July 3, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



of the fourteenth century begun by the 

 friar of Kilkenny, but soon interupted by 

 his death: 



I friar, John Clyiij of the order of Friars Minor 

 and of the convent of Kilkenny, wrote in this book 

 those notable things which happened in my times, 

 which I saw with my eyes, or which I learned 

 from persons worthy of credit. And lest these 

 things worthy of remembrance should perish with 

 time and fall away from the memory of those who 

 are to come after us, I, seeing these many evils, and 

 the whole world lying, as it were in the wicked one, 

 among the dead, awaiting death — ^as I have truly 

 heard and examined, so have I reduced these 

 things to writing; and lest the writing should 

 perish with the writer, and the work fail altogether 

 with the workman, I leave parchment for continu- 

 ing the work, if haply, any man survive, and any 

 of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and 

 continue the work I have commenced. 



That the period of the Byzantine Empire 

 (395-1453) was one of general degeneracy 

 is shown on every page of the historian. 

 It produced no literature of merit, and 

 "the study of nature was regarded as the 

 surest symptom of an unbelieving mind." 

 Neuburger says : 



The Byzantines merely followed the downward 

 path. Surfeited with tradition, which made modes 

 of thought appear inevitable, because customary, 

 filled as a nation with overweening self-conceit, fed 

 by the glories of the Grreco -Roman past, they 

 neither could nor would destroy the historic bridge 

 nor replace the crumbling ruin with a new edifice. 

 It lay outside the sphere of their interests to enter 

 into that conscious emulation of antiquity which, 

 emphasizing the growing contrast between past 

 and present, and eliminating the obsolete and the 

 inert, is the essence of mental cultivation. For- 

 getting that it was the free development of the 

 national spirit which constituted the greatness of 

 the past, they went so far as to smother its liveliest 

 expression by denying, in their rigid adherence to 

 Attic speech, all part in literature to the language 

 of the people. The more incapable did the Byzan- 

 tines become of grasping the spirit, the more tena- 

 ciously did they cling to the letter — a reflection of 

 the mania for titles and ceremonies in political life 

 — and thus they dragged the inanimate mechan- 

 ism, the dry bones of antiquity through a thousand 

 years, instead of erecting a new edifice on the 

 foundations of antiquity. 



The physician and historian, Procopius, 

 in his account of the great pestilence in the 

 reign of Justinian "emulated the skill and 

 diligence of Thucydides in the description 

 of the plague at Athens." Of this epi- 

 demic Gibbon says: 



In time its first malignancy was abated and dis- 

 persed; the disease alternately languished and re- 

 vived; but it was not till the end of a calamitous 

 period of fifty-two years, that mankind recovered 

 their health, and the air resumed its pure and sa- 

 lubrious quality. No facts have been preserved to 

 sustain an account, or even a conjecture, of the 

 numbers that perished in this extraordinary mor- 

 tality. I only find that during three months, four 

 and at length ten thousand persons died each day at 

 Constantinople, that many cities of the east were 

 left vacant, and that in several districts of Italy, 

 the harvest and the vintage withered on the ground. 

 The triple scourge of war, pestilence and famine 

 afilioted the subjects of Justinian, and his reign :'s 

 disgraced by a visible decrease of the human spe- 

 cies, which has never been replaced in some of the 

 fairest countries of the globe. 



This epidemic spread over the whole of 

 Europe and it took more than a century to 

 reach England, where "it fabled long after 

 in prose and verse as the great plague of 

 CadwaUader's time." Then for quite a 

 thousand years it reaped its periodic har- 

 vests as often as immunity was lost in new 

 generations. 



The historian, as a rule, confines his 

 descriptions to martial and political events 

 and consequently gives a wholly erroneous 

 idea of true conditions. Gibbon says: 



If a man were called upon to fix the period in 

 the history of the world, during which the condi- 

 tion of the human race was most happy and pros- 

 perous, he would without hesitation, name that 

 which elapsed from the death of Domitiau to the 

 accession of Commodus (from 96 to 180 a.d.). 



Noah Webster, in his work on epidemics 

 and pestilence, quotes the preceding with 

 the following just comment: 



It is certain that, at this time, the Roman Em- 

 pire was in its glory, and governed by a series of 

 able and virtuous princes, who made the happiness 



