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ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY. 157 



not without some poetic license, though of a different 

 kind, tells us that the first papal legate sent to Scotland in 

 1247 "drew the money out of the Scots to himself as 

 strongly as the adamant does iron." Hugo de Bercy, 1 in 

 1248, speaks of the compass as in common use, and notes 

 a change in its construction, the needle now being sup- 

 ported by two floats and arranged in a glass cup. The 

 Norwegians, 2 by the middle of the century, not only had 

 the instrument in constant employment, but were using it 

 as an especial reward of merit and as the device of an 

 order of knighthood. 



Meanwhile the influence of the philosophy of Aristotle 

 had greatly augmented, and his writings were the subjects 

 of commentaries innumerable. But the world was in- 

 debted to the Arabs for the Aristotelian text, and it had 

 come down from copyist to copyist, gathering errors as the 

 rolling snowball gathers snow on its way; for the tran- 

 scribers of the East were not the patient and accurate 

 writers of the monasteries, and they had little compunc- 

 tion about adding paragraphs here and there drawn from 

 their own imaginations. But worse even than this, there 

 also appeared works attributed to Aristotle which are now 

 generally conceded to be entirely spurious and of purely 

 Arabic origin. Such, for example, is the Arabic transla- 

 tion of a Book of Stones, of which, if it ever existed, no 

 trace remains, nor can any reference to it be found in any 

 classic author. 



The Arabic treatise does not purport to be even a com- 

 plete translation of the alleged work of Aristotle, but 

 merely a collection of excerpts. Nevertheless it seems to 

 have been received with the same respect accorded to the 

 philosopher's genuine writings, and this despite the fact 

 that the manuscripts of it must have materially differed 

 among themselves. In certain of these codices, though 

 evidently not in all, for the passage is wholly absent in 



'Riccioli : Geograph. and Hydrograph., lib. x., cap. 18. 

 2 Torfaeus: Hist. Norweg., lib. iv., 345. 



