PROGRESS OF SCIENCE TO 1450 A.D. 175 



To show the low state of natural history it suffices to refer to 

 an extraordinary work, the so-called Physiologus or Bestiary, a 

 kind of scriptural allegory of animal life, originally Alexandrian, 

 but surviving in mutilated forms and widely used in medieval 

 times. The childish and grotesque character of this curious 

 compendium shows how ill-adapted were the centuries of crusad- 

 ing to the calm pursuits of science ; they were indeed almost barren 

 in this direction. 



Scholasticism, nevertheless, lingered long after the Crusades 

 were ended, and abundant survivals of it exist even today. 



MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES. The origin of the universities which 

 play so great a part in the cultivation and dissemination of learn- 

 ing in the later middle ages is involved in obscurity. The medical 

 school at Salerno in southern Italy seems to have become known 

 in the ninth century, so that the University of Salerno is some- 

 times called the oldest in Europe. It was still famous in the 

 thirteenth century. The law school at Bologna, in northern 

 Italy, became well known about 1000 A.D., though the date of 

 the University of Bologna is usually given as near the end of the 

 twelfth century. The University of Paris is often dated from 

 the early part of the same century. None of these early univer- 

 sities was much more than an association or gild of masters and 

 pupils. Laboratories for instruction were of course unknown. 



In the eleventh and twelfth centuries there was a gradual de- 

 velopment from the previous monastic schools to the beginnings 

 of modern universities at Paris, Bologna, Salerno, Oxford, and 

 Cambridge, the schools themselves however continuing along 

 their previous lines ; and from that time onward to our own, the 

 universities have played the chief part in the advancement of 

 learning in general and of science in particular. In their develop- 

 ment theological influences were naturally dominant, and it is 

 interesting to observe that the use of Aristotle's Natural Philoso- 

 phy, which became later the stronghold of orthodox conserva- 

 tism, was prohibited in the thirteenth century. 



Medieval academic standards were naturally low. The univer- 

 sity was a voluntary and privileged society of scholars. Not until 



