MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IITH AND 12TH CENTURIES 89 



dence: heaven filled with angels, air with birds, water with fish, 

 and land with men and animals. Chapter 5 begins the treat- 

 ment of the heavens with the element aether or fire; Chapter 7 

 proceeds to meteorology by way of air; Chapter 12 begins the 

 treatment of waters with the element water; and Book XIV, 

 which is devoted to the earth and its parts, has an opening 

 chapter on the element earth. 



The Venerable Bede (672-735) follows a similar order in his 

 On the Nature of Things. A fourfold distinction concerning 

 the divine creation is made in the first chapter; one phase of 

 creation is that the elements of the world were made together 

 in unformed matter. In the formation of the world it is 

 specified, in the second chapter, that heaven, earth, angels, air, 

 and water were made from nothing in the beginning, and the 

 elements are used to differentiate the six days of creation. 

 Elements enter into the definition of the world in the third 

 chapter. The fourth chapter is on the elements and their 

 influence on each other and the mixtures they form are stated 

 in terms of the qualities heavy and light, hot and cold, moist 

 and dry.^" Astronomical questions are introduced by considera- 

 tion of the element fire in Chapter 5; the transition to meteor- 

 ological questions is made in Chapter 25, on air; waters are 

 treated after Chapter 38 on the differentiation of salt and fresh 

 waters; geographic questions are introduced by Chapter 45, on 

 earth. 



Bede makes use of the idea of atoms in his treatment of time. 

 In Chapter 3 of the De Temporum Ratione, on " the most 

 minute spaces of times," he calls the minimum indivisible part 

 of time atoms. Days are divided into 12 hours, and hours into 

 12 points, 10 minutes, 15 parts, 40 moments — points and minutes 

 being measured on clocks, parts on the circle of the Zodiac, 

 moments by the swiftest motion of the stars. The least of all 

 divisions of time which can in no way be divided further is 

 called the atoTn in Greek, that is, the indivisible. Because of 

 its smallness it is preceptible by grammarians rather than 



*^ Venerable Bede, De Natura Rerum, I-IV, PL 90, 187-96. 



