HISTORY OF SCIENTIFIC INSTRUCTION. 375 



eminent writer of his age, was born near Monkwearmouth in 673, 

 and passed his life in the monastery there. He not only wrote the 

 history of our island and nation, but treatises on the nature of things, 

 astronomy, chronology, arithmetic, medicine, philosophy, grammar / 

 rhetoric, poetry, music, basing his work on that of Pliny. He died 

 in 735, in which year his great follower was born in Yorkshire. I 

 refer to Alcuin. He was educated at the Cathedral School at York 

 under Archbishop Egbert, and, having imbibed everything he could 

 learn from the writings of Bede and others, was soon recognized as 

 one of the greatest scholars of the time. On returning from Rome, 

 whither he had been sent by Eaubald to receive the pallium, he met 

 Karl the Great, King of the Franks and Lombards, who eventually 

 induced him to take up his residence at his court, to become his 

 instructor in the sciences. Karl (or Charlemagne) then was the 

 greatest figure in the world, and although as King of the Franks 

 and Lombards, and subsequently Emperor of the Holy Roman Em- 

 pire, his court was generally at Aachen, he was constantly traveling 

 throughout his dominions. He was induced, in consequence of 

 Alcuin's influence, not only to have a school always about him on 

 his journeys, but to establish, or foster, such schools wherever he 

 went. Hence it has been affirmed that " France is indebted to 

 Alcuin for all the polite learning it boasted of in that and the fol- 

 lowing ages." The universities of Paris, Tours, Fulden, Soissons, 

 and others were not actually founded in his day, but the monastic 

 and cathedral schools out of which they eventually sprang were 

 strengthened, and indeed a considerable scheme of education for 

 priests was established — that is, an education free from all sciences, 

 and in which philosophy alone was considered. 



Karl the Great died in 814, and after his death the eastward 

 traveling wave, thus started by Bede and Alcuin, slightly but very 

 gradually increased in height. Two centuries later, however, the 

 conditions were changed. We find ourselves in presence of inter- 

 ference phenomena, for then there was a meeting with another wave 

 traveling westward, and this meeting was the origin of the Euro- 

 pean universities. The wave now manifested traveling westerly, 

 spread outward from Arab centers first and finally from Constanti- 

 nople, when its vast stores of Greek lore were opened by the con- 

 quest of the city. 



The first wavelet justified Eudemus's generalization that " the 

 invention of the sciences originated in practical needs," and that 

 knowledge for its own sake was not the determining factor. The 

 year had been determined, stone circles erected almost everywhere, 

 and fires signaled from them, giving notice of the longest and short- 

 est days, so that agriculture was provided for, even away from 



