SCIENCE IN EARLY ENGLAND.1

By CHARLES L. BARNES, M. A., F. C. S.

Under the ample shelter afforded by the words "literary" and "philosophical," I feel that a paper on the progress of science in England from the seventh to the thirteenth century, inclusive, may find admittance, though that which is new, and not that which is old, is more usually welcomed within these walls.

The authorities from whom my remarks have been gathered are, in the main, as follows:

(1) Popular Treatises on Science, written during the Middle Ages in Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and English, edited by Thomas Wright, and published for the Historical Society of Science, 1841. This society, whose existence seems to have been forgotten, had for president the Duke of Sussex, and for vice-presidents, the Earl of Munster, Lord Holland, the Bishop of Durham, and three others, while several distinguished names appear on the council, viz, Augustus de Morgan, J. O. Halliwell, Sir Francis Palgrave, the Rev. Robert Willis, professor of natural experimental philosophy at Cambridge, Thomas Wright, and several more. Another of its publications, also issued in 1841, has the following title: A Collection of Letters illustrative of the Progress of Science in England from the Reign of Elizabeth to that of Charles II, and is edited by Halliwell, afterwards better known as Halliwell Phillips. A further list of books in contemplation is given in each of these volumes, but they are not to be found at the reference library, and I have not yet been able to discover when or why the society dissolved, unless it died a natural death on the publication of the Rolls series.

(2) Biographia Britannica Literaria, by Thomas Wright. Two volPublished for the Royal Society of Literature, 1842.

umes.

(3) Alexander Neckam, De Naturis Rerum, edited by T. Wright. 1863. Rolls series.

(4) Leechdoms, Wort-cunning, and Starcraft of Early England, edited by the Rev. Oswald Cockayne. Three volumes. 1866. Rolls series.

1From Memoirs and proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, Fourth Series, Vol. X, No. 1, 1895-96.

(5) Roger Bacon, Opus Minus, Opus Tertium, and Compendium Philosophiæ, edited by J. S. Brewer. 1859. Also in the Rolls series. Many fragments have also been gleaned from the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Dictionary of National Biography.

This country, in its earlier days, lay quite outside the sphere of scientific influence; remote from Egypt, Rome, or Greece, and the arena of constant struggles between the native races and their invaders, it offered more attractions to warriors and missionaries than to philosophers, consequently we may pass over not only the whole Roman period, but a considerable interval after the invasion of the Saxons in 449, without finding a single circumstance to dwell upon. The conversion of this people to Christianity was begun in 597 by Augustine, at the instance of Pope Gregory the Great, and the intellectual awakening which followed from this event soon bore fruit in the development of the language and literature. The poems of Cadmon, Cynewulf, and the legendary Beowulf are the earliest specimens of Anglo-Saxon achievements in a most difficult art, and date from 660 to 700 or thereabouts.

In the eighth century the cultivation of letters was taken up even by women, many of whom wrote Latin and French with equal ease, while all ranks were in the habit of making journeys to Rome, whence they returned laden with books and ideas which they did their best to disseminate.

The want of Anglo-Saxon scientific terms delayed the translation of books into the vernacular, and those which existed in any language suffered severely between the ninth and eleventh centuries at the hands of the Danes, and in a minor degree from an unfortunate custom of scraping the letters off old MSS. to make room for new matter.

The barbarous Northmen, who have been described as the curse of England at that period, were especially bitter against monasteries and the treasures they contained, and from the sacking of Lindisfarne or Holy Island in 793 till the reign of Canute did incalculable damage. Under this monarch, himself a Dane, the country had a temporary prosperity. After him came the English restoration, then the Norman Conquest, and so on. At no time were the sword and implements of war laid by for long, and those whose bent would have been toward philosophy under happier circumstances were forced to keep silence or to fall in with the popular current. These things must be borne in mind before we judge our ancestors too harshly. It is well known that the Saxons made furnaces for the evaporation of salt in Cheshire and Worcestershire, and contrived dishes of metal and even of transparent glass for domestic purposes, while their agriculture was conducted upon sound principles, though with rude instruments.

The sources of their scientific information were, in the first place, Greek and Roman; but as they accepted without question the authority of Aristotle and Pliny, they advance worth speaking of till

the eleventh century. Much progress had long before been made in other countries. The great Alexandrian school-the closing scene of which was the murder of Hypatia in 414—had been continued for two centuries in Persia; thence it was carried by the Arab conquerors into Spain, and flourished abundantly from the ninth century onward at Granada, Cordova, Toledo, Seville, and elsewhere; but owing to the lack of travelers sufficiently versed in Arabic, and at the same time capable of assimilating the new ideas, their diffusion into England took place very slowly. The philosopher's stone and potable gold, the elixir of life, were undreamed of till the Arabian influence was felt, and chemistry and medicine were in a state of which the less said the better.

Of those who endeavored to keep alight the flame of science in this country were, in the first place, Bede, the monk of Jarrow (672–735), styled in after times the Venerable, the Father of English learning, whose work, De Natura Rerum, served as as a foundation for other writers for a long period, though it only represents a very small part of his literary labors. It is chiefly a cosmography and cosmogony, the same which had prevailed in Europe for many centuries. The earth was the center of the universe, and the firmament a sphere, bounded by fire; beyond this was heaven, the abode of angelic natures, capable of human and superhuman functions. The planets were seven in number and revolved within the firmament; comets were stars suddenly developed, which portended pestilence, revolution, war, or tempest; lightning was produced by the collision of clouds, just as fire is produced by striking two flints. This idea is to be found in Lucretius, first century B. C., in Book VI, De Rerum Natura: "It lightens then, when the clouds have struck out by their collision many seeds of fire, just as if a stone were to strike another stone or a piece of iron, for then, too, light bursts out and fire scatters about bright sparks." Probably the same notion had been current for untold ages before this.

Two other works of Bede's were written to elucidate questions connected with Easter, this feast having at all times presented problems of a most thorny kind. Characteristically enough, Bede believed that the world in his day was old, decrepid, worn out, and in its sixth stage, and that it would shortly come to an end.

Toward the end of the seventh century (in 668, to be very precise), Theodore, a native of Tarsus, was made Archbishop of Canterbury, and taught astronomy and arithmetic in the schools, while Albert, Archbishop of York, also diffused the higher branches of knowledge. Under the system of the schools, learning was divided into seven arts, the "Trivium," comprising grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and the "Quadrivium," namely, arithmetic, geometry (probably mensuration or surveying, not Euclidean geometry), astronomy, and music. The number of arts was, however, sometimes expanded to ten by the inclusion of astrology, medicine, and mechanics, though these occasionally replace grammar, logic, and rhetoric, instead of supplementing them.

After these we have Gerbert, born about 950, better known in later

times as Pope Sylvester II, and his followers, Elthelwold of Winchester (925-984), and Dunstan of Glastonbury (925-988), the latter of whom subsequently became Archbishop of Canterbury. Gerbert, though not an Englishman, may be introduced as having made Europeans acquainted with the Indian numerals and algebra, and with various mechanical inventions, such as the clock pendulum. He had studied at Cordova and Toledo, and acquired a great reputation, not unmixed with obloquy as a dabbler in forbidden arts. Ethelwold was famed as an ingenious mechanic, and a treatise by him on the quadrature of the circle is in existence at the Bodleian Library. Dunstan fell under the same imputation as Gerbert, and is recorded to have possessed a magic harp which played sweet tunes by itself when hanging on a wall. He once survived the ordeal of being thrown into a pond. His favorite studies were arithmetic, geometry, and music, and a story of him in connection with a pair of tongs and a forge has caught the popular ear. Ailmer, a monk of Glastonbury, is credited with the manufacture of a pair of wings wherewith to spurn the ground. He broke his leg on coming down too roughly after an attempt to fly from a church tower, but, with a true scientific spirit, attributed his misfortune to the want of a tail to the machine.

Robert, Bishop of Hereford (died 1095), wrote on the motion of the stars and the lunar computus (a method of finding Easter). He also compiled a number of mathematical tables.

Next we find Athelard of Bath, whose name is said to be the greatest in English science up to the days of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. He traveled in Greece, Spain, North Africa, Sicily, and probably to Bagdad, then one of the chief seats of Arabian learning, and translated Euclid from Arabic to Latin, thus introducing a text-book which still survives amongst us. (A version in the same tongue taken direct from the Greek is said to have been made by Boetius, who lived from 475 to 525, but his writings were not read till late in the Anglo-Saxon period.) Later on, somewhere between 1110 and 1120, he founded a school in France, where he taught the then new and unpopular sciences he had learned.

Philippe de Thaun, writer of a Bestiary, to be noticed presently; William of Newbury, who gave currency to the fables of animals embedded in rocks surviving their accidental release, and to legends of dragons and other monstrous creatures (probably founded on fossil bones); Alexander Neckam (1157-1217); Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (died 1253), and Roger Bacon completed a list, which is only meant to include the principal names. Of Neckam and Bacon, I shall have more to say presently. Grosseteste has been favorably noticed by George Boole as having had a glimpse of the principle of least action. Starting with a datum derived from Aristotle, that there is greater union and unity in a straight line than united virtue is more powerful th

hat nature, operating in stra

r, and assuming that all

s not united, he deduces

in the best manner

possible. Hence he infers that light travels in straight lines, and gives the law of reflection correctly, but accounts for refraction by hinting that the ray is less weakened by this process than the other. He might have learned all his optics and more from Euclid and Ptolemy.

Now, quitting the list of authors, we may glance at some of their works, taking here and there an extract where the quaintness or interest appears to demand it.

Among the arithmetical problems in vogue we have the following: "The swallow once invited the snail to dinner; he lived just one league from the spot, and the snail traveled at the rate of an inch a day. How long would it be before he dined?" This problem casts an unworthy slur upon the powers of locomotion possessed by the gasteropod, and even upon his intelligence, though it does not specifically say that the swallow's invitation was accepted. Here is another, which has been battered to and fro throughout the centuries, but which is still recognizable as an old friend: "Three men and their wives came to the side of a river, where they found but one boat capable of carrying over only two persons at once. All the men were jealous of each other. How must they contrive so that no one should be left in company with his neighbor's wife?" A third instance shows that the arithmetical bogey of school books, who, when asked a straightforward question, answers it in the most crooked way he can think of-stretches his line far back. "An old man met a child. Good day, my son,' says he, 'may you live as long as you have lived and as much more, and thrice as much as all this, and if God give you one year in addition to the others, you will be just a century old.' What was the lad's age?" To prevent a needless waste of exertion, I hasten to say that he was eleven. These problems were current in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Some sciences were taught by dialogue, never a good method even in our day, but it might have been given up earlier with advantage if the following are fair samples. To the question, "Where does the sun shine at night?" The answer is returned that "It shines in three places: First in the belly of the whale called leviathan, next it shines in hell, and afterwards on the island called Glith, where the souls of holy men rest till doomsday."

Q. Where is a man's soul?—A. In his head, and it comes out at his mouth.

Q. Where resteth the soul of a man when his body sleepeth?-A. I tell thee it is in three places-in the brain, the heart, and the blood.

Occasionally they degenerate into riddles: Q. What is that from which if you take the head it becomes higher?-A. Go to your bed. and you will find it.'

The "Popular Treatise on Science," above mentioned, comprise: (1) A tract on astronomy in Anglo-Saxon, abridged from Bede's De Natura Rerum, by an unknown author, probably about 990. (2) The Livre des Créatures, by Philippe de Thaun. (3) The Bestiary, by the

The head of the occupier is that which becomes higher.