282 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Since Bacon's authority concerning Alexander is unreliable and his 

 conjecture concerning ancient scythe-bearing chariots unwarranted, we 

 may also doubt if steamboats and automobiles had "certainly been 

 made" in his day; but there seems little doubt that men were trying 

 to accomplish such things. 



The modern science of geology was a sealed book both to the middle 

 ages and to antiquity. But in geography the middle ages seem to have 

 preserved the knowledge of the ancients and to have added considerably 

 thereto. The north of Europe and its adjacent seas now became better 

 known. In the thirteenth century medieval missionaries and travelers 

 penetrated to the far East, and the accounts of the Venetian trader, 

 Marco Polo, and of the Franciscan friar, William of Kubruk, gave infor- 

 mation concerning China and Japan, — lands practically unknown to 

 the men of classical times. The mariner's compass must have been 

 known in western Europe by the twelfth century; it is first mentioned 

 by Alexander ISTeckam, the same man who thought that Adam's fall 

 caused the spots on the moon. It very possibly was a western invention, 

 since it can hardly be proved that it was known before this in the 

 Orient, where some think that it was first introduced by the Portuguese. 

 After ISTeckam the compass is frequently referred to by western writers 

 and was evidently in common use. The old story that sailors were long 

 afraid to use the new instrument lest they be accused of magic seems to 

 be an arrant fabrication with no foundation in the writings of the time, 

 which speak of the invention in a tone of perfect freedom and uncon- 

 cern. In the fourteenth century came the development of deep sea sail- 

 ing and Atlantic navigation; and the Portuguese by 1350 had dis- 

 covered the Canary, Madeira and Azores Islands. The Italian sailors 

 became so expert in charting coasts that Professor Beazley affirms that a 

 certain fourteenth-century map of the Mediterranean is superior to any 

 other until as late as the eighteenth century. Thus in the middle ages 

 the foundations were laid for the circumnavigation of Africa and dis- 

 covery of America in the last decade of the fifteenth century. Already 

 in Dante's time every well-educated person knew that the world was 

 round and that the people on the other side could not possibly fall off; 

 and any one who read Pliny and Seneca, as every medieval student of 

 nature did, could read, as Eoger Bacon did, that the space dividing the 

 west of Spain from the east of India was not great. Other authorities, 

 however, made the distance much greater. 



Alchemy, the art which strove to convert metals of less value into 

 gold, is usually associated especially with the middle ages, and regarded 

 as a proof of their superstition compared to the scientific perfection of 

 modern chemistry. "We must make several amendments to this view. 

 First, alchemy is in no sense peculiarly medieval but existed in the an- 

 cient Greek-speaking world and perhaps came down from ancient Egypt. 



