122 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



with that of Augustine at Cirencester. There he seems to 

 have lived out his days uneventfully and to have risen to 

 be Abbot. He died at Kempsey, near Worcester, in 1217, 

 and that is all that is known about him personally. 



Neckam was a typical product of the prevailing philos- 

 ophy of his time. His principal treatise bears the title 

 De Natura Rerum, which was a stereotyped one among 

 the mediaeval encyclopaedists, and in it he epitomizes all 

 the scientific knowledge of his day which he has gathered 

 by observation, and proceeds to explain it by the aid of a 

 tropical imagination tempered by theology. He delights 

 in intellectual labor, and detests scholastic methods, yet 

 sees no other mode than these last by which its produc- 

 tions may be utilized. He collects his facts with patient 

 care, all the time thinking that the study of the liberal 

 arts, while useful, leads people into the u vanity of over- 

 curious researches. n And then he seeks to reconcile the 

 inconsistency by averring that the arts are commendable 

 in themselves, but those who abuse them are worthy of 

 reprehension : regardless as to whether or not he himself 

 may be found in the latter category. But for scholastic 

 reasoning as such, it is " a thing full of vacuities." 



There is no direct statement in Neckam's writings 

 which fixes exactly the time when they were produced ; 

 but John of Brompton, whose chronicle ends with the 

 accession of King John (which occurred during his life- 

 time), quotes from the De Natura Rerum in a way that 

 shows it to have been well known at the end of the I2th 

 century. It is a treatise constructed very much on the 

 lines of St. Isidore's Etymologies, but is not so categorical 

 as the older work. It is a treasure house of curious folk- 

 lore and legends. In it appears for the first time the fancy 

 of the Man in the Moon; the traditions of the development 

 of the goose from the barnacle; 1 the swan that sings ere it 

 dies ; the unnatural ostrich which starves its young, and 



persisted even in the Royal Society at the end of the I7th cen- 

 tury. Phil. Trans., No. 137, p. 927, vol. xii., 1677-8. 



