THE OLD HUMANITIES AND 

 THE NEW SCIENCE 



EARLY in the sixteenth century a liter- 

 ary joke sent inextinguishable laugh- 

 ter through the learned circles of Europe. 

 The Epistolae Obscurorum Vironim is great 

 literature, to which I refer for two reasons 

 — its standard is an exact gauge of my 

 scholarship, and had M agister Nostrandus 

 Ortuinus Gratiusof Cologne, to whom most 

 of the letters are addressed, been asked to 

 join that wicked Erfurt Circle, he could not 

 have been more surprised than I was to re- 

 ceive a gracious invitation to preside over 

 this gathering of British scholars. I felt to 

 have been sailing under false colours to 

 have ever, by pen or tongue, suggested the 

 possession of even the traditional small Lat- 



