192 THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF MICHAEL SCOT 



to summon or dismiss. No one, however, who 

 compares them with the graphic statements of 

 mathematical problems in the margin of the Liber 

 Abbaci can fail to be struck with the resemblance. 1 

 The one book seems, in regard of these figures, but 

 a degenerate copy of the other, made by some 

 scribe who did not understand the matter he had 

 in hand, and who darkened the ground of his 

 designs to heighten the fancied terrors of the 

 subject. 



It would not be easy to miss the meaning of 

 this mistake. Michael Scot had probably written 

 or translated a treatise on algebra. We may 

 remember how well such a conjecture agrees with 

 the tone of Pisano's dedicatory letter to him, in 

 which he submitted the Liber Abbaci to Scot's 

 revision, and acknowledged him as a supreme 

 master in this branch of science. It is difficult to 

 account for this fame save by supposing the exist- 

 ence of an unknown work by Michael Scot on the 

 veritable Almuchabola, of which this pretended 

 treatise on magic is all that now survives. The 

 mistake that gave it so corrupted a form could 

 hardly have been made as late as the seventeenth 

 century, when such things were well understood. 

 The manuscript, though dating from that time, is 

 probably only a copy of one much older. The 

 preface, indeed, mentions the year 1255 as the 

 epoch of translation, and, although Michael Scot 

 had then lain more than twenty years in his grave, 

 this date would suit well as the birth-hour of a 

 legend which, though certainly later than Scot's 



1 This resemblance should be studied in the remarkably beautiful 

 MS. of the Liber Abbaci, numbered xi. 21 in the Bibl. Naz. Florence. 



