Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 87.djvu/286

282 Since Bacon's authority concerning Alexander is unreliable and his conjecture concerning ancient scythe-bearing chariots unwarranted, we may also doubt if steamboats and automobiles had "certainly been made" in his day; but there seems little doubt that men were trying to accomplish such things.

The modern science of geology was a sealed book both to the middle ages and to antiquity. But in geography the middle ages seem to have preserved the knowledge of the ancients and to have added considerably thereto. The north of Europe and its adjacent seas now became better known. In the thirteenth century medieval missionaries and travelers penetrated to the far East, and the accounts of the Venetian trader, Marco Polo, and of the Franciscan friar, William of Kubruk, gave information concerning China and Japan,—lands practically unknown to the men of classical times. The mariner's compass must have been known in western Europe by the twelfth century; it is first mentioned by Alexander Neckam, the same man who thought that Adam's fall caused the spots on the moon. It very possibly was a western invention, since it can hardly be proved that it was known before this in the Orient, where some think that it was first introduced by the Portuguese. After Neckam the compass is frequently referred to by western writers and was evidently in common use. The old story that sailors were long afraid to use the new instrument lest they be accused of magic seems to be an arrant fabrication with no foundation in the writings of the time, which speak of the invention in a tone of perfect freedom and unconcern. In the fourteenth century came the development of deep sea sailing and Atlantic navigation; and the Portuguese by 1350 had discovered the Canary, Madeira and Azores Islands. The Italian sailors became so expert in charting coasts that Professor Beazley affirms that a certain fourteenth-century map of the Mediterranean is superior to any other until as late as the eighteenth century. Thus in the middle ages the foundations were laid for the circumnavigation of Africa and discovery of America in the last decade of the fifteenth century. Already in Dante's time every well-educated person knew that the world was round and that the people on the other side could not possibly fall off; and any one who read Pliny and Seneca, as every medieval student of nature did, could read, as Roger Bacon did, that the space dividing the west of Spain from the east of India was not great. Other authorities, however, made the distance much greater.

Alchemy, the art which strove to convert metals of less value into gold, is usually associated especially with the middle ages, and regarded as a proof of their superstition compared to the scientific perfection of modern chemistry. We must make several amendments to this view. First, alchemy is in no sense peculiarly medieval but existed in the ancient Greek-speaking world and perhaps came down from ancient Egypt.