OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 615 



the art of navigation, the gradual perfection of nautical 

 instruments, both magnetic and astronomical, and finally, the 

 application of certain methods for the determination of the 

 ship's place, and the more general use of the solar and lunar 

 ephemerides of Regiomontanus. 



Without entering into the details of the history of science, 

 which would be foreign to the present work, I would enu- 

 merate amongst those who prepared the way for the epoch of 

 Columbus and Gama, three great names Albertus Magnus, 

 Roger Bacon, and Vincenzius of Beauvais. I have named them 

 according to time, but the most celebrated, influential and 

 intellectual, was Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk of Ilchester, 

 who devoted himself to the study of science at Oxford and 

 Paris. All the three were in advance of their age, and acted 

 influentially upon it. In the long and generally unfruitful 

 contests of the dialectic speculations and logical dogmatism of 

 a philosophy which has been designated by the indefinite and 

 equivocal name of scholastic, we cannot fail to recognise the 

 beneficial influence exercised by what may be termed the 

 reflex-action of the Arabs. The peculiarity of their national 

 character, already described in a former section, and their 

 predilection for communion with nature, procured for the 

 newly translated works of Aristotle an extended diffusion 

 which was most instrumental in furthering the establishment 

 of the experimental sciences. Until the close of the twelfth 

 and the beginning of the thirteenth century, misconceived 

 dogmas of the Platonic philosophy prevailed in the schools. 

 Even the fathers of the church believed that they could trace in 

 them the prototypes of their own religious views.* Many of 

 the symbolising physical fancies of Timaeus were eagerly taken 

 up, and erroneous cosmical views, whose groundlessness had 

 long been shown by the mathematical school of Alexandria, 

 were revived under the sanction of Christian authority. 

 Thus the dominion of Platonism, or, more correctly speak- 

 ing, the new adaptations of Platonic views, were propagated 

 far into the middle ages, under varying forms, from 



* Jourdain, Reck, crit. sur les traductions d'Aristote, pp. 230-234, 

 and 421-423 ; Letronne, Des opinions cosmographiques des Peres de 

 VEglise, rapprochees des doctrines pJiilosopliiques de la Gr&ce, in the 

 Revue des deux Mondes, 1834, t. i. p. 632. 



