Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/280

276 English monk, still tends to moralize and allegorize. For instance, he says that some persons call the spots on the moon caverns or mountains, but that he believes that they were put there to signify the stain of sin which Adam's transgression brought into the world. But Neckam also displays a scientific attitude. When he finds a statement in the book of Genesis in apparent contradiction to the astronomy of his time, he explains that the Bible here follows "the judgment of the eye and the popular notion," but that astronomy is really right. The later and longer encyclopedias of Arnold of Saxony, Thomas of Cantimprè, Bartholomew of England, and Vincent of Beauvais greatly increased the amount of space devoted to nature and contained comparatively little moralizing.

I may explain that in a medieval encyclopedia, instead of the alphabetical arrangement followed in modern encyclopedias, there is first a topical arrangement under such heads as Reptiles or Birds or Trees, and then an alphabetical arrangement under each topic. As in modern encyclopedias, most of the information was taken from other books, but sometimes the medieval encyclopedist adds new data which he has heard from hunters, travelers and others, or which he has learned from personal observation.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period of intellectual curiosity. Albertus Magnus says that he lists the properties of individual plants in order to satisfy the curiosity of his students. A favorite book of the period, translated into almost every European language, was entitled, "De omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis" which may be freely translated as "Concerning everything that can be known and then some." Indeed, it is not merely in professedly learned works written in Latin that one sees the interest of those times in natural science. If we turn to popular literature in the tongue of the layman and open one of the long French romances of the thirteenth century, we find Dame Nature making a speech concerning various branches of natural science which occupies a considerable section of the entire poem, whereas little space is devoted to logic or theology.

This interest in nature is often accompanied by an independent scientific spirit, of which we have just seen some evidence even in the moralizing Neckam. But it can be traced back earlier than him to the beginning of the twelfth century. As the life story and writings of Abelard illustrate the great interest in logic, philosophy and theology at the beginning of the twelfth century, and help to explain the origin of the University of Paris; so the career and books of a contemporary of his with a very similar name, Adelard of Bath, depict a pioneer of natural science. As Abelard went forth from Brittany through the towns of France in quest of Christian teachers, so from England Adelard made a wider circuit in lands both Christian and Mohammedan, where he might acquaint himself with all that was best in contemporary learning, but especially in mathematics and natural science.