THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



T^. 



A^ 



NOVEMBEE, 1903. 



THE RENAISSANCE OF SCIENCE. 



By Dr. EDWARD S. HOLDEN, 



U. S. MILITARY ACADEMY, WEST POINT, N. Y. 



nnHE centuries immediately following the disruption of the Roman 

 -*- empire witnessed the formation of the languages of southern Eu- 

 rope — Italian, Spanish, French — and the process of their building-up 

 placed an almost insuperable barrier in the way of the advancement of 

 learning. Latin became a dead language ; Greek was entirely unknown ; 

 the spoken languages were never written. 'The whole treasury of 

 knowledge was locked up from the eyes of the people.' All legal 

 documents and all correspondence as well as all the rituals of the 

 church were couched in Latin, and until the end of the thirteenth 

 century it was very unusual for a layman to write or even to read. 

 The clergy were the only clerks. It is disputed whether Charlemagne 

 could sign his name, and it is certain that Alfred the Great had but 

 an indifferent knowledge of Latin. From the sixth to the eleventh 

 century the mass of the clergy were only slightly more enlightened. 

 Alfred declares that at the date of his accession (871) he did not know 

 a single priest south of the Thames who understood the ordinary prayers 

 of the church, or who could translate Latin into his mother tongue. 

 The ignorance of the dark ages in Europe is a direct consequence of the 

 confusion of tongues. 



Through the translations of Nestorian monks in the orient the 

 works of Greek philosophers, physicians, mathematicians and astron- 

 omers became known to the Arabs in the eighth and ninth centuries. 

 The precepts of Ptolemy were followed closely, even slavishly, by the 

 astronomers of Bagdad, Persia, Egypt, Spain and Turkistan, so long 

 as learning lasted in these lands. We owe an immense debt to the Arabs 

 for their faithful transmission of astronomical theories which they had 



