Page:The place of magic in the intellectual history of Europe.djvu/24

16 tells us that mugwort prevents the traveler from feeling fatigue, and that the Egyptian fig makes the wrinkles of old age vanish and can tame the fiercest bulls once they are gathered beneath its branches. He describes fountains with properties as marvelous as those of the herb or of the tree. He tells of stones which, placed on the head of the sleeping wife, provoke confession of marital infidelity, or which, extracted from the crop of a rooster and carried in one's mouth, give victory in war. What is more, words as well as plants and stones are found by the careful and industrious investigator of nature to have great virtue, as experiment shows beyond doubt.

Neckam, despite the fact that according to his editor, Thomas Wright, he "not infrequently displays a taste for experimental science," was, after all, more of a moralizing compiler than anything else. But greater men than Neckam, men who were interested in learning and science for their own sake, men who knew more and wrote more, still cherished beliefs of the same sort. There was Michael Scot in the early years of the thirteenth century, the wonder of the cultured court of Frederick II, perhaps that monarch's tutor, the "Supreme Master" of Paris, the man who helped much to make the treasures of learning amassed