Historical Relations 119 



we have such a work in our hands it will provide us with the 

 introductory and perhaps the most fascinating chapter in a great 

 History of Modern Science. Nor was there long delay before the 

 affection for the outer visible world spread to other and higher walks 

 of life. It had early expressed itself in the career of St. Francis, 

 and it was not long in entering the schools themselves. The 

 literature of the later scholastic centuries is inconceivably tedious 

 to those who are not by temper in sympathy with its special themes. 

 Yet even that literature is relieved by an occasional rare and 

 precious ray of nature study. 



It is an amusing reflection on the incompleteness of all 

 philosophical systems to recall that Albertus Magnus (i 206-1 280), 

 the teacher of Aquinas, who perhaps more than any man was 

 responsible for the scholastic world-system, was among those few 

 medieval writers who were real observers of nature. To love the 

 world around and to watch its creatures is, after all, of the very 

 essence of the human animal. Naturam expellas furca tamen usque 

 recurret. Albert, scholastic of the scholastics, drowned in erudi- 

 tion, the most learned man of his time, reviver of the Aristotelian 

 cosmology, the typical medieval philosopher, has left us evidence 

 in his great works on natural history that the scientific spirit was 

 again astir. As an independent observer he is not altogether 

 contemptible, and this element in him marks the beginning of the 

 modern scientific movement. It was, however, centuries before 

 observational activity obtained sufficient momentum or coherence 

 to affect the religious standpoint with any gravity. 



But Albert was not quite alone in his observations. Other 

 observers were about, and some of them made discoveries of no 

 mean importance. During the thirteenth century there w^s much 

 interest in optics ; the attention devoted to the subject led in about 

 the year 1 300 to the application of lenses — which had been known 

 to the Arabian writers — as spectacles. A similar process had led 

 at an even earlier date to the adaptation of the magnet to the 

 mariner's compass. These are discoveries of first-rate importance 

 and we cannot pass them by in silence. But — and this is where we 

 sense the characteristic medieval atmosphere — these discoveries led 

 to the production of no general laws. The lens led to no advance in 

 the doctrine of refraction or in the theory of light. The compass 

 revealed nothing of the nature of terrestrial magnetism to the 

 medieval thinker. They were on the level of inventions rather 



