186 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



name of Petrarch (1304-1374). This revival, while at first chiefly 

 literary and philosophical, brought with it translations into Latin 

 the current language of scholars at that time of Aristotle and 

 other classical writers of scientific importance, and thus aided in 

 bringing on a new birth or renaissance in science as well as in 

 other branches. 



Precisely as there is one great name in thirteenth century 

 literature, viz. that of Dante, which must be regarded with 

 attention by all students of history, so in the fourteenth the name 

 and work of Petrarch require careful consideration. Francesco 

 Petrarca, commonly called Petrarch, a gifted Italian poet and 

 scholar, greatly promoted the revival of ancient learning by insisting 

 on the importance and merits of the Greek and Roman authors. 



Petrarch was less eminent as an Italian poet than as the founder 

 of Humanism, the inaugurator of the Renaissance in Italy. . . . 

 Standing within the kingdom of the Middle Ages, he surveyed the 

 kingdom of the modern spirit and, by his own inexhaustible indus- 

 try in the field of scholarship and study, he determined what we call 

 the revival of learning. By bringing the men of his own generation 

 into sympathetic contact with antiquity, he gave a decisive impulse 

 to that European movement which restored freedom, self-conscious- 

 ness and the faculty of progress to the human intellect. . . . He 

 was the first man to collect libraries, to accumulate coins, to advocate 

 the preservation of antique monuments, and to collate manuscripts. 

 Though he knew no Greek, he was the first to appreciate its vast im- 

 portance ; and through his influence, Boccaccio laid the earliest founda- 

 tions of its study. . . . For him the authors of the Greek and Latin 

 world were living men, more real in fact than those with whom he 

 corresponded ; and the rhetorical epistles he addressed to Cicero, 

 Seneca and Varro prove that he dwelt with them on terms of 

 sympathetic intimacy. Symonds. 



Rich as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are in mathe- 

 matical science and geographical discovery, and in art and inven- 

 tion, they are almost destitute of positive achievement in natural 

 science. Doubtless the scientific spirit of curiosity and inquiry 

 was alive and active, but thus far it had taken other directions. 



