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 there were any, published before the catastrophe which annihilated that highly scientific nation, which, according to Bailly, existed in remote ages in the centre 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 knowledge".

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 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 the common class of mankind. They actually adopted

15 Bruck. iii. 597.

16

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.

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the belief, however crude and inconsistent, that the form of the earth and heavens really is what at any place it appears to be; that the earth is flat, and the waters of the sky sustained above a material floor, through which in showers they descend. Yet the true doctrines of astronomy appear to have had some popular circulation. For instance, a French poem of the time of Edward the Second, "called Ymage du Monde," contains a metrical account of the earth and heavens, according to the Ptolemaic views; and in a manuscript of this poem, preserved in the library of the University of Cambridge, there are representations, in accordance with the text, of a spherical earth, with men standing upright upon it on every side: and by way of illustrating the tendency of all things to the centre, perforations of the earth, entirely through its mass, are described and depicted; and figures are exhibited dropping balls down each of these holes, so as to meet in the interior. And, as bearing upon the perplexity which attends the motions of up and down, when applied to the globular earth, and the change of the direction of gravity which would occur in passing the centre, the readers of Dante will recollect the extraordinary manner in which the poet and his guide emerge from the bottom of the abyss; and the explanation which Virgil imparts to him of what he there sees. After they have crept through the aperture in which Lucifer is placed, the poet says,

Where he was lately left, but saw him now
With legs held upward. . . .

"How standeth he in posture thus reversed ?"

"Thou wast on the other side so long as I
Descended; when I turned, thou didst o'erpass
That point to which from every part is dragged
All heavy substance.”

CARY.

This is more philosophical than Milton's representation, in a more scientific age, of Uriel sliding to the earth on a sun-beam, and sliding back again when the sun had sunk below the horizon.

Uriel to his charge

Returned on that bright beam whose point now raised,
Bore him slope downward to the sun, now fallen
Beneath the Azores.

P. L. b. iv.

The philosophical notions of up and down are too much at variance with the obvious suggestions of our senses, to be held steadily and justly by minds undisciplined in science. Perhaps it was some mis

understood statement of the curved surface of the ocean, which gave rise to the tradition of there being a part of the sea directly over the earth, from which at times an object has been known to fall, or an anchor to be let down. Even such whimsical fancies are not without instruction, and may serve to show the reader what that vagueness and obscurity of ideas is, of which I have been endeavouring to trace the prevalence in the dark ages.

We now proceed to another of the features which appears to me to mark, in a very prominent manner, the character of the stationary period.