THE OLD HUMANITIES AND 

 THE NEW SCIENCE 



I 



EARLY in the sixteenth century a liter- 

 ary joke sent inextinguishable laugh- 

 ter through the learned circles of Europe. 

 The Epistolse Obscurontm Vironim is great 

 literature, to which I refer for two reasons 

 its standard is an exact gauge of my 

 scholarship, and had Magister Nostrandus 

 Ortuinus Gratiusof Cologne, to whom most 

 of the letters are addressed, been asked to 

 join that wicked Erfurt Circle, he could not 

 have been more surprised than I was to re- 

 ceive a gracious invitation to preside over 

 this gathering of British scholars. I felt to 

 have been sailing under false colours to 

 have ever, by pen or tongue, suggested the 

 possession of even the traditional small Lat- 



