152 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



as a man of science. . . . There was only one thing left for him to 

 do, to serve God. J. C. Morison, The Service of Man. 



THE EASTERN EMPIRE. EDICT OP JUSTINIAN. Only half a 

 century after the fall of Rome the Greek schools in Athens were 

 closed, in 529 A.D., by order of the emperor Justinian, and intel- 

 lectual darkness settled down over Eastern Europe. Theology 

 became more than ever the chief pursuit of the educated, and Greek 

 learning more than ever neglected. Many Greek manuscripts, 

 however, were hidden away, and many Greek scholars, though 

 scattered, kept alive the feeble spark of Greek learning. 



THE DARK AGES. After the mighty Roman Empire of the 

 West had come to its end, the peoples of Christian Europe and of 



the Graeco-Roman world descended into the great hollow which is 

 roughly called the Middle Ages, extending from the fifth to the fifteenth 

 century, a hollow in which many great and beautiful and heroic things 

 were done and created, but in which knowledge, as we understand it 

 and as Aristotle understood it, had no place. The revival of learning 

 and the Renaissance are memorable as the first sturdy breasting by 

 humanity of the hither slope of that great hollow which lies between 

 us and the ancient world. The modern man, reformed and regenerated 

 by knowledge, looks across it and recognizes on the opposite ridge, in 

 the far-shining cities and stately porticoes, in the art, politics and 

 science of antiquity, many more ties of kinship and sympathy than 

 in the mighty concave between, wherein dwell his Christian ancestry 

 in the dim light of scholasticism and theology. Morison. 



The "great hollow" here so graphically portrayed may be de- 

 scribed as the Middle or Medieval Age (c. 450-1450 A.D.) and of 

 these ten centuries the first three, or thereabouts, are often called 

 the Dark as they certainly were the darkest Ages. 



The darkest time in the Dark Ages was from the end of the sixth 

 century to the revival of learning under Charles the Great (Charle- 

 magne). Bad grammar was openly circulated and sometimes com- 

 mended. St. Gregory the Great quoted the Bible in depreciation of 

 the Humanities. (Ps. Ixx. 15. 16.) The study of heathen authors 

 was discouraged more and more. "Will the Latin grammar save an 

 immortal soul ? " " What profit is there in the record of pagan sages, 



