Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern ScienceIn the early 1600s, Francis Bacon could encompass all knowledge of both the physical and the metaphysical in a single term: natural philosophy. Over the next two hundred years, however, natural philosophy gradually split into philosophythe study of first causes and ways of knowingand sciencethe study of the material world, based on direct observation and verifiable experiment. Science was not initially an exclusively masculine domain. During the