58 SCIENCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. pt. it. 



1522. This ship, guided by Magellan, was the first which 

 ever sailed quite round the world ; and all these voyages, 

 proving that the earth is a round globe, and bringing back 

 accounts of new stars in the heavens, set men thinking that 

 there was much still to be learnt about the universe. 



Leonardo da Vinci, 1452. — We must not pass on into 

 the sixteenth century without mentioning Leonardo da 

 Vinci, the great painter, who was also very remarkable for 

 the number of interesting inventions which he made in 

 mechanics. Leonardo was bom in 1452 at Vinci, in 

 Tuscany ; he is so generally spoken of as a painter that 

 many people do not know that he left behind him fourteen 

 valuable works on Natural Philosophy. He invented water- 

 mills and water-engines, as well as locks to shut off the 

 water, such as are now used on our canals and rivers. He 

 studied the flight of birds, and tried to make a machine for 

 flying, and, besides being one of the best engineers of his 

 day, he made many curious machines, such as a spinning- 

 machine, a water-pump, and a planing-machine. Some of 

 these things were only models which he made for his own 

 pleasure, but they show that he, like Roger Bacon, was very 

 much in advance of his age ; and he did good service to 

 science by the careful experiments which he made, and by 

 insisting that it was only by going to Nature herself that men 

 can really advance in knowledge. 



Chief Works consulted. — Draper's 'Hist, of Intellectual Develop- 

 ment ; ' Baden Powell's * Hist, of Natural Philosophy,' 1834 ; Sprengel 



* Histoire de la Medecine,' 1850 ; * Penny Cyclopaedia,' art. 'Arabians ;' 



* Encyclopaedias Metropolitana and Britannica ; ' Rodwell's ' Birth of 

 Chemistry,' 1874; 'The Works of Geber,' Englished by R. Russell 



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