198 PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 



pared with the heavens, as a reason to repress our love of glory. This 

 work, it will be recollected, was translated into the Anglo-Saxon by 

 our own Alfred. It was also commented on by Bede, who, in what 

 he says on this passage, assents to the doctrine, and shows an acquaint- 

 ance with Ptolemy and his commentators, both Arabian and Greek. 

 Gerbert, in the tenth century, went from France to Spain to study 

 astronomy with the Arabians, and soon surpassed his masters. He is 

 reported to have fabricated clocks, and an astrolabe of peculiar con- 

 struction. Gerbert afterwards (in the last year of the first thousand 

 from the birth of Christ) became pope, by the name of Sylvester II. 

 Among other cultivators of the sciences, some of whom, from their 

 proficiency, must have possessed with considerable clearness and steadi- 

 ness the elementary ideas on which it depends, we may here mention, 

 after Montucla,' 6 Adelbold, whose work On the Sphere was addressed 

 to Pope Sylvester, and whose geometrical reasonings are, according to 

 Montucla, 17 vague and chimerical ; Hermann Contractus, a monk of 

 St. Gall, who, in 1050, published astronomical works ; William of 

 Hirsaugen, who followed his example in 1080; Robert of Lorraine, 

 who was made Bishop of Hereford by William the Conqueror, in con- 

 sequence of his astronomical knowledge. In the next century, Adel- 

 hard Goth, an Englishman, travelled among the Arabs for purposes of 

 study, as Gerbert had done in the preceding age ; and on his return, 

 translated the Elements of Euclid, which he had brought from Spain 

 or Egypt. Robert Grostete, Bishop of Lincoln, was the author of an 

 Epitome on the Sphere ; Roger Bacon, in his youth the contemporary 

 of Robert, and of his brother Adam Marsh, praises very highly their 

 knowledge in mathematics. 



" And here," says the French historian of mathematics, whom I 

 have followed in the preceding relation, "it is impossible not to reflect 

 that all those men who, if they did not augment the treasure of the 

 sciences, at least served to transmit it, were monks, or had been such 

 originally. Convents were, during these stormy ages, the asylum of 

 sciences and letters. Without these religious men, who, in the silence 

 of their monasteries, occupied themselves in transcribing, in studying, 

 and in imitating the works of the ancients, well or ill, those works 

 would have perished ; perhaps not one of them would have come 

 down to us. The thread which connects us with the Greeks and 

 Romans would have been snapt asunder ; the precious productions of' 



16 Mont. i. 502. " lb. i. 503. 



