396 COSMOS. 



earlier ages of their new belief, and owing to the peculiar bent 

 of their minds, full of contempt for all works of human ait. 

 Thus Chrysostom abounds in passages like the following: 

 44 If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would 

 lead thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault of heaven, 

 and around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by 

 the water's side; who does not despise all the creations of art 

 when in the stillness of his spirit he watches with admiration 

 the rising of the sun, as it pours its golden light over the face 

 of the earth; when resting on the thick grass beside the 

 murmuring spring, or beneath the sombre shade of a thick 

 and leafy tree, the eye rests on the far receding and hazy 

 distance ? " * Antioch was at that time surrounded by hermit- 

 ages, in one of which lived Chrysostom. It seemed as if 

 eloquence had recovered her element, freedom, from the 

 fount of nature in the mountain regions of Syria and Asia 

 Minor, which were then covered with forests. 



But in those subsequent ages so inimical to intellectual 

 culture when Christianity was diffused amongst the Germanic 

 and Celtic nations, who had previously been devoted to the 

 worship of nature, and had honoured under rough symbols its 

 preserving and destroying powers, intimate intercourse with 

 nature, and a study of its phenomena were gradually con- 

 sidered suspicious incentives to witchcraft. This communion 

 with nature was regarded in the same light as Tertullian, 

 Clement of Alexandria, and almost all the older fathers of the 

 church, had considered the pursuit of the plastic arts. In the 

 twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Councils of Tours (1163) 

 and of Paris (1209) interdicted to monks the sinful reading of 

 works on physics. f Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon were 



* See Joannis Chrysostomi Op. omnia, Par. 1838, (8vo. t. ix. p. 687 

 A, t. ii. p. 821 A, and 851 E, t. i. p. 79); compare also Joannis Philo- 

 poni in cap. 1, Geneseos de creatione Mundi libri septem, Vienna 

 Aust. 1630, p. 192, 236, and 272; as also Georgii Pisidce Mundi opi- 

 ficium, ed. 1596 v. 367-375, 560, 933, and 1248. The works of Basil 

 and of Gregory of Nazianzum soon arrested my attention, after I began 

 to collect descriptions of nature; but I am indebted to my friend and 

 colleague H. Hase, Member of the Institute, and Conservator of the 

 King's Library at Paris, for all the admirable translations of Chrysostom 

 and Thallasius, that I have already given. 



t On the Concilium Turonense, under Pope Alexander III., get 

 Ziegelbauer, Hist. Rei Utter, ordinis S. Benedicti, t. ii. p. 248, ed. 



