Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/384

Rh 362 SCALIGEK vigorous invective, displaying, like all his subsequent writings, an astonishing knowledge and command of the Latin language, and much brilliant rhetoric, but full of vulgar abuse, and completely missing the point of the Ciceronianus of Erasmus. The writer's indignation at finding it treated with silent contempt by the great scholar, who thought it was the work of a personal enemy Aleander caused him to write a second oration, more violent, more abusive, with more self-glorification, but with less real merit than the first. The orations were followed by a prodigious quantity of Latin verse, which appeared in successive volumes in 1533, 1534, 1539, 1546, and 1574; of these, a friendly critic, Mr Pattison, is obliged to approve the judgment of Huet, who says : " par ses poesies brutes et informes Scaliger a deshonore le Parnasse ; " yet their numerous editions show that they commended them- selves not only to his contemporaries but to succeeding scholars. A brief tract on comic metres (De Comicis Dimensionibus) and a work De Causis Lingu& Latinse the earliest Latin grammar on scientific principles, and following a scientific method were his only other purely literary works published in his lifetime. His Poetics was left unpublished, and only appeared in 1561 after his death. With many paradoxes, with many criticisms which are below contempt, and many indecent displays of violent personal animosity, especially in his reference to the unfortunate Dolet, over whose death he gloated with brutal malignity, it yet contains much acute criticism, and shows that for the first time a writer had appeared who had formed an adequate idea of what such a treatise ought to be, and how it ought to be written. But it is as a philosopher and a man of science that J. C. Scaliger ought to be judged. His tastes were for metaphysics and physics rather than for literature. Classical studies he regarded as an agreeable relaxation from severer pursuits. Whatever the truth or fable of the first forty years of his life, he had certainly been a most close and accurate observer, and had made himself acquainted with many curious and little-known pheno- mena, which he had stored up in a most tenacious memory, and which he was able to make use of with profit. His scientific writings are all in the form of commentaries, and it was not until his seventieth year that (with the excep- tion of a brief tract on the De Insomniis of Hippocrates) he felt that any of them were sufficiently complete to be given to the world. In 1556 he printed his Dialogue on the De Plantis attributed to Aristotle, and in 1557 his Exerdtationes on the work of Cardan, De Subtilitate. His other scientific works, Commentaries on Theophrastus's History of Plants and Aristotle's History of Animals, he left in a more or less unfinished state, and they were not printed until after his death. They are all marked by the same characteristics : arrogant dogmatism, violence of language, irritable vanity, a constant tendency to self- glorification, which we expect to find only in the charlatan and the impostor, are in him combined with extensive real knowledge, with acute reasoning, with an observation of facts and details almost unparalleled. He displays every- where what Naude calls " an intellect teeming with heroic thought." But he is only the naturalist of his own time. That he anticipated in any manner the inductive philo- sophy cannot be contended ; his botanical studies did not lead him, like his contemporary Gesner, to any idea of a natural system of classification, and he rejected with the utmost arrogance and violence of language the discoveries of Copernicus. In metaphysics and in natural history Aristotle was a law to him, and in medicine Galen, but he was not a slave to the text or the details of either. He has thoroughly mastered their principles, and is able to see when his masters are not true to themselves. He corrects Aristotle by himself. He is in that stage of learning when the attempt is made to harmonize the written word with the actual facts of nature, and the result is that his works have no real scientific value. Their interest is only historical. His Exerdtationes upon the De Subtilitate of Cardan (1557) is the book by which Scaliger is best known as a philosopher. Its numerous editions bear witness to its popularity, and until the final fall of Aristotle's physics it continued a popular text-book ; as late as the middle of the seventeenth century an elaborate commentary upon it was published by Sperling, a professor at Wittenberg. We are astonished at the encyclopaedic wealth of knowledge which the Exerdtationes display, at the vigour of the author's style, at the accuracy of his observations, but are obliged to agree with Naud6 that he has committed more faults than he has discovered in Cardan, and with Nisard that his object seems to be to deny all that Cardan affirms and to affirm all that Cardan denies. Yet it is no light praise that writers like Leibnitz and Sir William Hamilton recognize J. C. Scaliger as the best modern exponent of the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle. He died at Agen 21st October 1558. 2. JOSEPH JUSTUS SCALIGER (1540-1609), the great- est scholar of modern times, was the tenth child and third son of Julius Caesar Scaliger and Andiette de la Roque Lobejac (see above). Born at Agen in 1540, he was sent when twelve years of age, with two younger brothers, to the college of Guienne at Bordeaux, then under the direction of Jean Gelida. An outbreak of the plague in 1555 caused the boys to return home, and for the next few years Joseph was his father's constant com- panion and amanuensis. The composition of Latin verse was the chief amusement of Julius in his later years, and he daily dictated to his son from eighty to a hundred lines, and sometimes more. Joseph was also required each day to write a Latin theme or declamation, but in other respects he seems to have been left to his own devices. The Latin verse of Julius, faulty as it is in all that constitutes poetry, yet displays a more extensive knowledge of the Latin language, and a greater command of its resources, than is to be found in the verse of any of his contemporaries ; and this constant practice in writing and reading or speaking Latin, under the super- vision of one who knew the language thoroughly, was probably the foundation of Joseph's Latin scholarship. But the companionship of his father was worth more to him than any mere instruction. He learned from Julius what real knowledge was, and that it did not consist in discussions on words and phrases ; and to his father he owed it that he was not a mere scholar, but something more an acute observer, never losing sight of the actual world, and aiming not so much at correcting texts as at laying the foundation of a science of historical criticism. In 1558, on the death of his father, he proceeded to Paris, and spent four years at the university there. Of his life at Paris we know but little. Hitherto he had not studied Greek. Now he felt that not to know Greek was to know nothing. It was in the literature of Greece that he must look for the true key of antiquity, and he forthwith began to attend the lectures of Turnebus. But after two months he found out his mistake. He had much to learn before he could be in a position to profit by the lectures of the greatest Greek scholar of the time. He shut himself up in his chamber, and determined to teach himself. He read Homer in twenty-one days, and then went through all the other Greek poets, orators, and historians, forming a grammar for himself as he went along. From Greek, at the suggestion of Postel, he proceeded to attack Hebrew, and then Arabic ; of both he acquired a respect- able knowledge, though not the critical mastery which he