EASTMAN: DESCRIPTIONS OF BOLCA FISHES. 3 



natural science, a period coeval with the literary reawakening in Italy. 

 We need not, however, extend our survey so far back as to include the 

 detached statements or speculations of classic authors, or even post- 

 Augustan writers, such as Tertullian and Poniponius Mela, for, familiar 

 as the ancients undoubtedly were with the occurrence of fossils, they do 

 not appear to have been seriously concerned in attempts to account 

 for their origin, nor did their views serve to enlighten subsequent 

 progress. Per contra, the doctrines of Aristotle, followed blindly or 

 enlarged upon by scholastic ^vriters during the middle ages, acted as a 

 positive hindrance. Minds which could accept without difficulty Aris- 

 totle's ideas of spontaneous generation were free to admit that mineral 

 matter could take on of itself any conceivable shape, even mimicking 

 animate forms. If living plants and animals could produce themselves, 

 •why not fossils, as readily 1 Avicenna,^ for instance, most brilliant 

 luminary of the Arabian circle of sciences in the tenth century, and 

 whose Canon Medicinae remained the principal medical authority 

 throughout the middle ages, proposed a vis hqnjidica, and following him 

 in the thirteenth century Albertus Magnus ^ affirmed his viHus forma- 

 tica. At a still later period a "World-Spirit," or Archaeus, was pre- 

 dicated by Bauhiu, and Libavius held that fossils sprang from germs or 

 seeds, like living beings. Glimmerings of a spirit of experiment and 

 observation are rarely in evidence before the fourteenth century. Until 

 about this period nature-study in Europe continued at an extremely low 

 ebb, Greek and Latin scientific works were unread in the original, and 

 untranslated into the vulgar tongue, and popular concepts of natural 

 history were perverted by the bestiaries. 



Fourteenth Century. In Cecco d'Ascoli (1257-1327),^ the ill- 

 fated author of VAcerba, and sometime professor of philosophy in the 

 University of Bologna, we discover a man of remarkable erudition and 



1 Cf. Wiistenfeld, F., Gescliiclite der arabischen Aerzte und Naturforscher, nach 

 den Quellen bearbeitet. Giittingen, 1840. 



^ Sighart, J., Albertus Magnus, sein Leben und seine Wissensehaft, nacli den 

 Quellen dargestellt. Regensburg, 1857. 



3 Popular name for Francesco Stabili of Ascoli, whom Petrarch honored with 

 a sonnet beginning, — 



" Tu se 'I grande Ascolan che il monde allumi." 



He has been made the subject within recent years of a thoughtful essay by Wel- 

 bore St. C. Baddeley, and of a historical romance by Pietro Fanfani {Cecco d'Ascoli, 

 Racconto storico del secolo XIV. Leipzic, 1871). VAcerba, which was the immedi- 

 ate cause of the author's death, passed througli a score of editions between 1473, 

 the date of the earliest, and 1546. The latest bears date of 1820, at Venice. 



