Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/316

298 familiarity with the phenomenon of which Dr. Rose charitably supposed him to be ignorant. It was difficult to believe that a man could describe at length a treatise which he knew to be textually identical with another work printed under a different name, and purporting to belong to a different century, without a word of allusion to the latter. Dr. von Prantl added that he proposed to prove from further evidence that William of Conches had used the work of William of Hirschau. [In his second edition Dr. von Prantl suppressed the pages about William of Hirschau, and transplanted something from them into his account of William of Conches, pp. 127 sq.]

The blunder, however, has survived, and Dr. von Prantl's theory was treated seriously by professor Wagenmann in the g Goettingischen gelehren Anzeigen for 1865 and by h Dr. Reuter.

  1. number and attribution of the works of William of Conches have always been a standing puzzle in medieval bibliography. It has already been stated that the book which forms the subject of the preceding excursus, and which has been confused among the editions of the venerable Bede, William of Hirschau, and Honorius of Autun, is now generally ascribed to William of Conches. But it will be best to assume nothing about it until we have gathered sufficient evidence to warrant a certain conclusion. All William's productions hang so closely together that the proof that one of them is his involves all the rest: and if the following investigation goes over a good deal of ground which has already been covered by previous bibliographers, it does not in all points arrive at the same results as they have done.

2. The book that may serve as a foundation for our inquiry is the Dialogus de Substantiis physicis ante annos ducentos conjectus a Wilhelmo aneponymo philosopho, published 