5 24 THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY. 



there defending the oppressed. It is with a man of this kind, the Ab- 

 bot Rabanus Maurus Magnentius, of Fulda, that we have to do in this 

 essay. After the fall of the Roman Empire the spirit of knowledge 

 became quite extinct, except for a few Greek minds in the Eastern 

 Empire, and in England and Ireland, where gentler manners followed 

 the introduction of the Christian faith and the Latin language, and 

 learning gained a place of refuge ; and the knowledge of antiquity 

 spread after Archbishop Theodore and his deacon, Hadrian, founded 

 the school of Canterbury about 680. At last, also, a short but rela- 

 tively bright period of scientific awakening broke over Central Europe 

 during the reign of Charlemagne, who strove to increase culture and 

 learning in his own land and to introduce them into the countries that 

 he acquired, and for that purpose called learned men to his court, 

 among them Alcuin of England. The cloister schools prospered 

 greatly under Alcuin, and some among them cultivated knowledge 

 with quiet assiduity in the midst of the decline that set in soon after 

 his death. Of these was the cloister of Fulda, to which our Rabanus 

 Maurus was attached. He was born at Mayence, of an old noble 

 family, in 774 or 776, and entered the cloister of Fulda as a puer 

 oblatus (destined for the Church) when nine years old. He acquitted 

 himself so well here that the Abbot Ratgar, in 802, sent him to the 

 celebrated Alcuin at Tours to finish his education. Rabanus resided 

 there a year, a favorite pupil of Alcuin's, who, according to the custom 

 of the time, gave him the surname of Maurus. On his return to Fulda, 

 Ratgar appointed him chief of the cloister school, which became fa- 

 mous under him. Soon afterward, however, the abbot changed his 

 mind very suddenly, prohibited studies, and set the monks at manual 

 labor in building churches. A poem written by Rabanus at this time 

 has come down to us, in which he bewails the loss of his books. The 

 monks soon became disgusted with this rude treatment, and complained 

 of Ratgar to the Emperor, who removed him. Eigil Was appointed to 

 succeed him, and restored Rabanus, whose intimate friend he was, 

 to his school. Monks came to Fulda from great distances to learn 

 Rabanus's method of teaching, and his scholars were sought for on 

 all sides, so that he soon became known as the first teacher in Ger- 

 many. Rabanus himself became Abbot of Fulda after Eigil's death 

 in 822. 



Under his lead Fulda reached the height of its fame, and no other 

 German cloister, except perhaps Reichenau, could compare Avith it. 

 He committed the school to the care of his pupil Walafriedus Strabus, 

 author of a work, " De Hortulo," in which twenty-three plants of the 

 author's garden are celebrated in hexameter verses, and in the per- 

 formance of his duties as abbot himself had but little time to devote 

 to study. Politics claimed much of his attention, and in the x con- 

 tentions which arose for the throne of the empire he defended the' 

 cause of Louis against his son, composing in view of the strife a work 



