mena.

as to what suppositions would explain the phenoHe describes the earth as an oblong floor, surrounded by upright walls, and covered by a vault, below which the heavenly bodies perform their revolutions, going round a certain high mountain, which occupies the northern parts of the earth, and makes night by intercepting the light of the sun. In Augustin" (who flourished A.D. 400) the opinion is treated on other grounds; and without denying the globular form of the earth, it is asserted that there are no inhabitants on the opposite side, because no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam (L). Considerations of the same kind operated in the well-known instance of Virgil, bishop of Salzburg, in the eighth century. When he was reported to Boniface, archbishop of Mentz, as holding the existence of Antipodes, the prelate was shocked at the assumption, as it seemed to him, of a world of human beings, out of the reach of the conditions of salvation; and application was made to Pope Zachary for a censure of the holder of this dangerous doctrine. It does not however appear that this led to any severity; and the story of the deposition of Virgil from his bishopric, which is circulated by Kepler and by more modern writers, is undoubtedly altogether false. The same scruples continued to prevail among Christian writers to a later period; and Tostatus" notes the opinion of the rotundity of the earth as an "unsafe" doctrine,

10 Civ. D. xvi. 9.

11 Montfauc. Patr. t. ii.

only a few years before Columbus visited the other hemisphere.

8. Intellectual Condition of the Religious Orders. It must be recollected, however, that though these were the views and tenets of many religious writers, and though they may be taken as indications of the prevalent and characteristic temper of the times of which we speak, they never were universal. Such a confusion of thought affects the minds of many persons, even in the most enlightened times; and in what we call the Dark Ages, though clear views on such subjects might be more rare, those who gave their minds to science, entertained the true opinion of the figure of the earth. Thus Boëthius 12 (in the sixth century) urges the smallness of the globe of the earth, compared with the heavens, as a reason to repress our love of glory. This work, it will be recollected, was translated into the Anglo-Saxon by our own Alfred. It was also commented on by Bede, who, in what he says on this passage, assents to the doctrine, and shows an acquaintance with Ptolemy and his commentators, both Arabian and Greek. Gerbert. in the tenth century, went from France to Spain to study astronomy with the Arabians, and soon surpassed his masters. He is reported to have fabricated clocks, and an astrolabe of peculiar construction. Gerbert afterwards, (in the last year of the first thousand from the birth of Christ,) Boëthius, Cons. ii. pr. 7.

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became pope, by the name of Sylvester II. Among other cultivators of the sciences, some of whom, from their proficiency, must have possessed with considerable clearness and steadiness the elementary ideas on which it depends, we may here mention, after Montucla, Adelbold, whose work On the Sphere was addressed to Pope Sylvester, and whose geometrical reasonings are, according to Montucla", vague and chimerical; Hermann Contractus, a monk of St. Gall, who, in 1050, published astronomical works; William of Hirsaugen, who followed this example in 1080; Robert of Lorraine, who was made Bishop of Hereford by William the Conqueror, in consequence of his astronomical knowledge. In the next century, Adelhard Goth, an Englishman, travelled among the Arabs for purposes of study, as Gerbert had done in the preceding age; and on his return, translated the Elements of Euclid, which he had brought from Spain or Egypt. Robert Grostête, Bishop of Lincoln, was the author of an Epitome on the Sphere; Roger Bacon, in his youth the contemporary of Robert, and of his brother Adam Marsh, praises very highly their knowledge in mathematics.

"And here," says the French historian of mathematics, whom I have followed in the preceding relation, “it is impossible not to reflect that all those men who, if they did not augment the treasure of the sciences, at least served to transmit it, 14 Mont. i. 503.

13 Mont. i. 502.

were monks, or had been such originally. Convents were, during these stormy ages, the asylum of sciences and letters. Without these religious men, who, in the silence of their monasteries, occupied themselves in transcribing, in studying, and in imitating the works of the ancients, well or ill, those works would have perished; perhaps not one of them would have come down to us. The thread which connects us with the Greeks and Romans would have been snapt asunder; the precious productions of ancient literature would no more exist for us, than the works, if any there were, published before the catastrophe that annihilated that highly scientific nation, which, according to Bailly, existed in remote ages in the center of Tartary, or at the roots of Caucasus. In the sciences we should have had all to create; and at the moment when the human mind should have emerged from its stupor and shaken off its slumbers, we should have been no more advanced than the Greeks were after the taking of Troy." He adds, that this consideration inspires feelings towards the religious orders very different from those which, when he wrote, were prevalent among his countrymen.

Except so far as their religious opinions interfered, it was natural that men who lived a life of quiet and study, and were necessarily in a great measure removed from the absorbing and blinding interests with which practical life occupies the

thoughts, should cultivate science more successfully than others, precisely because their ideas on speculative subjects had time and opportunity to become clear and steady. The studies which were cultivated under the name of the Seven Liberal Arts necessarily tended to favour this effect. The Trivium, indeed, which consisted of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, had no direct bearing upon those ideas with which physical science is concerned; but the Quadrivium, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, could not be pursued with any attention, without a corresponding improvement of the mind for purposes of sound knowledge1.

9. Popular Opinions.-That, even in the best intellects, something was wanting to fit them for scientific progress and discovery, is obvious from the fact that science was so long absolutely stationary. And I have endeavoured to show that one part of this deficiency was the want of the requisite clearness and vigour of the fundamental scientific ideas. If these were wanting, even in the most powerful and most cultivated minds, we may easily conceive that still greater confusion and obscurity prevailed in

15 Bruck. iii. 597.

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Roger Bacon, in his Specula Mathematica, cap. i., says, "Harum scientiarum porta et clavis est mathematica, quam sancti a principio mundi invenerunt, etc. Cujus negligentia jam per triginta vel quadraginta annos destruxit totum studium Latinorum." I do not know on what occasion this neglect took place.