lectual feast which we are now lavishly enjoying, and perpetually enlarging.

The history of the sciences among the Anglo-Saxons can contain little more information than that some individuals successively arose, as Aldhelm, Bede, Alcuin, Joannes Scotus, and a few more, who endeavoured to learn what former ages had known, and who freely disseminated what they had acquired. Besides the rules of Latin poetry and rhetoric, they studied arithmetic and astronomy as laborious sciences.

In their arithmetic, before the introduction of the Arabian figures, they followed the path of the ancients, and chiefly studied the metaphysical distinctions of numbers. They divided the even numbers into the useless arrangement of equally equal, equally unequal, and unequally equal; and the odd numbers into the simple, the composite, and the mean. They considered them again, as even or odd, superfluous, defective, or perfect, and under a variety of other distinctions, still more unnecessary for any practical application, which may be seen in the little tracts of Cassiodorus and Bede. Puzzled and perplexed with all this mazy jargon, Aldhelm might well say, that the labour of all his other acquisitions was small in the comparison with that which he endured in studying arithmetic. But that they attained great practical skill in calculation, the elaborate works of Bede sufficiently testify.

As all human ideas occur to the mind in some natural order of succession, and always connected with some previous remembrances and associations, the Anglo-Saxons could not become attached to the investigations of natural science, before preceding agencies had led them to attend to it. But all the impulses which were acting on their minds, were operating in very different directions; and no general current in the world around them led them to anticipate the Arabs in the rich and unexplored country of experimental knowledge.

Yet our venerable Bede made some attempts to enter this new region; and his treatise on the nature of things shows that he endeavoured to introduce the study of natural philosophy among the Anglo-Saxons.

This work has two great merits. It assembles into one focus the wisest opinions of the ancients on the subjects he discusses, and it continually refers the phenomena of nature to natural causes. The imperfect state of knowledge prevented him from discerning the true natural causes of many things, but the principle of referring the events and appearances of nature to its own laws and agencies, displays a mind of a sound philosophical tendency, and was calculated to lead his countrymen to a just mode of thinking on these subjects. Although to teach that thunder and lightning

This is printed in the second volume of his works, p. 1., with the glosses of Bridferth of Ramsey, Joannes Noviomagus, and another.

were the collisions of the clouds, and that earthquakes were the effect of winds rushing through the spongy caverns of the earth were erroneous deductions, yet they were light itself compared with the superstitions which other nations have attached to these phenomena. Such theories, directed the mind into the right path of reasoning, though the correct series of the connected events and the operating laws had not then become known. The work of Bede is evidence that the establishment of the Teutonic nations in the Roman empire did not barbarize knowledge. He collected and taught more natural truths with fewer errors than any Roman book on the same subjects had accomplished. Thus his work displays an advance, not a retrogradation of human knowledge; and from its judicious selection and concentration of the best natural philosophy of the Roman empire, it does high credit to the Anglo-Saxon good sense. The following selections will convey a general idea of the substance of its contents.

Expressing the ancient opinion, that the heavens turned daily round, while the planets opposed them by a contrary course: he taught that the stars borrowed their light from the sun; that the sun was eclipsed by the intervention of the moon, and the moon by that of the earth; that comets were stars with hairy flames, and that the wind was moved and agitated air. He said that the rainbow is formed in clouds of four colours, from the sun being opposite, whose rays being darted into the cloud is repelled back to the sun. The rain is the cloud compressed by the air into heavier drops than it can support, and that these frozen make the hail. Pestilence is produced from the air, either by excess of dryness, or of heat, or of wet. The tides of the ocean follow the moon, as if they were drawn backwards by its aspiration, and poured back on its impulse being withdrawn. The earth is surrounded by the waters; it is a globe. Hence we see the northern stars but not the southern, because the globous figure of the earth intercepts them. The volcano of Etna was the effect of fire and wind acting in the hollow sulphureous and bituminous earth of Sicily, and the barking dogs of Scylla were but the roaring of the waves in the whirlpools, which seamen hear. He had remarked the sparkling of the sea on a night upon the oars, and thought it was followed by a tempest. So the frequent leaping of porpoises from the water had caught his notice, and he connected it with the rise of wind, and the clearing of the sky. He remarks,

e

in another work, that sailors poured oil on the sea to make it more transparent. He describes fully his ideas on the influence of the moon on the tides, and intimates that it also affects the air. He speaks again of the roundness of the earth like a ball, and ascribes the inequality of days and nights to this globular

c Ibid. p. 28, 30, 31.
f Ibid. p. 49.

d Ibid. p. 38.

De Rer. Nat. p. 6. Ibid. p. 39, 40, 43. Ibid. p. 37. He adds his presages on the weather. "If the sun arise spotted or shrouded with a cloud, it will be a rainy day; if red, a clear one; if pale, tempestuous; if it seem concave, so that, shining in the centre, it emits rays to the south and north, there will be wet and windy weather; if it fall pale into black clouds, the north wind is advancing; if the sky be red in the evening, the next day will be fine; if red in the morning, the weather will be stormy; lightning from the north, and thunder in the east, imply storm; and breezes from the south, announce heat; if the moon in her last quarter look like gold, there will be wind; if on the top of her crescent black spots appear, it will be a rainy month; if in the middle, her full moon will be serene." De Nat. p. 37.

b De Temporum Ratione, p. 56.

i Ibid. p. 110, 115

rotundity. He thinks the Antipodes a fable; but from no superstition, but because the ancients had taught that the torrid zone was uninhabitable and impassable. Yet he seems to admit, that between this and the parts about the south pole, which he thought was a mass of congelation, there was some habitable land. It was the probability of human existence in such circumstances, not such a local part of the earth, which Bede discredited.1

For the credit both of Bede and the Anglo-Saxons, I should have been glad to have been convinced that the four books De Elementis Philosophiæ, printed as his in his works, were actually his composition; for they display a spirit of investigation, a soundness of philosophical mind, and a quantity of just opinions on natural philosophy, that would do credit to any age before that of Friar Bacon. But its merit compels us to suspect the possibility of its belonging to the eighth century.m

Their astronomy was such as they could comprehend in the Greek and Latin treatises which fell into their hands on this subject. Bede was indefatigable in studying it, and his treatises were translated into the Anglo-Saxon, of which some MSS. exist in the Cotton Library. He appropriated all the practical results and reasonings of the Roman world, but did not cultivate the mathematical investigations of the Alexandrian Greeks. All the studious men applied to it more or less, though many used it for astrological superstitions. It was indeed then studied by all men of science in two divisions, and that which we call astrology, the legacy of the Chaldeans, was for a long time the most popular. It was perhaps on this account, rather than from a love of the nobler directions of the science, that our ancient chroniclers are usually minute in noticing the eclipses which occurred, and the comets and meteors which occasionally appeared."

Their geographical knowledge must have been much improved by Adamnan's account of his visit to the Holy Land, which Bede abridged; and by the sketch given of general geography in Orosius, which Alfred made the property of all his

i De Temporum Ratione, p. 125.

* Ibid. p. 132. St. Austin had also denied the Antipodes, or persons with their feet below us, and their heads in the sky, as an incredible thing. He thought that this part of the globe was either covered with sea, or if dry land, was not inhabited. De Civ. Dei. L. 16. c. 9.

There are some tracts printed as Bede's, which would seem not to be his. As the Mundi Constitutio, in which he is himself quoted "Secundam Bedam de temporibus," vi. p. 375. And in the Argumenta Lunæ, the calculation is made for the year 936, or two hundred years after he lived, p. 197. The Astrolabium, p. 468, contains Arabic names, and the Prognostica foretells battles and pestilence at Corduba, p. 463.

The author speaks of England, p. 333, as if he belonged to it; but he also mentions the Antipodes as if he believed their existence, p. 336. He also says that a comet is not a star, p. 333: both these opinions are different from Bede's. I have since observed that Fabricius ascribes it to Guilielmus de Conchis, Bib. Med. p. 502, a Norman who lived in the reign of Henry II.

"Even Bede says, the comet portends "change of kingdoms, or pestilence, or wars, or tempest, or drought." De Nat. Rer. p. 30.

countrymen, by his translation and masterly additions. The eight hides of land given by his namesake for a MS. of cosmographical treatises, of wonderful workmanship, may have been conceded rather to the beauty of the MS. than to its contents. But, notwithstanding these helps, the most incorrect and absurd notions seem to have prevailed among our ancestors concerning the other parts of the globe, if we may judge from the MS. treatises on this subject which they took the trouble to adorn with drawings, and sometimes to translate. Two of these are in the Cotton Library, and a short notice of their contents may not be uninteresting as a specimen of their geographical and physical knowledge.

The MS. Tib. B. 5, contains a topographical description of some eastern regions, in Latin and Saxon. From this we learn there is a place in the way to the Red Sea, which contains red hens, and that if any man touches them, his hand and all his body are burnt immediately: also, that pepper is guarded by serpents, which are driven away by fire, and this makes the pepper black. We read of people with dogs' heads, boars' tusks, and horses' manes, and breathing flames. Also of ants as big as dogs, with feet like grashoppers, red and black. These creatures dig gold for fifteen days. Men go with female camels, and their young ones, to fetch it, which the ants permit, on having the liberty to eat the young camels.P

The same learned work informed our ancestors that there was a white human race fifteen feet high, with two faces on one head, long nose, and black hair, who in the time of parturition, went to India to lie in. Other men had thighs twelve feet long, and breasts seven feet high. They were cannibals. There was another sort of mankind with no heads, who had eyes and mouths in their breasts. They were eight feet tall and eight feet broad. Other men had eyes which shone like a lamp in a dark night. In the ocean there was a soft-voiced race, who were human to the navel, but all below were the limbs of an ass. These fables even came so near as Gaul; for it tells us that in Liconia, in Gaul, there were men of three colours, with heads like lions, and mouths like the sails of a windmill. They were twenty feet tall. They run away, and sweat blood, but were thought to be men. Let us however, in justice to our ancestors, recollect that most of these fables are gravely recorded by Pliny. The Anglo-Saxons were, therefore, not more credulous or uninformed than the Roman population.

The descriptions of foreign ladies were not very gallant. It is stated that near Babylon there were women with beards to their breasts. They were clothed in horses' hides, and were great hunters, but they used tigers and leopards instead of dogs. Other women had boars' tushes, hair to their heels, and a cow's tail. They were thirteen feet high. They had a beautiful body, as white as marble, but they had camels' feet. Black men living on burning mountains; trees bearing precious stones; and a golden vineyard which had berries one hundred and fifty feet long, which produced jewels; gryphons, phoenixes, and beasts with asses' ears, sheeps' wool, and birds' feet, are among the other wonders which instructed our ancestors. The accounts in the MS. Vitellius, A. 15, rival the phenomena just recited, with others as credible, and are also illustrated with drawings.

• Bede, 299.

P This was probably a popular notion; for it is said, among their prognostics, that if the sun shine on the fourth day, the camels will bring much gold from the ants, who keep the gold hoards. MSS. CCC. Cant. Wanl. 110.

We cannot now get at the national opinions of the AngloSaxons on physical subjects in any other way than by observing what things they thought worthy to be committed to writing. They who could write were among the most informed part of the Saxon society, and as their parchment materials were scanty, it seems reasonable to suppose that, what they employed themselves in writing stood high in their estimation. We will add a few things which are in Anglo-Saxon in a MS. in the Cotton Library.

"Istorius said that this world's length is twelve thousand miles, and its breadth six thousand three hundred, besides the islands. There are thirty-four kinds of snakes on the earth; thirty-six kinds of fish, and fifty-two kinds of flying fowls. The name of the city to which the sun goes up is called Jaiaca; the city where it sets is Jainta. Asguges, the magician, said that the sun was of burning stone. The sun is red in the first part of the morning, because he comes out of the sea; he is red in the evening, because he looks over hell. The sun is bigger than the earth, and hence he is hot in every country. The sun shines at night in three places; first in Leviathan the whale's inside. He shines next in hell, and afterwards on the islands named Glith, and there the souls of holy men remain till doomsday. Neither the sun nor the moon shines on the Red Sea, nor does the wind blow upon it.” Some excellent moral and prudential maxims follow in the MS.

The Anglo-Saxon scholars, though defective in actual knowledge, had just conceptions of the objects of philosophy. Thus Alcuin defines it to be the research into natural things, and the knowledge of divine and human affairs. He distinguishes it into knowledge and opinion. He describes it to be knowledge, when a thing is perceived with certainty, as that an eclipse of the sun is caused by the intervention of the moon; but that it is only opinion when it is uncertain, as the magnitude of heaven or the depth of the earth."

He divides philosophy in three branches; physics, ethics, and logic. But in his further considerations he exhibits not so much the deficiencies of the Anglo-Saxon mind, as the imperfect state of the knowledge which former times had handed down to it; for all the subjects which he comprises in physics are: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. That extensive field of science to which we now almost exclusively apply the name of physics, natural philosophy, had not been discovered or attended to by the Greeks and Romans; and still less chemistry, mineralogy, and the analogous sciences. The Anglo-Saxon scholars formed themselves chiefly on the Roman writers, and in general did not go beyond them. Alcuin gives us another train of definitions in physics.

"Physic is nature; physica is natural: it discusses the nature and contemplation of all things. From physica proceed arithmetic, astronomy, astrology, mechanics, medicine, geometry, and music.

9 MS. Cot. Lib. Julius, A. 2.

Alc. Dialectica, p. 1356.