old center of civilization of the Han people. Wealth and power rested in the hands of the old aristocratic landowning families. Governmental institutions incorporated the tension between their private interests and the inevitable desire of their foremost peer, the emperor, to concentrate authority. The civil service examination system was beginning to give the central government a means to shape a uniform education for its future officials; but since birth or local recommendation determined who was tested, the mass of commoners remained un-involved. The social ideals prevalent among the elite were static; the ideal past was cited to discourage innovation; and the moral example of those who ruled, rather than responsive institutions or prescriptive law, was held to be the key to the healthy state. The classicist’s paradigm of a two class society—self-sufficient agriculturalists ruled and civilized by humane generalists, with land as the only true wealth—did not encourage commerce, industry, or the exploitation of natural resources. The wants of the great families, whose civil servant members were becoming city dwellers by the middle of the eighth century, nonetheless gave momentum to all of these activities; but the majority of the population still took no part in the rudimentary money economy.

The T’ang order began a long, slow collapse about 750, until in the first half of the tenth century the empire of “All Under Heaven” was reduced to a succession of ephemeral and competing kingdoms. When the universal state was reconstructed in the Northern Sung (960–1126). Its foundations were in many important respects different from those of the early T’ang. A new dynasty was not only, as classical monarchic theory had it, a fresh dispensation of the cosmos; it was also the occasion for institutionalizing a new distribution of power in society. The cumulative result of changes in taxation had been to make the old families accountable for their estates as they had not been earlier, and to encourage smaller landholdings–and, thus, a wider diffusion of wealth.

The center of vitality had moved southeast to the lower Yangtze valley, which had long before emerged as the major rice-yielding region. By this time its fertility, combined with its relative freedom from restrictive social arrangement, had bred a new subculture that was more productive in industry than elsewhere and hospitable to the growth of commerce and stable markets, the beginnings of a uniform money economy, and the great broadening of education that printing had just made possible. The new southern elite was, on the whole, small gentry, and lacked the military traditions of the ancient northern clans and of power holders in the period of disunion. Their families were often too involved in trade for them to despise it. Although conservative, as all Chinese elites have been, they were prepared to think of change as a useful tool. The novelties of attitude and value were often slighter or subtler than such a brief account can convey, but within the established limits of Chinese social ideals their considerable.

In Shen Kua’s time the old families still provided many of the very highest officials and thus wielded great influence, positive or obstructive, in discussion about the future of China. But they had become merely influential members of a new political constellation that brought a variety of convictions and interests to that brought a variety of convictions and interests to that perennial debate. An especially obvious new element was that many southern small gentry families like Shen’s established traditions of civil service, either as a main means of support or to protect and further their other concerns. Once a family’s social standing was achieved. one or more members could enter the bureaucracy freely because of experience as subordinates in local administration or because they were amply prepared by education for the examinations. Their sons could enter still more freely because special access to both direct appointment and examination was provided to offspring of officials.

Not sharing the old vision of a virtue-dominated social order fixed by precedent, men of the new elite were willing to sponsor institutional renovation in order to cope directly with contemporary problems. Dependent on their own talents and often needing their salaries, they were dedicated to building a rational, systematic, and in most respects more centrally oriented administration. They were willing to make law an instrument of policy, and insisted that local officials be rated not only on the moral example they set but also quantitatively–on how effectively they made land arable and collected taxes. In the name of efficiency they devoted themselves to removing customary curbs on imperial authority and (with only partial success in the Sung) to dismantling the structures of privilege that underlay regional autonomy. Only later would it become clear that they were completing the metamorphosis of the emperor from paramount aristocrat to autocrat. At the same time they were successfully demanding more policy-making authority as the emperor’s surrogates, although at the cost to themselves of greater conformity than officials of the old type had willingly accepted.

This irreversible transition did not lead to a modern state, but only to a new and ultimately stagnant pattern. The most accelerated phase of a change was the activity of what is called the New Policies group (actually a shifting coalition) between 1069 and 1085. Its leader, Wang An-shih (1021–1086), was brought to the capital in 1068 by the young emperor Shen-tsung, who had just taken the throne. Within two years Wang had become first privy councillor. He resigned for nine months in 1074, when pressure from his antagonists persuade the emperor to be less permissive, and returned permanently to private life in 1076. The New policies continued to be applied and extended. but with less and less attention to their founding principles. until Shen-tsung’s death in 1085. Under the regency of the empress dowager, enemies of the reform attempted for eight years to extirpate Wang’s influence and take revenge upon his adherents. When Emperor Che-tsung came of age in 1093, the New policies were revived, but were so bent toward selfish ends and administered so disastrously that the word “reform” is hardly applicable.

Wang An-shih’s opponents were many: the old aristocrats, career bureaucrats of the sort who would oppose any change as disruptive, officials whose individual or group interests ran in other directions-and men of group interests ran in other directions-and men of high ideals who found his proposals ill-advised and his personal style too intolerant.*

In the successive reform movements of the Northern Sung there were considerable differences in the alignment of men with different beliefs and backgrounds. See the discussion in James T. C. Liu, “An Early Sung Reformer: Fan Chung-yen.” in John K. Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought and Institutions (Chicago, 1957), 105–131. esp. 107–109. The generalizations of the present article and of current scholarship as a whole are crude and tentative, pending the “comparative analysis of the inter-relationships between ideology and family, class, status-group, and regional interests” that Robert M. Hartwell has called for in “Historical Analogism, Public Policy, and Social Science in Eleventh-and Twelfth-century China,” in American Historical Review, 76 (1971), 690–727.

No institution had evolved through Chinese history to work out and resolve conflicts of political viewpoint. This lack was filled by cliques, intrigues, and appeals to imperial intervention. Division and corruption among active supporters of the New Policies also had been a problem from the start. The scope of Wang’s program was so large that he had to take competent support where he found it. The new access to power that he offered attracted ambitious men, many of whom had little real sympathy for his convictions and dedicated themselves primarily to manipulation and graft. Once Wang was gone, the leadership of his group tended to become a battleground for aspirations of this kind. The internal and external enemies of the New Policies left the program a shambles by the time the Chin Tartars drove the Sung south in 1127.

A primary aim of the reforms was financial security of the state, which prompted initiatives in water control and land reclamation, encouragement of extractive industries and agriculture, intervention in commerce, and rationalization of taxes. Another goal, particularly at the emperor’s insistence, was military strength. There had been a long confrontation between the Chinese and the powerful Khitan empire, pastoral masters of mounted combat to the north (renamed Liao in 1066). Seventy years of fitful peace were punctuated by humiliating Chinese failures to recapture territory south of the Great Wall and maintained by large annual bribes. For three decades the Tangut people of the north-west had posed an almost equally unpalatable demand for appeasement. Victory or détenet through strength, the emperor hoped, could be bought on both fronts with the wealth that the New Policies generated from man’s exploitation of nature. Here too expertise was needed in cartography, strategic theory and tactical doctrine (both of which contained cosmological elements), design and manufacture of war matériel, fortification, troop organization and training, and development of a stable economy in border regions.

Shen Kua contributed to nearly every field of New Policies activity, both civil and military. His social background and political commitments cannot be considered responsible for his scientific talent or curiosity; the antecedents and loyalties of other major contemporary scientific figures were very different from his. But a review of his career and of his work will show how regularly his involvement with particular technical themes and problems grew out of his activities in government.

Life. From about 1040 Shen traveled with his father to successive official posts from Szechwan in the west to the international port of Amoy. He was exposed not only to the geographical diversity of China but also to the broad range of technical and managerial problems—public works, finance, improvement of agriculture, maintenance of water-ways—that were among the universal responsibilities of local administrators. Because his physical constitution was weak, he became interested in medicine at an early age.

Late in 1051, when Shen was twenty, his father died. As soon as the customary inactivity of the mourning period ended in 1054, Shen received the first of a series of minor local posts; his father’s service exempted him from the prefectural examination. His planning ability became almost immediately apparent when he designed and superintended a drainage and embankment system that reclaimed some hundred thousand acres of swampland for agriculture. This was the first of a seried of projects that established his reputation for skill in water control. In 1061, as a subprefect in Ning-kuo 8 (now Fu-hu, 9 Anhwei province), after a cartographic survey and a historical study of previous earthworks in the region, he applied the labor of fourteen thousand people to another massive land reclamation scheme that won the recognition of the emperor. In a series of floods four years later, Shen noted, it was the only such project not over- whelmed. He wrote characteristically that in the first year it returned the cost of the grain used, and that there was more than a tenfold profit on cash expended. In 1063 he passed the national examinations. Posted to Younchow, he impressed the fiscal intendant (a post then equivalent to governor), Chang Ch’u10 (1015–1080), who recommended him for a court appointment leading to a career in the professional financial administration.*

The succession of fiscal posts that often led to a seat on the Council of State in the eleventh century has been documented by Robert M. Hartwell in “Financial Expertise, Examinations, and the Formulation of Economic Policy in Northern Sung China,” in Journal of Asian Studies, 30, 281–314.

Shen apparently used the time not occupied by his early metropolitan appointments, which were conventional and undemanding, to study astronomy. In reply to the informal questions of a superior he set down clear explanations, still extant, of the sphericity of the sun and moon as proved by lunar phases, of eclipse limits, and of the retrogradation of the lunar nodes. They demonstrate an exceptional ability to visualize motions in space, which were at best implicit in the numerical procedures of traditional astronomy and seldom were discussed in technical writing. In 1072 Shen was given an additional appointment as director of the Astronomical Bureau. With the collaboration of his remarkable commoner protégé Wei P’u11 and the aid of other scholarly amateurs, using books gathered from all over the country, he undertook a major calendar reform. He planned an ambitious series of daily observations to extend over five years, using renovated and redesigned instruments. When he took office, the bureau was staffed with incompetents. He forced the dismissal of six whom he caught falsifying records of phenomena, but the obstruction of those who remained doomed his program of observations and kept his new system of ephemerides computation from being among the two or three most securely founded before modern times. Shen’s personal involvement in later stages of the reform undoubtedly was limited by his gradual movement into the vortex of factional politics.

Shen was early known to Wang An-shih, who composed his father’s epitaph while a young provincial official; Shen eventually came to be publicly identified by enemies of the New Policies as among the eighteen members of Wang’s intimate clique. In late 1072, in support of Wang’s program, Shen surveyed the silting of the Pien Canal near the capital by an original technique, dredged it, and demonstrated the value of the silt as fertilizer. Until mid–1075 he spent much time traveling as a troubleshooter of sorts, inspecting and reporting on water control projects, military preparations, and local administrations—and, it has been conjectured, providing encouragement to Wang’s provincial supporters. Shen was put in charge of arsenal activities and, in 1075, was sponsored by Wang (then head of government) to revise defensive military tactics, a task the throne had proposed for Wang himself.

In 1074 the Khitan were pressing negotiations to move their borders further south. Incompetent and timorous Chinese negotiators were conceding unfounded Liao assertions about the language and substance of previous agreements. Shen built a solid Chinese case by going to the archives, as no one had bothered to do before. His embassy in mid-1075 to the camp of the Khitan monarch on Mt. Yung-an (near modern P’ing-ch’üan, Hopei) was triumphant. He described himself surrounded by a thousand hostile onlookers, calling on his staff, who had memorized the old documents of the Khitan themselves, to cite without pause or flurry the exact reference to refute one historical claim after another.

Shen returned to China—with biological specimens and maps of the territories he had passed through—to become a Han-lin academician, to be given charge of a large-scale water control survey in the Yangtze region, and then to become head of the Finance Commission. While in this very powerful position he untangled a variety of contradictory policies, producing in the process some of the most penetrating writings before modern times on the operation and regulation of supply and demand, on methods of forecasting prices in order to intervene effectively in the market, and on factors that affect the supply of currency (varying through hoarding, counterfeiting, and melting) as the value of the metal in it fluctuates about its controlled monetary value. In the autumn of 1077, just as his revision of critical fiscal measures was well launched, he was impeached by the corrupt and vindictive censor Ts’ai Ch’ueh14 (1036–1093). The charge was that Shen had opposed a New Policies taxation measure in an underhanded, inconsistent, and improper way. It was credited by historians for centuries, but its truth has been refuted in every detail by recent Chinese research. His protector Wang An-shih had just left government; it is believed, given the mood of the time, that by threatening an established budget item in order to ease the burdens of the poor, Shen became an easy victim of factional maneuvering.

The emperor was not only the ritual synapse between the political and natural orders; he was a human being whose likes and dislikes were indulged within broad limits that could be further widened by force of his personal charisma and will. The closer to him an official penetrated, the more achievement and even survival became subject to imperial whim and the intrigue of colleagues. Although the record is fragmentary, it gives the impression that Shen Kua was maneuvered by Wang An-shih into the proximity of the throne because of his brilliance, judgment, and effectiveness at complicated tasks. Nothing indicates that he was adept at protecting himself. He attracted the most damaging animosity not from opponents of the New Policies but from designing members of his coalition. Once the emperor qualified his support of the New Policies in 1074, the risk of debacle remained great and imminent. Many officials who had risen with Wang fought furiously for the power that would keep them afloat even though the program sank. They did not wish to be deterred by a colleague who judged issues on their own merits. They probably also felt, as others did, that a man of Shen’s age and rank did not deserve the emperor’s confidence.

Ts’ai Ch’ueh was rising into the vacuum that Wang’s retirement had left. The emperor depended increasingly on Ts’ai’s monetary counsel and could not easily disregard what he insisted upon. For three years it was impossible to overcome his objections and those of another censor, and to rehabilitate Shen. Finally Shen was sent to Yenchou (now Yenan, Shensi province), on the necessary route for military operations by or against the Tanguts, as commissioner for prefectural civil and military affairs.16 The Tanguts were then divided and weakened, minor Chinese conquests around 1070 had set the stage for a war, and the treasury had ample funds. Shen played an important part in organizing and fortifying for the victorious offensive of the autumn of 1081. In extending Sung control he showed a practical as well as a theoretical mastery of the art of warfare. He was cited for merit and given several honorary appointments. It was probably at the same time that he was ennobled as state foundation viscount. In his sixteen months at Yen-chou, Shen received 273 personal letters from the emperor. His standing at the court was in principle reestablished. Whether he had become shrewd enough to survive there was never tested.

Shen and a colleague followed up the victory by proposing fortifications to close another important region to the Tanguts. The emperor referred the matter to an ambitious and arrogant official who, ignoring the proposal, changed the plan to provide defenses for what Shen argued was an indefensible and strategically useless location. Shen was commanded to leave the vicinity of the new citadel so as not share in the credit for the anticipated victory. When the Tangut attack came, the emissary’s force was decimated while Shen, with imperial permission, was successfully defending a key town on the enemy invasion route to Yen-chou. The campaign thus provided the Tangut with no opening for advance—but Ts’ai Ch’ueh was now a privy councillor. As titular military commander Shen was held responsible for the defeat and considerable loss of life. At the age of fifty-one his career was over. The towns he saved were later abandoned by the anti—New Policies regime to no advantage, just as the lands he had saved from the Khitan through diplomacy had since been lost by another negotiator.

Shen spent six years in fixed probationary residence, forbidden to engage in official matters. He used at least two of these years to complete a great imperially commissioned atlas of all territory then under Chinese control. He had been working on this atlas intermittently earlier, he had had access to court documents. His reward included the privilege of living where he chose.

Ten years earlier Shen had bought, sight unseen, a garden estate on the outskirts of Ching-k’ou In 1086, visiting it for first timed, he recognized it as a landscape of poignant beauty that he had seen repeatedly in dreams, and named it Dream Brook (Meng ch’i, alternately read Meng hsi). He moved there in 1088. Despite a pardon and the award of sinecures to support him in his old age, he spent seven years of leisure, isolation, and illness until his death there.*

For a translation that conveys the flavor of Shen’s autobiography, see Donald Holzman, “Shen Kua,” 275–276.

Shen’s writings, of which only a few are extant even in part, include commentaries on Cofunction missions, a collection of literary works. and monographs on rituals, music, mathematical harmonics, administration, mathematical astronomy, astronomical instruments, defensive tactics and fortification, painting, tea, medicine, and poetry. Of three books complied during his last years at Dream Brook, one, “Good Prescription” (Liang fang), was devoted to medical therapy. theory, and philology; the other belong to particularly Chinese gerneres, “Record of Longings Forgotten” (Wang Huai lu), a collection of notes on the life of the gentleman farmer in the mountains, contains useful information on implements and agricultural technique and. unlike more conventional agricultural treatises up to that time, on the culture of medicinal plants.

“Brush Talks From Dream Brook” (Meng ch’i pi t’an) and its sequels and well-edited in modern times, is by any reckoning one of the most remarkable documents of early science and technology. It is a collection of about six hundred recollections and observations, ranging from one or two sentences to about a page of modern print—“because I had only my writing brush and ink slab to converse with, I call it Brush Talks.” They are loosely grouped under topics (seventeen in all current versions), of which seven contain considerable matter of interest in the study of nature and man’s use of it: “Regularities Underlying the Phenomena” (mostly astronomy, astrology, cosmology, divination), “Technical Skills” (mathematics and its applications, technology, medicine), "Philology" (including etymology and meanings of technical terms). “Strange Occurrences” (incorporating various natural observations), “Artifacts and Implements” (techniques reflected in ancient objects), “Miscellaneous Notes” (greatly overlapping other sections), and “Deliberations on Material Medica” (most of it on untangling historic and regional confusions in identities of medical substances).

Notices of the highest originality stand cheek by jowl with trivial didacticisms, court anecdotes, and ephemeral curiosities under all these rubrics; other sections were given to topics conventional in collections of jottings—memorable people, wisdom in emergencies, and so on. Shen’s theoretical discussions of scientific topics employed the abstract concepts of his time—yin-yang, the Five Phases (wu-hsing), ch’i and so on. A large fraction of the book’s contents is devoted to fate, divination, and portents, his belief in which has been ignored by historians seeking to identify in him the prototype of the modern scientist. The author of “Brush Talks” has been compared with Leibniz: and in an era of happier relations with the Soviet Union, Hu Tao-ching, the foremost authority on Shen, referred to him as the Lomonosov of his day. But Shen was writing for gentlemen of universal curiosity and humanistic temperament; custom, wisdom, language, and oddity were as important themes as nature and artifice.

Because Shen’s interests were multifarious, the record unsystematic, and its form too confining for anything but fragmentary insight, only accumulation can provide a fair impression of what constitutes his importance. What follows is the mere sample that space allows of his attempts to deepen the contemporary understanding of nature, his observations that directed the attention of his educated contemporaries to important phenomena or processes, and his own technical accomplishments. They are grouped to bring out contiguity of subject matter without interposing the radically different disciplinary divisions of modern science. These samples will become the basis of discussion—which, given the state of research, must be highly tentative—of the epistemological underpinnings of Shen’s work, and of the unity of his scientific thought with elements that today would be considered unscientific, primitive, or superstitious. Finally, it will be possible to evaluate Shen’s life as a case study in the reconcilability of Confucianism and science, which the conventional wisdom among sinologists for over a generation has tended to place in opposition.

Quantity and Measure. Mathematics was not the queen of sciences in traditional China. It did not exist except as embodied in specific problems about the physical world. Abstract thought about numbers was always concerned with their qualities rather than their properties, and thus remained numerology. This art, although it blended into arithmetic, was only partly distinct from other symbolic means (in the anthropologist’s sense: magical, ritual, religious, divinatory) for exploring the inherent patterns of nature and man’s relation to it. Computation, on the other hand, was applied to a great variety of mensurational, accounting, and other everyday tasks of the administrator in a coherent tradition of textbooks. Occasionally curiosity and skill pushed beyond these pragmatic limits, but never very far. Some of the problems that Shen presented in “Brush Talks” had no application, but his enthusiasm for them was in no way qualified.

In addition to this accumulation of individual problems there were two exact sciences, in which mathematics served theory to advance knowledge of the patterns underlying the phenomena. One was mathematical harmonics (lü lü), which explored the relations between musical intervals and the dimensions of instruments that produced them, in ways analogous to the Pythagorean art. Its appeal was much the same in both China and Greece: it demonstrated how deeply the power of number was grounded in nature. For this reason in China mathematical harmonics was often put into the same category as mathematical astronomy, which also had foundations in metaphysics. Astronomy, by far the more technically sophisticated of the two exact sciences, was normally employed on behalf of the monarch. Unpredictable phenomena and failures of prediction were either good or bad omens. Bad omens were interpreted as warnings that the emperor’s mediating virtue, which maintained concord between the cosmic and political orders, was deficient. Successful prediction of celestial events was symbolic preservation or enhancement of the charisma of the ruling dynasty.

The annual calendar (or almanac) issued by authority of the throne was thus of great ceremonial importance. It encompassed all predictable phenomena, including planetary phenomena and eclipses. The utilitarian planetary phenomena and eclipses. The utilitarian calendrical aspects—lunar months and solar years—had long since been refined past any practical demand for accuracy, but astronomical reinforcement of the Mandate of Heaven called forth endless attempts at greater precision of constants. As it became conventional to institute a complete new system for computing these ephemeredes when a new emperor was enthroned, technical novelty was at a premium. When new ideas were unavailable, trivial recasting of old techniques was usually substituted. Repeated failures of prediction were another motive for reform of the astronomical system. In such cases too the system was in principle replaced as a unit rather than repaired. most systems survived or feel on their ability to predict eclipses, particularly solar eclipses. These were the least amenable of all celestial phenomena to the algebraic, non-geometric style of mathematics. Prior to Shen’s time little effort had gone into predicting the apparent motions of the planets, which lacked the immediacy of solar and lunar phenomena. This was, in fact, an omission that Shen seems to have been the first to confront.

General Mathematics. As wood-block printing became widespread, the government used it to propagate carefully edited collections of important ancient textbooks for use in education. This was being done in medicine at the time Shen entered the capital bureaucracy. In 1084 a collection of ten mathematical manuals, made four centuries earlier and reconstituted as well as extant texts allowed, was printed. The authority of these projects served both to fix textual traditions, preserving selected treatises from further attrition, and passively to encourage the fading into oblivion of books left out. Shen thus lived at a pivotal period in the development of mathematics, and his judgments on lost techniques and disused technical terms (such as 300, 306) have played an important part in later attempts to interpret them.*

Numbers in parentheses are item numbers in the Hu Taoching edition of Meng ch’i pi t’an (the latter is referred to hereafter as “Brush Talks”). Roman volume numbers followed by page numbers refer to translations in Joseph Needham et al., Science and Civilisation in China. Where my own understanding differs considerably from Needham’s, an asterisk follows the page reference. All quotations below are from Shen, and all translations are my own. Full bibliographical data are given in the notes only for sources of too limited pertinence to be included in the bibliography. Chinese and Japanese family names precede personal names throughout this article.

“Brush Talks” is also an essential source for the study of pre-Sung metrology, currency, and other subjects related to computation.

Shen used mathematics in the formulation of policy arguments more consistently than most of his colleagues; examples are his critique of military tactics in terms of space required for formations (579) and his computation that a campaign of thirty-one days is the longest that can feasibly be provisioned by human carriers (205). But of the computational methods discussed in his “Technical Skills” chapter, those not related to astronomy are almost all abstractly oriented.

This original bent emerges most clearly in two problems. One departs from earlier formulas for computing the frustum of a solid rectangular pyramid. Shen worked out the volume of the same figure if composed of stacked articles (he mentioned go pieces, bricks, wine vats) that leave interstices (301). Since Shen intended this “Volume with interestices” (ch’i chi) method to be applicable regardless of the shape of the objects stacked, what he gave is a correct formula for the number of objects, which are thus to be considered of unit volume. His presentation has several interesting features. Needham has suggested that the concern with interestices (and, one would add, unit volumes) may have been a step in the direction of geometric exhaustion methods (III, 142–143)—although it was tentative and bore fruit only in seventeenth-century Japan. Second, instead of the worked-out problem with actual dimensions that is conventional in early textbooks, Shen simply gave a generalized formula; “double the lower length, add to the upper length, multiply by the lower length, add to the upper length, multiply by the lower width,” and so on. Third, this was the earliest known case in China of a problem involving higher series. Built on earlier numerical approaches to arithmetical progressions, it provided a basis for more elaborate treatment by Yang Hui (1261) and Chu Shih-chieh (1303).

The second problem of interest was said “in a story” to have been solved by one of China’s greatest astronomers, the Tantric Buddhist patriarch I-hsing35 (682–727): the number of possible situations on a go board, with nineteen by nineteen intersections on which any number of black or white pieces may be placed. Whether I-hsing actually solved this problem we do not know; Shen’s single paragraph was the first and last known discussion of permutations in traditional mathematics. It stated the order of magnitude of the answer—“approximately speaking one must write the character wan (10,000) fifty-two times in succession”—adding exact answers for smaller arrays, three methods of solution, and a note on the limited traditional notation for very large numbers (304)*.

This was translated in part by Needham (III.139). The extant text, even in Hu’s edition, is very corrupt. It has been edited and considerably emended by Ch’ien Pao-tsung in Sung Yuan shuhsueh-shih lun-wen-chi. 266–269.

Mathematical Harmonics. The Pythagoreans were fascinated by the relations of concordant intervals to the plucked strings that produced them, since the lengths between stops were proportionate to simple ratios of integers. The Chinese built up a similar science on a gamut of standard pipes. Beginning with a pipe eight inches long and 0.9 inch in diameter, they generated the lengths of subsequent pipes by multiplying the previous length alternately by 2/3 and 4/3, making twelve pipes within an approximate octave. The dozen were then related to such categories as the twelve divisions of the tropical year, in order to provide a cosmic basis for the system of modes that the pipes determined. A pentatonic scale, which could be used in any of the twelve modes, provided similar associations with the Five Phases. This basis was extended to metrology by defining the lengths and capacities of the pipes in terms of millet grains of standard dimensions. Shen provided a lucid and concise explanation of these fundamentals of mathematical harmonics, and corrected grotesque complications that had crept into a canonic source through miscopying of numbers (143, 549). He also experimentally studied stringed instruments. By straddling strings with paper figures, he showed that strings tuned to the same notes on different instruments resonate, as do those tuned an octave apart on the same instrument (537; cf. IV.1, 130). His two chapters on music and harmonics37 are also a trove of information on composition and performance.

Astronomy. Shen’s major contributions in astronomy were his attempts to visualize celestial motions spatially, his are-sagitta methods that for the first time moved algebraic techniques toward trigonometry, and his insistence on daily observational records as a basis for his calendar reform. The first had no direct application in computation of the ephemerides, although it may well have inspired (and at the same time have been inspired by) the second, which grew out of traditional mensurational arithmetic. It has been suggested that the clarity of Shen’s cosmological explanations led to his appointment to the Astronomical Bureau, which provided opportunity for his contributions in the second and third areas. But circumstances that arose from the bureaucratic character of mathematical astronomy made these contributions futile in his lifetime.

Shen’s discussions of solar, lunar, and eclipse phenomena (130–131; excerpts, III, 415—416) have been mentioned. By far the most remarkable of his cosmological hypotheses attempted to account for variations in the apparent planetary motions, including retrogradation. This concern is not to be taken for granted, since traditional astronomers preferred purely numerical approaches to prediction, unlike the spatial geometric models of Greek antiquity, and showed little interest in planetary problem. Noting that the greatest planetary anomaly occurred near the stationary points, Shen proposed a model in which the planet traced out a figure like a willow leaf attached at one side to the periphery of a circle (see Figure 1). The change in direction of the planet’s motion with respect to the stars was explained by its travel along the pointed ends of the leaf (148).* The willow leaf, in other words, served one of the same functions that the epicycle served in Europe. It is characteristic that, having taken a tack that in the West was prompted entirely by geometric reasoning, Shen’s first resort should have been a familiar physical object. Use of a pointed figure doubtless would not have survived a mathematical analysis of observational data, but this remained an offhand suggestion.

Translated by N. Sivin. Cosmos and Computation in Early Chinese Mathematical Astronomy (Leiden, 1969), also published in Toung Pao. 55 (1969), 1–73 (see 71–73), from which the figure is reproduced with permission of E. J. Brill.

Another early outcome of Shen’s service at the court was a series of proposals for the redesign of major astronomical instruments: the gnomon, which was still employed to measure the noon shadow and fix the solstices; the armillary sphere, with which angular measurements were made; and the clepsydra, used to determine the time of observations (and to regulate court activities). Shen’s improved versions of the latter two apparently were not built until late 1073, after he had taken charge of the Astronomical Bureau. The armillary at least was discarded for a new one in 1082, a casualty of his personal disgrace.

Shen’s clepsydra proposals represent a new design of the overflow-tank type (Needham’s Type B; III, 315–319, 325), but the most significant outcome of his work on this instrument was a jotting on problems of calibration. Day and night were by custom separately divided into hours, the length of which varied with the season. The time was read off graduated float rods, day and night sets of which were changed twenty-four times a year. Shen pointed out that this crude and inadequate scheme amounted to linear interpolation, “treating the ecliptic as a polygon rather than a circle,” and argued for the use of higher-order interpolation (128).

The best armillary sphere available in the central administration when Shen first worked there was based on a three-hundred-year-old design “and lacked ease of operation” (150). The most interesting of Shen’s improvements was in the diameter of the naked-eye sighting tube. At least from the first millennium b.c. a succession of stars had been taken up and abandoned as the pole star. In the late fifth century of the current era Tsu Keng discovered that the current polestar, 4339 Camelopardi, rotated about a point slightly more than a degree away. This determination of the true pole was incorporated in subsequent instruments by making the radius of their sighting tubes 1.5 Chinese degrees (each 360/365.25°). The excursion of the pole star just inside the field of view thus provided a nightly check on orientation. Six hundred years later Shen found that the polestar could no longer be kept in view throughout the night. He gradually widened the tube, using plots of the polestar’s position made three times each night for three months to adjust aim, until his new calibration revealed that the distance of the star from “the unmoving place at the celestial pole” was now slightly over three degrees (127; III , 262). Shen’s successors followed him in treating the distance as variable, although the relation of this secular change to the equinoctial precession was not explored. Aware of the periodic retrogradation of the lunar nodes, Shen also discarded the armillary ring representing the moon’s path, which could not reflect this motion; it was never used again.

Calendar Reform. On the accession of Shen-tsung in 1068, a new computational system was expected. The inability of the incumbent specialists to produce one left Shen with a clear mandate when he took over the Astronomical Bureau in 1072. The situation became even more awkward when he was forced to bring in Wei P’u and others from outside the civil service, although few of the incompetents already in the bureau could be dislodged, in order to begin work on the calendar reform. It is not yet possible to tell what part of the work was done by Shen and what part by his assistants, although it is clear that Wei took responsibility for compiling the system as Shen became increasingly occupied elsewhere in government. Wei, a commoner whose connection with Shen was first reported in 1068, bore the brunt of fervent opposition within the bureau. He was even formally accused of malfeasance.

Shen knew that previous Sung astronomical systems had suffered greatly from reliance on old observations, and had a clear conception of what new data were needed for the first major advance in centuries. Unabating opposition within the bureau and his own demanding involvements outside it limited the number of innovations of lasting importance in his Oblatory Epoch (Feng-yuan39) system. It was the official basis of calender computation from 1075, the year of its completion, to 1094, a period very close to the average for systems of the Northern Sung. That the system was not used longer has little to do with its merits, since except in cases of spectacular failure, Sung astronomical systems changed as rulers changed. Shen’s was replaced when a new era was marked by the coming of age of Che-tsung. The immediate vicissitudes and long-term influence of three special features will give a general idea of the limits that historical actuality set upon Shen’s astronomical ambitions.

The boldest aspect of Shen’s program was the attempt to master the apparent motions of the planets–not merely their mean speeds and prominent pheomena–for the first time. This could not be done with a few observations of stationary points. occultations, and maximum elongations. Shen and Wei therefore planned a series of observations of a kind not proposed in Europe until the time of Tycho Brahe, five centuries later; exact coordinates read three times a night for five years. Similar records were to be kept for the moon’s positions, since previous Sung systems had still used the lunar theory of I-hsing, which after 350 years had accumulated considerable error. These records were the most unfortunate casualty of the antagonism within the Bureau. Shen and Wei had no recourse but to produce a conventional planetary theory based mainly on old observations. They were able to correct the lunar error, but even this proposal provoked such an outcry that it could be vindicated only by a public demonstration using a gnomon (116).

A second issue was the central one of eclipse prediction. Previous attempts to add or subtract correction factors showed the futility of this approach. It was Wei P’u who “realized that, because the old eclipse technique used the mean sun, [the apparent sun] was ahead of it in the accelerated phase.” He therefore incorporated apparent solar motion into the eclipse theory (139). This had been done centuries earlier but abandoned.

A major obstacle in eclipse prediction, as well as in such workaday problems as the projection of observations in equatorial coordinates onto the ecliptic, was the absence of spherical geometry. Shen’s evolution of arc-chord-sagitta relations out of some inferior approximations for segment areas given in the arithmetical classics was a first step toward trigonometry, making it possible in effect to apply sine relations and a fair approximation of cosine relations (301; III. 39, with diagram). The great remaining lack, as in planetary theory, was a mass of fresh observations on which to base new parameters. That this weakness could threaten the continuance of the system became clear the year after it was adopted (1076), when the failure of a predicted lunar eclipse to occur left Shen and his associates open to attack. Shen parried with a successful request that astronomical students at the Han-lin Academy observatory be ordered to carry out his observational program “for three or five years” and to communicate the results to the original compilers. Whether this attempt to bypass the statement at the Astronomical Bureau’s observatory was well-conceived remains unknown, for in the next year Shen’s impeachment aborted it.

In sum, the immediate outcome of the Oblatory Epoch calendar reform was undistinguished, and within half a century the official documents embodying it had been lost. It is impossible to be sure, for instance, to what extent arc-sagitta relations had been incorporated after Shen invented them. But enough information survived in proposals, reports, Shen’s writings, and compendiums of various sorts for his astronomical system to play a considerable part in the highest achievement of traditional Chinese mathematical astronomy, the Season-Granting (Shou shih) system of Kuo Shou-ching (1280). Kuo carried out a sustained program of observation using instruments that incorporated Shen’s improvements. He took up Shen’s arc-sagitta formula, greatly improving the cosine approximation, and applied it to the equatorecliptic transform. Aware of Shen’s emphasis on the continuous variation of quantities in nature, and of his criticism of linear interpolation in clepsydra design, Kuo used higher-order interpolation to an unprecedented extent in his calendar reform.

Shen recorded another scheme for reform of the civil calendar that was most remarkable for his time and place. It almost certainly occurred to him in the last decade of his life. The traditional lunisolar calendar was a series of compromises in reconciling two incommensurable quantities. The modern value for the tropical year is 365.2422 days, and that for the synodic month 29.53059 days, so that there are roughly 12.37 lunar months per solar year. The practical problem was to design a civil calendar with an integral number of days each month, and an integral number of months each year, in such a way that the long-term averages approach the astronomical constants. Hardly two of the roughly one hundred computational systems recorded in early China solved this problem in exactly the same way, just as there was endless tactical variety in other traditional societies, but strategy was generally the same. Months of twenty-nine and thirty days alternated, with occasional pairs of long months to raise the average slightly. Intercalary thirteenth months were inserted roughly seven times every nineteen years, which comes to 0.37 additional months per year.

By a millennium before Shen’s time the calendar was more than adequate in these respects for every civil need, although attempts to further refine the approximation led to endless retouching. The rhythms of administration, and to some extent of commerce, were of course paramount in the design of the lunisolar calendar, despite pieties about imperial concern for agriculture. It is most unlikely that Chinese peasants ever needed a printed almanac by which to regulate their activity; what they consulted, if anything, was its notations of lucky and unlucky days. Division of the year by lunar months is, in fact, useless for agriculture, since the seasons that pace the farmer’s work vary with the sun alone. The Chinese calendar also incorporated twelve equal divisions of the tropical year (ch’i, like the Babylonian tithis), further subdivided into twenty-four periods with such names as Spring Begins, Grain Rains, and Insects Awaken. These provided a reliable notation for seasonal change in the part of northern China in which the series originated.

Shen’s suggestion was a purely solar calendar, based on the twelve divisions of the tropical year (average 30,43697 days in his system) instead of on the lunation. The civil calendar would thus alternate months of thirty and thirty-one days, with pairs of short months as necessary to approach the average. This would provide truly seasonal months and at the same time do away with “that goitrous excrescence” the intercalary month. “As for the waxing and waning of the moon, although some phenomena such as pregnancy and the tides are tied to them, they have nothing to do with seasons or changes of climate; let them simply be noted in the almanac” (545). Shen was aware that because the lunisolar calendar went back to hoary antiquity “it is by no means appropriate to criticize it.” He predicted that his discussion “will call forth offense and derision, but in another time there will be those who use my arguments.” This proposal was in fact considered by later scholars the greatest blemish on Shen’s astronomical talent. His posterily appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, with the even more radical solar calendar enacted for a few years by the T’ai-p’ing rebels.* His work was cited to justify historically more respectable proposals between that time and the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1912.

Kuo T’ing-i, T’ai-p’ing t’ien kuo li-fa k’ao-ting (“Review of the Calendrical Methods of the T’ai-p’ing Heavenly kingdom,” 1937; reprinted Taipei, 1963); Lo Erh-kang, T’ien li k’ao chi t’ien li yii yin yang li jih tui-chao-piao (“On the T’ai-p’ing Calendar, With a Concordance Table for the Lunar and Gregorian Calendars”; Peking, 1955).

Configuration and Change. Chinese natural philosophers, unlike the majority in the postclassical West, did not dismiss the possibility that terrestrial phenomena could conform to mathematical regularities. But given the strength of Chinese quantitative sciences in numerical rather than geometric approaches, the very late and partial development of mathematical generalization, and the complete absence of notions of rigor, it is only consistent that much of the effort to discover such regularities produced numerology. Thus the most obvious of Shen’s contributions to understanding of the earth and its phenomena are qualitative.

Magnetism. For more than a millennium before Shen’s time, south-pointing objects carved from magnetite had been used from time to item in ceremonial and magic, and in 1044 objects cut from sheet iron and magnetized by thermoremanence were recommended for pathfinding in a book on military arts. Shen took up the matter of needles rubbed against lodestone by contemporary magi, discussed floating and other mountings, recommended suspension, noted that some needles point north and some south, and asserted that “they are always displaced slightly east rather than pointing due south"—all in about a hundred characters (437; IV.1, 249–250). This recognition of magnetic declination depended not only on consideration of a suspended needle but also on the improved meridian determined by Shen’s measurement of the distance between the polestar and true north; declination in his part of China at the time has been estimated as between five and ten degrees (Needham and Peter J. Smith, “Magnetic Declination in Mediaeval China,” in Nature [17 June 1967], 1213–1214. See the historical table in Science and Civilization in China, IV.1, 310).

Shen may have been anticipated by geomancers, who practiced a sophisticated protoscience of land configuration and siting, but the dates of texts on which such claims have been based are questionable. The use of compass needles in navigation is recorded shortly after Shen’s death, and later descriptions provide enough detail to show that the twenty-four-point rose that Shen substituted for the old eight compass points (perhaps also under the stimulus of the better meridian, if not of geomantic practice) had become widely used. He apparently was unaware of the polarity of magnetite itself, since in another article he explained the difference between north-pointing and south-pointing needles as “perhaps because the character of the stone also varies” (588; IV.1, 250).

Cartography. It has been conjectured that Shen was the first to use a compass in mapmaking, although traditional methods would have sufficed. Neither his early maps of Khitan territory nor the atlas of China completed in 1087 have survived to answer this question. But in an enclosure to the latter he did separately record bearings between points using his twenty-four-point compass rose, as well as rectilinear distances rather than, as customary, distances along established routes (he calls the use of distances “as the bird flies” ancient, but we have no earlier record). “Thus although in later generations the maps may be lost, given my book the territorial divisions may be laid out according to the twenty-four directions, and the maps speedily reconstructed without the least discrepancy” (575; III, 576). His great atlas included twenty-three maps drawn to a uniform scale of 1:900,000; the general map was ten by; twelve Chinese feet. There is no evidence that the handbook outlasted the maps.

Three-dimensional topographic maps go back at least to Hsieh Chuang (421–466), who had a demountable wooden model carved, apparently on the basis of an ancient map. In 1075, while inspecting the Khitan border, Shen embodied information gathered from the commander and the results of his own travels in a series of relief maps modeled, for the sake of portability, in plastic media–wheat paste and sawdust until the weather turned freezing, then beeswax–on wooden bases. These were carried to the capital and duplicated in wood; similar models were thenceforth required from other frontier regions (472; III, 580).

Shen’s regular use of both historical research and special on-the-ground surveys to solve such cartographic problems as tracing changes in water-courses also is noteworthy (431). Typical of his ingenious topographic survey methods were those used in 1072 to measure the slope of the Pien Canal near the capital. There he built a series of dikes in temporary, narrow parallel channels to measure incremental changes in water level (457; III, 577*).

Formation of the Earth. In 1704, in the T’ai-hang mountain range (Hopei), Shen noticed strata of “bivalve shells and ovoid rocks running horizontally through a cliff like a belt. This was once a seashore, although the sea is now hundreds of miles east. What we call our continent is an inundation of silt....This mud year by year flows eastward, forming continental land.” A similar stratum had been observed long before by Yen Chen-ch’ing (708–784), who vaguely suggested its orgin in the sea; but Shen—whose duties had made him intimately familiar with the process of silting—opened a new line of investigation by proposing a mechanism (430; III, 604).

Probably on his southward drought survey earlier in the same year, Shen saw the Yen-tang range (Chekiang), a series of fantastic rock formations “invisible from beyond the ridgeline [opposite], but towering to the sky when seen from the valleys. If we trace the underlying pattern, it must be that great waters in the valleys have attacked and washed away all the sand and earth, leaving only the great rocks erect and looming up.” His explanation proceeded to generalize the shaping role of erosion, and then to apply it to the hills that divide streams in the loess country of northwest China—“miniatures of the Yen-tang mountains, but in earth rather than stone” (433; III, 603–604).

Shen reported a variety of contemporary finds of petrified plants and animals (373–374; III, 614–618). He remarked particularly on a stony formation he identified as originally a grove of interconnected bamboo roots and shoots, found dozens of feet below ground level at Yenan (Shensi). He knew from his military service there that the climate was too dry to grow bamboo: “Can it be that in earliest times [literally, ‘before antiquity’] the land was lower and the climate moister, suitable for bamboo?” (373). About a century later the great philosopher and polymath Chu Hsi48 (1130–1200), who knew Shen’s jottings well and often extended ideas from them in his teaching, suggested that the stone of certain mountains was itself petrified silt deposits. But Shen’s notion of prehistoric climatic change, like that of the reshaping of land by erosion, was not pushed further soon after his lifetime.

Atmospheric Phenomena. Although Shen did not report important original discoveries of his own, he preserved a number of interesting observations not recorded elsewhere. Perhaps the most important is a vivid description of a tornado (385; translated in Holzman, “Shen Kua,” 286), the veracity of which was questioned by modern meteorologists until, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Sikawei Observatory in Shantung reported phenomena of the same kind, previously though restricted to the western hemisphere. Shen was also responsible for transmitting an explanation of the rainbow by Sun Ssu-kung, an elder contemporary in the court who was also considered one of the best mathematical astronomers of his era. “The rainbow is the image [literally, ‘shadow’] of the sun in rain, and occurs when the sun shines upon it. “This sentence does not, as often claimed, adduce refraction (pinhole or mirror images were regularly called “shadows”; see 44). Shen was prompted to determine by experiment that the rainbow is visible only opposite the sun (357). Later Chu Hsi, aware of Shen’s account, added that by the time the rainbow appears “the rain ch’i30 has already thinned out: this in turn is because sunlight has shone on and attenuated the rain ch’i30Ch’i must mean vapor here; the notion of reflections off individual drops is, as in Sun’s explanation, implicit at best. Shen also recorded the fall of a fist-sized meteorite in more detail and with less mystification than previous reports. The particulars of its fall came from a careful account by another of Wang An-shih’s associates. The object was recovered and exhibited, but Shen did not claim that he himself had observed that it’s color is like that of iron, which it also resembles in weight” (340; III, 433–434).

Products of the Earth. Responsibilities with respect to fiscal policy gave Shen a detailed knowledge of important commodities, their varieties, and the circumstances of their production, as may be seen from his descriptions of tea (208) and salt (221). Inflammable seepages from rock had been known a millennium before Shen’s time, and for centuries had been used locally as lamp fuel and lubricant. While civil and military commisisioner near Yen-chou, he noted the blackness of soot from petroleum and began an industry to manufacture the solid cakes of carbon ink used for writing and painting throughout China. Good ink was then made by burning pine resin, but Shen knew that North China was being rapidly deforested. He remarked that, in contrast with the growing scarcity of trees, “petroleum is produced in exhastibly within the earth,” The name Shen coined for petroleum50a is the one used today, and the source in Shensi province that he developed is still exploited. In the same article he quoted a poem of his that is among the earliest records of the economic importance of coal, then beginning to replace charcoal as a fuel (421; III 609, partial).

Optical Phenomena. Shen’s interest in image formation was not directly connected with his worldly concerns. His motivation is more plausibly traced to the play of his curiosity over old artifacts than to the improvement of naked-eye astronomical instruments.

In the canons of the Mohist school (ca. 300 B.C.) is a set of propositions explaining the formation of shadows and of optical images (considered a kind of show) in plane, convex, and concave mirrors. One proposition is widely believed to concern pinhole images, although textual corruption and ambiguity make this uncertain. These propositions are in many respects correct, although very shematic, and rays of light are not presupoposed. Shen concerned himself with the single question of why a concave mirror forms an inverted image. He posited an “obstruction” (ai50), analogous to an oarlock, that constricts the shadow” to a shape like that of a narrow-waisted drum—or, as we would put it, to form two cones apex to apex, the second constituting the inverted image. Like the Mohists, Shen clearly believed that inversion takes place before the image is reflected. he expressly likened the inverted image to that of a moving object formed on the wall of a room through a small opening in a paper window. Aware for the first time that there is a range of distances from a concave mirror within which no image is formed (that is, between the center of curvature and the focal point), he explained that this blank region, corresponding to the pinhole, is the locus of “obstruction” (44; translated i A. C. Graham and N. Sivin, “A Systematic Approach to the Mohist Optics” in S. Nakayama and N. Sivin, eds., Chinese Science; Explorations of an Ancient Tradition [Cambridge, Mass., 1973], 145–147). His pinhole observation was adventitious, but his approach to the burning mirror was experimental in its details.

Two other observations of optical interest are found under the rubric “Artifacts and Implements,” The first, in the “Sequal to Brush Talks,” noted that when the ancients cast bronze mirrors, they made the faces just convex enough that, regardless of size, every mirror would reflect a whole face. By Shen’s time this refinement had been abandoned and the reasoning behind the curvature forgotten, so that collectors were having the faces of old mirrors scraped flat (327; IV.I. 93).

The second jotting is the oldest record of a Far Eastern curiosity still being investigated: “magic mirrors,” or, as Shen called them, “transparent mirrors,” Shen described a bronze mirror with a smooth face and an integrally cast inscription in relief on its back (both conventional features). When the mirror was used to reflect the sun onto a wall, the inscription was duplicated within the image. Shen cited with approval an anonymous explanation: “When the mirror is cast, the thinner parts cool first; the raised design on the back, being thicker, cools later and the shrinkage of the bronze is greater. Although the inscription is on the obverse, there are imperceptible traces of it on the face, so that, so that it becomes visible within the light.” He then qualified this explanation as incomplete, because he had tried mirrors in his own and other collections that were physically indistinguishable from the “transparent” ones and found that they did not cast images (330; IV.1, 94*). His doubt was justified, although the approach taken by his informant was at least as good as those of some modern metallurgists. Although cooling rate plays no discernible part, the variation in thickness is indeed responsible for the image in this sort of mirror, the most common among several types extant. Filing considerable bronze off the face of the mirror after casting is the key. This releases tensions in the metal and gives rise to slight deformations that produce the image.

Productive Techniques and Materials. The technologies of Shen’s time were not cumulative and linked to science, but independent artisanal traditions transmitted from master to pupil. Shen left so many unique and informative accounts of ancient and contemporary processes among his jotting that “Brush Talks” has become a major source for early technology. Shen’s interests in contemporary techniques can in most cases be linked to broad concerns of his official career; but the exceptional richness of his official career; but the exceptional richness of his record bespeaks a rare curiosity, and the trenchancy of his descriptions a seriousness about mechanical detail unusual among scholar-officials. His notes on techniques lost by his time reflect the application of this technical curiosity and seriousness to archaeology, which was just becoming a distinct branch of investigation in the eleventh century.

Most of Shen’s cultured contemporaries had a keen appreciation for good workmanship but considered the artisans responsible for it beneath notice except for occasional condescension. Shen wrote about resourceful craftsmen and ingenious laborers with much the same admiration he gave to judicious statesmen. He did not lose sight of the social distance between himself and members of the lower orders, but in his writing there is no snobbishness about the concert of hand, eye, and mind.

Contemporary Techniques. The most famous example is Shen’s account of the invention of movable-type printing by the artisan Pi Sheng51 (fl. 1041–1048). Shen described the carving and firikng of ceramic type and the method of imbedding and leveling them in a layer of resin, wax, and paper ash in an iron form, one form being set as a second is printed. As in xylography, water-base ink was used. Since the porous, thin paper took it up with little pressure, no press was needed. Shen also remarked, with his usual acumen, that the process could become faster than carving wood blocks only with very large editions52 (the average then has been estimated at between fifty and a hundred copies). Unevenness of the surface and absorption of ink by the fired clay must have posed serious problems. Abandonment of the process after pidided was probably due to the lack of economic incentive that Shen noted. The long series of royally subsidized Korean experiments in the fifteenth century that perfected cast-metal typesetting still began with Pi Sheng’s imbedding technique as described by Shen. Whether he knew Pi is unclear, but Shen’s cousing preserved Pi’s original font (307; translated in full, but not entirely accurately, in T. F. Carter. The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward, L.C. Goodrich, ed., 2nd ed. [New York, 1955], 212).

Shen left a number of descriptions of metallurgacal interest—for instnce, an account of the recovery of copper from a mineral creek by replacement of iron, a process then being carried out on an industrial scale to provide metal for currency (455; II, 267); observations of two of the three steelmaking processes used in early China (56; translated in Needham. The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China [London, 1958], 33–34; the book was reprinted at Cambridge, England, in 1964); and remarks on a little-known cold-working method used by smiths of the Ch’iang53 people of western China to make extremely tough steel armor (33). Water control techniques of which he records details include pound-locks with double slipwaus (213; IV.3, 351–352), and sectional gabions for closing gaps after embankment repairs (207; IV.3, 342–343).

Ancient Techniques. The concern for understanding ancient techniques began with the commentators on the Confucian and other classics more than a millennium earlier. Exegesis remained an important activity in China, and the productive methods of golden antiquity were investigated with the same assiduity as anything else mentioned in its literary ramains. For various reasons—among them the remains. For various reasons—among them the recovery of ancient artifacts in large numbers for the first time, the growth of collecting, and the elaboration of a conscious aesthetics—archaeology began to emerge from the footnotes less than a century before Shen’s time, especially in monographs on ancient implements and ritual institutions. He was familiar with this literature and responded to it critically. Much of his writing in the “Artifacts and Implements” chapter falls squarely in this tradition, drawing on the testimony of both objects and books.

Shen’s vision of the past as a repertory of lost processes introduced an influential new theme. A constant concern in his writing was not only that the workmanship of the past be esteemed for its excellence, but also that the present be enriched through understanding what the practical arts had been capable of. Although the belief was still current that the inventions that first made civilization possible were all due to semidivine monarchs of archaic times, in a letter Shen saw the technological past as successful for just the opposite reason; “How could all of this have come from the Sages? Every sort of workman and administrator, the people of the towns and those of the countryside—none failed to take part” (Ch’ang-hsing chi [1718 ed.], 19:53b).

Shen’s remarks on magic mirrors are typical of his effort to understand lost processes. Another example is his reconstruction (and personal trial) of ancient crossbow marksmanship, interpreting a gnomic aiming formula in an ancient footnote with the aid of a graduated sight and trigger assembly that he examined after it was unearthed (331; III, 574–575*). The most famous instance of Shen’s use of literary sources for the study of techniques has to do with the remarkable modular system of architecture used in public buildings. The set of standard proportions is well-known from an official compilation printed about a decade after Shen’s death. Shen, by describing the proportion system of the Timberwork Canon (Mu ching), attributed to a great builder of about 1999 and already falling out of use, demonstrates the antiquity of this art (299; IV.3, 82–83).

Medicine. By Shen’s time medicine, which from the start drew heavily upon natural philosophy for its conceptual underpinnings, had accumulated a classical tradition. Not only was each new treatise consciously built upon its predecessors, but a major goal of new work was restoring an understanding that medical scholars believed was deepest in oldest writings. The revealed truth of the archaic canons was too concentrated for ordinary latter-day minds, who could hope to recapture it only as the culmination of a lifetime of study. Writers in the intervening centuries referred to the early classics as the ultimate source of significance even while aware that empirical and practical knowledge had considerably advanced since antiquity. The major contribution of the continuous tradition of medical writing was to fit new experiences into the old framework and, when necessary, to construct new framework in the feasible, standard editions of the chief classics were compiled and disseminated by government committees. This increased the respectability of the curing arts as a field of study. Large numbers of men from the scholar-official class began to take up medicine, not in but as a means of self-cultivation allied to cosmology and occasionally useful. The initial motivations commonly were personal ill health and the desire to serve one’s sick parents.

Shen, as noted earlier, began the study of medicine early, for the former reason. One of his two therapeutic compilations survives in somewhat altered form. Its preface is a long disquisition on the difficult of adequate diagnosis and therapy, as well as on the proper selection, preparation, and administration of drugs. His criticism of contemporary trends toward simplification reminds us that the development of urban culture and education in Sung China had led to increased medical practice among ordinary people as well as study by the literati. As protoscientific medicine began to displace magico-ritual folk remedies (at least in the cities), there were more half-educated physicians to be criticized by learned amateurs such as Shen. Shen’s most characteristic contribution was undoubtedly his emphasis on his own experience, unusual in a tradition whose literature in the Sung still tended to depend heavily on copying wholesale from earlier treatises. Shen not only omitted any prescription the efficasy of which he had not witnessed, but appended to most a description of the circumstances in which it had succeeded. He provided many precise descriptions of medicinal substances of animal, vegetable, and mineral origin. Although he had no more pharmacognostic scholars of his time, his concern for exact identification and for philological accuracy gave his critical remarks enduring value. Many were incorporated into later compilations on materia medica, and Shen’s writing also served as a stimulus to the work a few decades later of the great pharmacognostic critic K’ou Tsung-shih55 in his “Dilatations Upon the Pharmacopoeias” (Pen-ts’ao yen i,56 1116).

A recent discovery of considerable interest is that certain medical preparations from human urine collectively called “autumn mineral” (ch’iu shih), which have a long history in China, contain high concentrations of steroid hormones and some protein hormones as well. In “Good Prescriptions” Shen gives one of the earliest accounts, in the form of detailed instructions for two such preparation that he performed in 1061 (other accounts by contemporaries are harder to date).*

See Lu Gwei-djen and Joseph Needham, “Medieval Preparations of Urinary Steroid Hormones.” in Medical History, 8 (1964), 101–121; Miyashita Saburō, Kanyaku shūseki no yakushigakuteki Kenkyu (“A Historical Pharmaceutical Study of the Chinese Drug ‘Autumn Mineral’ the Ch’iu-shih”: Osaka. 1969). esp, 9–12.

Perhaps Shen’s most famous writing on general medical matters is one in which he refutes the common belief that there are three passages in the throat — as shown, for instance, in the first book of drawings of the internal organs based directly on dissection (1045).† His supporting argument is not from independent dissection but from sufficient reason “When liquid and solid are imbibed together, how can it be that in one’s mouth they sort themselves into two throat channels?” He thus saw the larynx as the beginning of a network for distributing throughtout the body the vital energy carried in atmospheric air, and the esophagus as carrying nutriment directly to the stomach cavity, where its assimilation begins. This was a significant increase in clarity as well as accuracy (480).

† Persons untrained in medicine performed the discussion upon executed bandits in 1045 and recorded what was found under the direction of an enthusiastic amateur. Another episode of the same kind, undertaken explicitly to correct the earlier drawings, took place at the beginning of the twelfth centuary. There is no reliable account of either in any European language, but see Watanabe Kōzō. “Genson suru Chūgoku Kinsei made no gozō rokufu zu no gaisetsu” (“A survey of Extant Chinese Anatomical Drawings Before Modern Times”) in Nihon ishigaku zasshi, 7 (1956), 88.

A passage that has been praised for its simple but beautiful language takes issue with the ancient principle that medicinal plants should be gathered in the second and eighth lunar months (when they were thought easiest to identify). In a few hundred words it epitomizes the variation of ripening time with the therapy: the physiological effect needed for the application: altitude; climate; and for domesticated medicinal plants, variation with planting time, fertilization, and other details of horticulture. The sophistication of this passage reflects not only increasing domestication of drugs from every corner of China in to the expanding commercial network.

Conclusion. The expansiveness of Northern Sung society and its relative openness to talent, not to mention increasing government sponsorship of learning, made this an important period in the history of every branch of science and technology. Shen was not the first polymath it produced. There was also Yen Su (fl, 1016), who designed an odometer and south-pointing chariot (in which a differential gear assembly kept figures pointing in a constant direction as the chariot turned), improved the design of the water clock and other astronomical instruments, and wrote on mathematical harmonics and the tides. In Shen’s lifetime there was Su Sung (1020–1101), who was first privy councilor during the last part of the reaction against the New Policies (1092–1093). Through the 1060’s he played a major part in a large imperially sponsored compilation of materia medica, and in the editing and printing of ancient medical classics. In 1088 a group that he headed completed a great water-driven astronomical clock incorporating an escapement device. Their detailed description of the mechanism included the oldest star map extant in printed form, based on a new stellar survey. (The book has been studied and translated in Wang Ling, Joseph Needham, Derek J. de Solla Price, et al., Heavenly Clockwork [Cambridge, England, 1960].) That Yen, Su, and Shen were all in the central administration is not surprising. The projects on which they were trained and those in which they worked out many of their ideas were of a scale that only the imperial treasury could (or at least would) support.

Breadth of interest alone does not account for Shen’s importance for the study of the Chinese scientific intellect. Another aspect is his profound technical curiosity. A number of the phenomena he recorded were mentioned by others; but even when other’s descriptions happen to be fuller, they usually are of considerably less interest because their subject matter is treated as a mere curiosity or as an occasion for anecdote rather than as a challenge to comprehension. Above all, one is aware in Shen, as in other great scientific figures of a special directness. A member of a society in which the weight of the past always lay heavily on work of the mind, he nevertheless often cut past deeply ingrained structures and assumptions. This was as true in his program of astronomical observations and his audacious solar calender as in his work as true in his work aware that man’s world had greatly expanded since antiquity, and questioning of precedent (in the name of a return to classical principles) was inherent in the New Policies. Shen’s commitment to this political point of view can only have reinforced the sense of cumulative improvement of techniques and increasing accuracy over time that one finds in major Chinese astronomers. But given these predispositions and opportunities, Shen remains in many senses an atypical figure, even in his time and among his associates.

There certainly is much that a modern scientist or engineer finds familiar, not only in the way Shen went about making sense of the physical world but also in the temper of his discourse, despite the profoundly antique nature of the concepts he used. One comes away from his writings confident that he would see much of modern science as a culmination (not the only possible culmination) of his own investigations—more confident than after reading Plato, Aristotle, or St. Thomas Aquinas. But does Shen’s special configuration of abilities and motivations suggest that a genetic accident produced, out of time, a scientific rationalist-empiricist of essentially modern type? To answer this question it is necessary to look at Shen’s larger conception of reality, of which his scientific notions compose only a part but from which they are inseparable.

The Relation of Scientific Thought to Reality. The sense of cumulative enterprise in mathematical astronomy did not imply the positivistic conviction that eventually the whole pattern could be mastered. Instead from the earliest discussions there was a prevalent attitude that scientific explanation–whether in terms of number or of abstract qualitative concepts, such as yin–yang–merely expressed, for human purposes, limited aspects of a pattern of constant relations too subtle to be understood directly. No one expressed this attitude more clearly than Shen. In instance after instance he emphasized the inability of secular knowledge to encompass phenomena: the reason for magnetic declination (437), why lightning striking a house can melt metal objects without burning the wooden structure (347), and so on.

Shen made this point most clearly in connection with astronomy. In one passage he discussed the fine variations that astronomers must, in the nature of their work, ignore. Every constant, every mean value obscures continuous variation of every parameters (123). In his official proposals on the artimaillary sphere, he argued that measure is an artifact, that it allows particular phenomena to be “caught” (po) in observational instruments. where they are no longer part of the continuum of nature. That Shen saw as the condition of their comprehensibility. This and similar evidence amount not merely to an appreciation of the role of abstraction in science, but also to the steady conviction that abstraction is a limited process incapable of producing universal and fundamental knowledge of the concrete phenomenal world. Nature is too rich, too multivariant, too subtle (wei). This limitation did not detract from the interest or worth of theoretical inquiry, and did not lead intellectuals to question whether learning could contribute to the satisfaction of social needs; but the ambit of rationalism in traditional scientific thought was definitely circumscribed.

In this light Shen’s explanatory metaphors become more comprehensible. In his remarkable suggestion that variations in planetary speed may be represented by a compounded figure, he chose to fasten to the periphery of his circle a willow leaf, whereas in Europe no figure but another circle was thinkable (148). When explaining optical image inversion in terms of converging and diverging rays, the images of the oarlock and wasted drum occurred to him (44). The variation in polarity of different magnetized needles was likened to the shedding of antlers by two species of deer in opposite seasons (588; IV.1, 250), and so on. Geometric figures, numbers, and quantities were useful for computation but had very limited value, not so great as cogent metaphors fro the world of experience, in understanding the pattern inherent in physical reality.

Many Chinese thinkers, even in the Sung, did believe in number as a key to the pattern of physical reality; but their search was concentrated in numerology (especially as founded on the “Great Commentary” to the Book of Changes) rather than in mathematics. This is not to imply that numerology was a distraction from mathematics. The two were not considered alternate means to the same goal.

Other Kinds of Knowledge. Did Shen believe that other ways of knowing complemented and completed empirical and theoretical investigation? Aside fro mist scientific aspects, Shen’s thought has been so little studied that only some tentative suggestions can be offered. Contemplation and disciplined self-examination were ancient themes in Confucianism, and by Shen’s time illumination was widely considered among the learned as a source of knowledge complementary to that given by experience of the external world. The domestication and secularization of Buddhist and Taoist meditation were gradually leading to a more introspective and less ritualistic approach to self-realization. This tendency was later elaborated with great variety of emphasis and weight in the schools of neo-Confucianism.

To understand what part contemplation and meditation played in the thought of Shen Kua requires a clearer view than we now have of their currency and coloring in his time, of the considerable role of Wang An-shih’s thought in his intellectual development, and of Shen’s own attitudes as indirectly expressed in his literary remains. There is as yet no sound basis for evaluating his interest in Taoist arcana that seems to have peaked in his thirties, his public remarks that express sympathetic interest in illuminationist (Ch’an, Japanese “Zen”) Buddhism, and his statement in an autobiographical fragment that Ch’an meditation was one of the things to which he turned his attention after retirement. In any case these involvements refract aspects of his epistemology that cannot be overlooked without badly distorting our recognition of the whole.

Teraji Jun has recently demonstrated this point in examining how strong a factor in Shen’s motivation and individuality was his belief in destiny and prognostication. There are crucial passages, especially in his commentary on Mencius, where Shen spoke of the necessity for choosing what is true and holding to it, and called the rule of the heart and mind by sensory experience “the way of the small man.” The basis of moral choice was ab autonomous inner authority defined in an original way but largely in Mencian terms, a centeredness “filling the space between sky and earth, unquestionably linked with the self-reliance that marked his unhappy career.

It is not immediately obvious why someone who so valued individual responsibility should have been fascinated by fate and divination, which in fact are the themes of whole chapters of "Brush Talks.” Shen does not seem to have viewed these enthusiasms as in conflict with his scientific knowledge. His delight in strange occurrences and his tendency to place matters of scientific interest under that rubric begin to make sense under the hypothesis that he accepted the odd, the exceptional, and the affront to common sense as a challenge for explanation at another time, or by someone else—without assuming that explanation was inevitable. In his hundreds of jottings on people, the person he chose to praise is most often the one who did not do the obvious thing, even when it seemed the sound thing to do.

At one point Shen provided a thoroughly rational explanation of the relations between fate and prognostication. The future can of course before known by certain people, he said, but it is a mistake to conclude that all matters are preordained. The vision of the future is always experienced in present time; the years in the interim also become simultaneous. One can do nothing to avoid an undesirable future so glimpsed. Authentic foreknowledge would have witnessed the evasive measures; a vision that failed to see them could not be authentic foreknowledge (350).

In addition to the visionary ability of certain minds, Shen pondered universally accessible methods of divination, which (he seems to have believed) do not describe the future or the spatially distant so much as provide counsel about them or aid thought about them. In one of his chapters, “Regularities Underlying the Phenomena,” he explained why the same divinatory technique people, thus has no inherent verifiability. He quoted the “Great Commentary” to the Book of Changes to the effect that understanding is a matter of the clarity and divinity (in a very abstract sense) within one’s mind. But because the mind is never without burdens, that hinder access to its divinity, Shen reasoned, one’s communion with it may take place through a passive mediating object or procedure (144, 145). This divinity is, for Shen’s sources, the moral center of the individual. Prognostication, however ritualized (as we would put it), thus draws indirectly upon the power of self examination. Access to the future, whether by vision or by divination, is a perfectly natural phenomenon that is imperfectly distinct, on the one hand, from the moral faculties, the choices of which condition the future, and, on the other, from science, the rational comprehension of the natural order as reflected in all authentic experience.

Thus it appears that introspection supplemented by divinatory procedures was a legitimate means to knowledge in Shen Kua’s eyes, just as painstaking observation and measurement of natural phenomena were another. He neither confused the two approaches nor attempted to draw a clear line between them. Nor was he inclined to assess the comparative importance of these ways of knowing.

The complementarity in Shen’s attitudes toward knowledge is echoed by another in the external world of his work. Computational astronomy and divination of various kinds (including judicial astrology) were equally weighty functions carried out by the central government on the emperor’s behalf, for both kinds of activity were established supports of his charisma. The need to combine science with ritual in this sphere is implied in an important memorial of Wang An-shih: because the monarch acts on behalf of the natural order, he can safeguard the empire and command the assent of the governed only through knowledge of nature. Ritually expressed awe of that order, without knowledge, is not enough (Hsu tzu chih t’ung chien ch’ang pien [%E2%80%9CMaterials for the Sequel to the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government”], presented to the throne 1168 [1881 ed.], 236:16b). Teraji has acutely pointed out that this is precisely the political justification for Shen’s research, and the reason that traditional bureaucrat-scientists who were concerned mainly with maintaining ancient practices were not what Wang wanted.

Confucianism and Science. Recent attempts in both East and West to construct a historical sociology of Chinese science have in large part been built around a contrast between Confucianist and Taoist ideology. The values of the Confucian elite are often described as oriented toward stasis hierarchy, bureaucracy, and bookishness. These characteristics are seen as perennially in tension with the appetite of socially marginal Taoists for novelty and change, their tendency to contemplate nature and the individual in it as a system, and their fascination with techniques, which kept them in touch with craftsmen and made them willing to engage in manual work themselves. It will no doubt be possible eventually to excavate a falsifiable, and thus historically testable hypothesis from the mound of observations and speculations in this vein that have accumulated over the last half-century. For the moment, all one can do is point out how relentlessly unsociological this discussion has been.

Sociology is about groups of people. Doctrines are germane to sociology to the extent that their effect on what groups of people do, or on how they form, can be demonstrated. Generalizations about people who accept a certain doctrine have no sociological significance unless such people can be shown to act as a group, or at least to identify themselves as a group. The term “Confucian” is commonly used indifferently even by specialists to refer to a master of ceremonial, a professional teacher of Confucian doctrines, a philosopher who contributes to their elaboration, someone who attempts to live by Confucius’ teachings, any member of the civil service, any member of the gentry regardless of ambition toward officialdom, or any conventional person (since it was conventional to quote Confucian doctrines in support of conventional behavior). A “Taoist” can be anyone from a hereditary priest ordained by the Heavenly Master to a retired bureaucrat of mildly unconventional to a retired bureaucrat of mildly unconventional tastes living on a city estate. Either group, by criteria in common use, includes people who would make opposite choices on practically any issue. This being so, the proposition “Taoists were more friendly toward science and technology than Confucians” reduces to “Educated individuals who hold unconventional sentiments are more inclined to value activities unconventional for the educated than are educated people who hold conventional sentiments.” That is probably not quite a tautologous statement, but it is sociologically vacuous and historically uninteresting.

Unease of this sort is probably the most obvious outcome of reflection on Shen Kua’s career. By sentimental criteria he can be assigned to Confucianism, Taoism, or Buddhism, to suit the historian’s proclivities.* He was a member of the elite a responsible official, a writer of commentaries on several of the Confucian classics, and a user of the concepts of Confucius’ successor Mencius to explore the depths of his own identity. He spoke well and knowledgeably of Buddhism. He practiced arcane disciplines, such as breath control, that he called Taoist.

A new element was introduced in 1974 in a book issued as part of the “anti-Confucius anti-Lin Piao” campaign against current ideological trends. Two of its essays (pp, 118–140) portray Shen as a legalist and a relentless opponent of Confucianism, “Legalist” is a term applied to writers on government and administration concentrated in the last centuries before the Christian era. especially those who argued that polity must be built on law and regulation, in contrast with the traditionalist faith of Confucius in rites and moral example. Although the arguments in this book are too distorted and too selective in their use of sources to be of interest as history, they become intelligible when “legalism” and “Confucianism” are understood as code words for the political convictions of two contending power groups in China today, as portrayed by spokesmen for one of the two. The book is Ju-Fa tou-cheng yü wo kuo ku-tai Ko-hsueh chi-shu ti fa-chan68 (“The Struggle Between Confucianism and Legalism and the Development of Science and Technology in Our Country in Ancient Times”; Peking, 1974). The first printing was 31,000 copies.

As for his allegiances, Shen was prominently associated with a powerful but shifting group of background very generally similar to his own. Social stasis and institutional fixity were impediments to their aims in reshaping government. At the same time, the new balance of power toward which they strove was more authoritarian than the old. Underlying their common effort was an enormous disparity of motivation, from the well-intentioned (Shen) to the simultaneously manipulative and corrupt (Ts’ai Ch’ueh).

Were these Confucians more or less Confucian than their Confucian opponents? Wang An-shih earned enduring stature for his commentaries on the classics and his though on canonic themes. His followers seem to have found inspiration in the classics as often as their enemies and as those who avoided taking a political position. This is not to say that everyone understood the Confucian teachings in the same way. The latter were not, from the viewpoint of intellectual history, a set of tightly linked ideas that set fixed limits on change; rather, they were a diverse and fragmentary collection of texts reinterpreted in every individual and group who looked to them for guidance when coping with problems of the moment.

The major commentaries, which attempted to define the meanings of Confucian teachings philologically, carried enormous authority; and governments (that of Wang An-shih, for instance) repeatedly attempted to make on interpretation orthodox. But the urge to pin down meanings was always in conflict with precisely what made these books classic. Their unlimited depth of significance depended more on what could be read into them than on precisely what their authors had meant them to say. That depth made them applicable to an infinity of human predicaments and social issues, unprecedented as well as perennial. Late neo-Confucian philosophers striking out in new directions demonstrated again and again how little the bounded intellectual horizons and social prejudices of the classics’ authors objectively limited what may be drawn from them.

In other words, the Confucian canon had the influence it did because it provided a conceptual language that over the centuries educated people used and redefined in thinking out decisions and justifying action and inaction. The classics were often cited as a pattern for static social harmony and willing subordination in arguments against the New Policies. Shen, on the other hand, used them to argue for flexibility in social relations and for greater receptivity toward new possibilities than was usual in his time, Either as a social institution or as ideology, Confucianism is too protean and thus too elusive a base generalizations about the social foundations of science and techniques in China.

Institutions also changed constantly, but at least they were tangible entities. It is essential to consider them when tracing the social connections of science. Very little is know about how scientists were educated in the Northern Sung period; the obvious next step is a collective study of a great many biographies. In Shen’s case we can see a pattern that certainly was not unique. He was, so far as we know, self-educated in astronomy, but with many learned associates to draw upon. In medicine and breath control he probably received teaching in the traditional master-disciple relationship, Defined in the ages before printing made possible access to large collections of books, this relationship involved the student’s memorizing the classics (more often one than several) that the teacher had mastered. This verbatim transmission of a text was supplemented by the teacher’s oral explanations, The relation was deepened by ceremonial formality; the master took on the obligation to monitor the disciple’s moral as well as intellectual growth, and the disciple accepted the responsibility of becoming a link in an endless chain of transmission. Schools were largely communities of masters and disciples. The scale of government-sponsored elementary schools in the provinces was small in Shen’s youth, and began to compete with private academies only in the New Policies period. The two sorts together did not server more than a small minority of youth.

By the eighth century there were small schools in the central government to train technical specialist. The masters, usually several in number, were functionaries, representing the departments of the bureau that the disciples were being trained to staff. The schools for medicine and astronomy could not lead to the top of government, but guaranteed steady advancement between minor sinecures. Very few of the great physicians or astronomers of traditional China began in these schools.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to believe that Shen Kua ever attended a school of any sort, nor does that make him untypical. His early education by his mother, his training in medicine by an obscure physician and others who remain unknown, and his catch-as-catch-can studies of most other matters do not set him apart from his contemporaries. With no knowledge of particulars one cannot even guess how his personal style in technical work was f

字存中 號夢溪 嘉祐八年進士 累官太子中允提舉司天監置渾儀景表玉壺浮漏招衛朴造新曆 遷太常寺丞 使契丹 為契丹國鈔上之拜翰林學士 以援銀有功加龍圖閣學士 時籍民車為兵車 公以為重大無用 又禁蜀鹽 公極言得不償失 二事遂寢食 又賦近畿馬備邊 公論三十一事詔皆可 元祐中以光祿少卿居潤 八年卒

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《中國大百科全書 中國歷史》（胡道靜 撰）

中國古代著名科學家。字存中。北宋錢塘(今浙江杭州)人。至和元年(1054)﹐沈括以父蔭入仕﹐任海州沭陽縣(今屬江蘇)主簿。修築渠堰﹐開發農田﹐頗有政績。嘉祐六年(1061)﹐兄沈扶受命往江南蕪湖視察廢秦家圩﹐沈括力贊沈扶﹐修復舊圩﹐易名萬春圩﹐闢田千餘頃。嘉祐八年﹐登進士第﹐次年﹐任揚州司理參軍。治平三年(1066)﹐入京編校昭文館書籍。

熙寧年間(1068～1077)﹐宋神宗趙頊用王安石為相﹐銳意改革﹐沈括也參與了當時的許多活動。熙寧四年十一月﹐遷太子中允﹐檢正中書刑房公事。次年﹐兼提舉司天監。他首革弊政﹐罷斥不學無術之徒﹐起用布衣盲人衛樸修訂新曆。後製成新渾儀﹑浮漏﹐修成《熙寧奉元曆》﹐受到遷官嘉獎。是年九月﹐又奉命督浚汴河水道﹐用先進方法測量了汴道地形。六年三月﹐遷集賢校理。五月﹐參與詳定三司令敕。六月﹐出使兩浙路﹐相度農田﹑水利﹑差役等事﹐並兼察訪。募饑民興修水利﹐上言罷免兩浙歲額外預買紬絹十二萬匹。七年三月﹐遷太常丞﹑同修起居註。七月﹐遷右正言﹔擢知制誥﹐兼通進銀台詞。九月﹐兼判軍器監。八年夏﹐遼人意欲侵佔宋朝河東路沿邊土地﹐引起邊界糾紛。沈括以翰林侍讀學士的身份﹐奉使交涉。他事先在樞密院詳閱檔案﹐弄清了宋遼雙方以前議定疆界在古長城的事實。到遼廷後﹐據理力爭﹐先後六次辯論﹐遼人不能屈﹐獲成而還。他在出使途中繪記了遼國山川險阻及風俗人情﹐成《使虜圖抄》﹐上於朝廷。不久受命權發遣三司使﹐主持中央財政工作。九年十二月﹐遷翰林學士﹑權三司使。十年七月﹐受劾貶官﹐以集賢院學士出知宣州(今安徽宣城)。元豐三年(1080)六月﹐再次受宋廷重用﹐知延州(今陝西延安)﹐兼鄜延路經略安撫使﹐成為邊防帥臣﹐積極練兵備戰。四年﹐西夏太后梁氏專政﹐宋朝乘機發兵大舉進攻﹐敗於西平府(今寧夏靈武西南)城下。西平府之役後﹐鄜延路軍兵在沈括指揮下先後攻佔了細浮圖等諸寨。為了進一步遏制西夏﹐沈括等人提出了在橫山一帶修築城堡的戰略方針﹐被宋神宗採納。五年八月﹐給事中徐禧築永樂城(今陝西米脂西北)遭西夏圍攻﹐全軍覆沒。沈括因此責授均州團練副使﹐隨州(今湖北隨縣)安置﹐自此結束了他的政治生涯。

元豐八年﹐宋哲宗即位大赦﹐沈括改授秀州(今浙江嘉興)團練副使﹐本州安置。元祐二年(1087)﹐他完成了在熙寧九年即已奉命編繪的“天下郡縣圖”。全圖包括大小總圖各一幅﹐分路圖十八幅﹐定名為《守令圖》﹐於次年投進。後來﹐宋廷給了他一個左朝散郎﹑守光祿少卿﹑分司南京的虛銜﹐准其任便居住。沈括便移居到潤州(今江蘇鎮江)﹐將他以前購置的園地﹐加以經營﹐名為“夢溪園”﹐在此隱居八年後去世。其間﹐寫成了他的科學名著《夢溪筆談》﹐以及農學著作《夢溪忘懷錄》(已佚)﹑醫學著作《良方》等。沈括所著詩文﹐在南宋時經編成《長興集》四十一卷﹐今殘存十九卷。

沈括資質聰穎﹐勤於思考﹐見多識廣﹐能夠向各行各業能者學習﹐在物理學﹑數學﹑天文學﹑地學﹑生物醫學等方面都有重要的成就和貢獻﹐在化學﹑工程技術等方面也有相當的成就。例如他在數學方面首創的隙積術和會圓術﹐提出了高階級差求數和公式及求弧長的近似公式。他提倡科學的十二氣曆﹐意識到石油的價值﹐表明了他卓越的科學見識。他的調查﹑觀測﹑科學實驗等方法﹐在當時也十分先進。北宋時期許多科學發明﹐例如活字印刷﹑指南針應用等技術﹐都藉助沈括的記載而得以流傳。宋代是中國古代科學技術發展的高峰期﹐而沈括則是最重要的代表人物。此外﹐沈括在文學﹑音樂﹑藝術﹑史學等方面都有一定的造詣。

為了紀念這位世界聞名的中國古代科學家﹐1979年7月1日﹐中國科學院紫金山天文台將該台在1964年發現的一顆小行星(編號2027)命名為沈括。

參考書目

• 胡道靜﹕《夢溪筆談校證》﹐上海出版公司﹐1956。
• 張家駒﹕《沈括》﹐上海人民出版社﹐1962。
• 杭州大學宋史研究室﹕《沈括研究》﹐浙江人民出版社﹐杭州﹐1985。

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《中國大百科全書 中國文學》（郭預衡 撰）

宋代科學家﹑文學家。字存中。錢塘(今浙江杭州)人。仁宗嘉祐八年(1063)進士。神宗時參加王安石變法活動。熙寧五年(1072)提舉司天監﹐次年赴兩浙考察水利﹑差役。遷太常丞﹐同修起居註。八年(1075)使遼﹐駁斥遼的爭地要求。此後曾任翰林學士﹐權三司使。後知延州﹐加強對西夏的防禦﹐加龍圖閣學士。元豐五年(1082)因徐禧失永樂城﹐連累遭貶。晚年隱居潤州﹐築夢溪園(今江蘇鎮江東)。

沈括博學﹐對天文﹑地理﹑方誌﹑律曆﹑音樂﹑醫藥﹑卜算﹑考古等都頗有研究。所著《夢溪筆談》一書﹐內容涉及自然科學與社會科學的廣闊領域﹐具有極高的科學價值。其中論及文學與藝術的部分也不乏可取之見。另外﹐他的集中與歐陽參政﹑蔡內翰﹑張舍人﹑孫侍講等人的幾封書信﹐都是論音樂的﹐見解很有獨到之處。沈括雖為古文﹐卻不甚推尊韓愈﹐所作《秀州崇德縣建學記》甚至引韓愈之言而駁之。《夢溪筆談》的文字也不刻意求古﹐多是“不甚經意”之文﹐質樸無華。許多篇章文筆明快精當﹐語言形像簡練﹐有較濃的文學意味。另外﹐他所著《長興集》中有一些記遊寫景之作﹐也很有特色。例如《蒼梧台記》寫“東望有山蔚然﹐立於大海洪波之中﹐日月之光﹐蔽映下上”﹔又如《江州攬秀亭記》寫“南山千丈瀑布﹐西江萬頃明月”﹐都很新穎別緻。

《夢溪筆談》有中華書局上海編輯所的胡道靜校註本。所著《長興集》(殘卷)﹐收在《沈氏三先生集》中﹐有《四部叢刊》影明覆宋本。使遼時所撰《乙卯入國奏請》﹑《入國別錄》等﹐在《續資治通鑑長編》中保存了一部分。

《中國大百科全書 哲學》（馬振鐸 撰）

中國北宋時期的自然科學家﹑思想家。字存中﹐號夢溪翁﹐杭州錢塘人。至和元年(1054)襲父蔭出任地方官。嘉祐八年(1063)舉進士﹐熙寧四年(1071)遷檢正中書刑房公事﹐參與王安石變法﹐後歷任提舉司天監﹑兼判軍器監﹑權發遣三司使等重要職務。熙寧八年使遼。元豐三年(1080)出知延州﹐後因永樂城陷﹐謫均州團練副使。元祐三年(1088)後遷居京口夢溪﹐直至去世。

沈括博學多才﹐精通天文﹑地理﹑數學﹑醫藥﹑音律﹐在物理﹑化學﹑天文﹑地質﹑生物﹑數學等自然科學領域皆有重要成就。主要著作為《夢溪筆談》。此外尚有《易解》﹑《使虜圖抄》﹑《天下郡縣圖》﹑《熙寧奉元歷》(均佚)﹑《長興集》(今存19卷)等著作。

作為一個自然科學家﹐沈括以唯物主義的氣一元論為其哲學基礎。他認為天地萬物都是氣構成的:“日月﹐氣也。”在《夢溪筆談》中他用氣的理論解釋各種自然現象﹐他說:“大則候天地之變﹐寒暑風雨﹐水旱螟蝗﹐率皆有法。小則人之眾疾﹐亦隨氣運盛衰。”認為物質氣的運動是有規律的。他一生有許多重大科學發現﹐如太行山崖壁海生物化石﹑延州黃河岸竹筍化石等。從這些發現中他得出﹐天地萬物都處在不停的運動變化之中﹐即使是海陸﹑氣候等人們通常認為亙古不變的事物﹐也是變動不居的。他對自然界的認識﹐包含著深刻的辯證法觀點。

沈括在中國科學史上佔有重要的地位﹐其科學著作中所包含的哲學思想﹐是中國古代唯物主義和辯證法發展史中的寶貴財富。

《中國大百科全書 物理學》（王錦光 薄忠信 撰）

中國北宋科學家。字存中﹐錢塘(今浙江省杭州市)人。曾任沭陽縣(今江蘇省沭陽縣)主簿。嘉祐八年(1063)中進士﹐不久升為太史令。熙寧年間積極參與王安石變法運動﹐如整理陝西鹽政﹐考察兩浙水利﹑差役等。熙寧五年(1072)提舉司天監﹐次年升任集賢院校理。熙寧八年(1075)出使契丹﹐斥其爭地要求。次年任翰林學士﹐權三司使。元豐五年(1082)﹐西夏攻永樂(今陝西省米脂縣西)﹑綏德(今陝西省綏德縣)二城﹐沈括奉命力保綏德﹐因永樂失守﹐連累坐貶。元祐三年(1088)退居潤州(今江蘇省鎮江市)﹐築夢溪園﹐彙集平生見聞﹐撰《夢溪筆談》。約於紹聖二年(1095)病卒。終年65歲。(生卒年可能都有一兩年的出入﹐尚待考定。)

沈括一生撰書多種﹐據《宋史‧藝文誌》載﹐其著述有22種 155卷﹐但根據《夢溪筆談》和宋代諸家書目﹐此外尚有 18種。現在尚存的只有《夢溪筆談》26卷(見彩圖 《夢溪筆談》書頁 元大德九年(1305)刻本 顯示圖片)﹑《補筆談》3卷﹑《續筆談》1卷﹑《長興集》殘存本19卷和《蘇沈良方》中的一部分沈括醫方﹐其他均已失傳。《夢溪筆談》的科學內容豐富﹐見解精到﹐無論在中國還是在世界科學史上都享有很高的聲譽。

沈括的物理知識是多方面的﹐在磁學﹑光學﹑聲學幾個方面都有所創見。

磁學 最早記載了人工磁化的一種簡便方法﹐即“以磁石磨針鋒”﹐造指南針。在歷史上第一個指出了地磁場存在磁偏角。即磁針所指“常微偏東﹐不全南也”。詳細討論了指南針的四種裝置方法﹕水浮﹐置於指甲上﹐置於碗沿上和懸吊的方法。他指出﹐浮在水面容易搖盪不定﹐放在指甲或碗沿上容易滑脫﹐用單根蠶絲懸掛最為方便。

光學 對針孔成像與球面鏡成像的問題﹐中國在戰國初期就有所認識。沈括對這些現象作了仔細研究﹐力圖進行理性的概括。他提出“礙”的概念﹐這是指某種特殊的幾何點﹐例如小孔成像的孔﹐凹鏡的焦點或曲率中心。他認為針孔成像和凹面鏡成像(包括凹面鏡向日取火)都由於光線通過“礙”的緣故。得到物的投影(亦即成像)。他認為這種幾何關係就是“算家”的“格術”。他正確地描述了鏡面的曲率與像的大小的關係。他所記載的“紅光驗屍”法指出﹐當屍體的傷痕不易發現時﹐可在中午用新的紅油傘罩在用水澆了的屍體上﹐則傷痕可見。這新的紅油傘實際上起了濾光器的作用﹐屍體傷痕的青紫處﹐在紅光下比在白光下看得清晰。沈括研究過透光鏡。透光鏡是一種特製的銅鏡﹐當鏡面對著陽光﹐鏡背的文字圖案﹐能夠反射在牆壁上﹐他猜測這是由於鏡面上存在與背文相對應的細微圖案的緣故﹐他還對鑄造過程中鏡面形成相似圖案的原因作了一種比較合理的解釋。

聲學 用紙人顯示聲音的共振﹐是沈括的一個發明。古代的琴(或瑟)上﹐都有宮﹑商﹑角﹑徵﹑羽﹑少宮等弦﹐其少宮﹑少商分別比宮﹑商高八度音。他剪了一個紙人放在少宮或少商弦上﹐彈動宮弦或商弦時﹐在相應的少宮或少商弦上的紙人就會跳動起來﹐而彈其他弦時﹐紙人則不動。用兩隻琴(或瑟)﹐將紙人放在一只琴的弦上﹐則彈動另一只琴時﹐相應弦上的紙人就會跳動。這裡﹐前者是因宮和少宮﹑商和少商的頻率相差一倍﹐故產生泛音的共振﹔後者則是基音的共振。沈括將這兩種情形統稱為“應聲”﹐並指出這是正常的規律。“虛能納聲”是沈括在聲學上的另一個見解。他指出﹐將牛革箭袋(矢服)放在地上當枕頭﹐就能聽到數里之內的人馬之聲。從現代物理學觀點看來﹐這是由地面下傳來的聲波能量衰減小﹐而箭袋的空腔起了集音作用的緣故。

參考書目

• 張家駒著﹕《沈括》﹐上海人民出版社﹐上海﹐1962。

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《中國大百科全書 天文學》（李志超 錢景奎 撰）

中國北宋著名科學家。字存中﹐錢塘(今杭州市)人。仁宗嘉祐八年(公元1063年)中進士﹐神宗熙寧三年(公元1070年)積極參與王安石變法運動。熙寧五年提舉司天監﹐疏浚汴河水道﹐次年視察浙江水利。熙寧八年奉命出使遼國﹐歸修《天下州縣圖》﹐後知宣﹑潭﹑青﹑延等州。元豐四年(公元1081年)引軍抗擊西夏。次年因永樂城陷受貶﹐安置隋州。哲宗元祐三年(公元1088年)遷居潤州(今鎮江)夢溪園。著《夢溪筆談》﹑《良方》﹑《長興集》等﹐對天文﹑地理﹑數學﹑醫﹑農等均有研究。

早在治平三年(公元1066年)參加編校昭文館書籍時﹐他就開始學習和研究天文學。通過實踐﹐認識到歲差現象(見歲差和章動)使天象發生變化是自然規律。他以月亮是一個球體﹐受太陽照射而發光來解釋月相的變化﹔科學地描述了墜落於常州的隕石﹐判斷其成分是鐵﹔注意到行星視運動軌跡像柳葉形﹐表明行星有往複視運動﹔還觀測天球周日旋轉的現象來定極星與天極的距離。在主管司天監期間﹐致力於整頓機構﹔強調實測﹐改製新天文儀器﹔推舉衛朴編制的《奉元曆》。熙寧七年製成新渾儀(見渾儀和渾象)和漏壺﹐寫出《渾儀議》﹑《浮漏議》﹑《景表議》等三篇論文(載《宋史‧天文誌》)﹐詳細記錄儀器的形制和他的研究心得。他所製渾儀﹐開創了簡化結構的方向﹐注意到校正極軸方向和降低望筒照准誤差的問題。漏壺採用了燕肅平水壺的當時最新發明﹔《景表議》中講述了觀象台地址選擇及大氣能見度問題。他對一年中太陽視運動不均勻問題曾進行了多年觀測﹐不但驗證了這一事實﹐而且發現了由於太陽視運動有快有慢﹐致使一天的長短不一﹐“冬至日行速﹐故百刻有餘﹔夏至日行遲﹐故不及百刻”。又指出日長的變化是漸進的﹐決無一天突然變化的道理。他提出計算太陽視運動的“妥法”﹐但《熙寧晷漏》原著已經失傳。他提出《十二氣曆》﹐建議廢除以十二個或十三個朔望月為一年的傳統曆法﹐改以節氣為主的陽曆﹐這種曆法規則簡單﹐便於指導農事活動。十九世紀英國氣象局用作農業氣候統計的肖伯納農曆就與《十二氣曆》十分相似。

沈括晚年所著《夢溪筆談》﹐是一部筆記文集﹐共600餘篇﹐其中三分之一屬自然科學。記述了北宋時期各方面的科學成就﹐如畢昇發明活字印刷術等。

參考書目

• 張家駒著﹕《沈括》﹐上海人民出版社﹐上海﹐1978。
• 中國科學技術大學編﹕《夢溪筆談評註》﹐安徽科學技術出版社﹐合肥﹐1979。

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《中國大百科全書 地理學》（楊文衡 撰）

中國北宋科學家﹑地理學家。字存中﹐杭州錢塘縣(今浙江杭州)人。生於天聖九年(1031)﹐卒於紹聖二年(1095)。嘉祐八年(1063)舉進士第﹐曾任司理參軍﹑察訪使﹑安撫使﹑翰林院學士﹑權三司使﹑集賢院學士﹑龍圖閣直學士等。在任職期間﹐同時進行科學研究。元豐五年(1082)被貶。元祐二年(1087)完成了《天下州縣圖》﹐元祐三年遷居潤州(今江蘇鎮江)夢溪園專心著作﹐寫成了聞名世界的科學巨著《夢溪筆談》﹑《補筆談》﹑《續筆談》。《夢溪筆談》原作30卷﹐現傳本作26卷﹐內容包括天文﹑氣象﹑數學﹑地質﹑地理﹑物理﹑化學﹑生物﹑醫藥﹑冶金﹑印刷術﹑文學﹑歷史﹑音樂﹑藝術等。沈括一生著作很多﹐除《夢溪筆談》外還有35種。惜大都失傳或殘缺。

沈括學識淵博﹐許多學科領域都有他的成就。在地理學上主要貢獻﹕在世界上最早用實驗驗證磁針“能指南﹐常微偏東”﹐發現地磁子午線與地理子午線有一磁偏角。熙寧五年(1072)測量汴河(唐﹑宋人稱通濟渠東段為汴河﹐宋以後堙廢)下游地勢﹐從汴京(今開封)上善門起﹐到泗州(今江蘇盱眙)淮河口止﹐用分層築堰法測得總長為840里130步﹐高差 19丈4尺8寸6分。這種測量方法在世界測量史上是首創。在視察邊防時﹐用麵糊或蠟﹑木屑在木板上把看到的山川地勢製成模型﹐然後再複製成木刻模型。這種木刻地形模型比歐洲最早的地形模型早700多年。繼承裴秀的“製圖六體”﹐編繪《天下州縣圖》(已佚)﹐資料豐富﹐精度較高。會簡單預報天氣﹐懂得虹的成因以及大氣中的折射原理﹐批駮了海市乃“蛟蜃之氣所為”的迷信觀點﹔所記載的陸龍卷﹐對說明世界陸龍卷的地區分布有重大意義﹔提出物候隨高度﹑生物品種﹑緯度高低﹑人類生產活動而變化的理論。對流水侵蝕作用的論述比英國J.赫頓早600多年。最早對華北平原的成因做出科學的解釋。對經濟地理和城市也有較精闢的論述。

參考書目

• 胡道靜校註﹕《夢溪筆談校證》﹐上海古典文學出版社﹐上海﹐1957。

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《中國大百科全書 生物學》（劉昌芝 撰）

北宋著名科學家﹑政治家﹑軍事家和文學家。字存中﹐錢塘(今浙江杭州)人。生於宋仁宗天聖九年﹐卒於宋哲宗紹聖二年。歷任昭文館校勘﹑提舉司天監事﹑史館檢討﹑集賢院校理等職。他“博學善文﹐於天文﹑方誌﹑律曆﹑音樂﹑醫藥﹑卜算無所不通”(《宋史‧沈括傳》)﹐是中國古代以博學著稱的科學家。

他通過對動植物的觀察和研究﹐在其名著《夢溪筆談》中廣泛記載和描述了各地所產的動植物﹐如南海的硨磲﹑潮州的鱷﹑西北的枸杞﹑北方沙漠的跳鼠等。他積累了豐富的動植物知識﹐留下了不少科學的記錄。關於動物方面,如描述海蛤,“海蛤即海岸泥沙中得之﹐大者如棋子﹐細者如油麻粒﹐黃白﹐或赤相雜﹐蓋非一類﹐乃諸蛤之房”﹐“蛤之屬,其類至多……不適指一物,故通謂之海蛤耳。”海蛤是海產雙殼類的總稱。可知當時人們已瞭解到海蛤的種類很多﹐並能根據大小﹑顏色形態特點來辨認它們不是一類。而是各種蛤類的總稱。沈括還描述了鱷的形態和習性。“大體其形如鼉﹐但喙長等其身﹐牙如鋸齒”﹐“遇鹿豕即以尾戟之以食”。並介紹了當地人利用鱷的這種習性“設鉤於大豕之身﹐筏而流之水中﹐鱷尾而食之﹐則為所斃”﹐從而滅之。在《夢溪筆談》中還記載了利用河豚“觸柵則怒﹐而腹鼓浮於水上”的習性進行捕撈。書中還載有關於慶州地區利用“步行蟲”防除農業害蟲的事例﹐以及河北滄州景縣一帶人民防禦蚊虻的方法等。

在植物方面﹐他進行大量的實地調查和觀察後﹐根據實物﹐校正了前人認識的錯誤﹐如指明蒲蘆是香蒲和蘆葦﹐赤劍是天麻﹐以及枳實﹑枳殼的區別等。他以中國南北不同地區的物候為例﹐說明植物生長與溫度的密切關係,他說:“嶺嶠微草﹑凌冬不凋﹔並﹑汾橋木,望秋先隕﹔諸越則桃李冬實﹐朔漠則桃李夏榮﹐此地氣之不同也。”

此外﹐他在解剖生理方面也有比較精深的研究﹐他在《夢溪筆談》中﹐明確提出,人有咽和喉兩個部分,咽用來咽食食物﹐喉則用來通氣。他對化石也有正確的認識﹐他在太行山上看到螺蚌殼化石﹐據此他正確地指出這一地帶過去乃是海濱。

沈括的主要著作有《夢溪筆談》26卷﹐《補筆談》3卷﹐《續筆談》1卷﹐《長興集》19卷﹐《蘇沈良方》15卷等。其中以廣泛記載各地動植物的《夢溪筆談》被認為是中國古代一部重要的科學著作﹐它還記載了其他方面的生物學知識。