16 Mr. Charles L. Barnes on 



which played sweet tunes by itself when hanging on a wall. 

 He once survived the ordeal of being thrown into a pond. 

 His favourite studies were arithmetic, geometry, and 

 music, and a story of him in connection with a pair of 

 tongs and a forge has caught the popular ear. 



Ailmer, a monk of Glastonbury, is credited with the 

 manufacture of a pair of wings wherewith to spurn the 

 ground ; he broke his legs on coming down too roughly 

 after an attempt to fly from a church tower, but, with a 

 true scientific spirit, attributed his misfortune to the want 

 of a tail to the machine. 



Robert, Bishop of Hereford (died 1095), wrote on the 

 motion of the stars, and the Lunar Computus (a method 

 of finding Easter). He also compiled a number of mathe- 

 matical tables. 



Next we find Athelard of Bath, whose name is said 

 to be the greatest in English science up to the days of 

 Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. He travelled in Greece, 

 Spain, North Africa, Sicily, and probably to Bagdad, then 

 one of the chief seats of Arabian learning, and translated 

 Euclid from Arabic to Latin, thus introducing a text-book 

 which still survives amongst us. (A version in the same 

 tongue taken direct from the Greek is said to have been 

 made by Boetius, who lived from 475 to 525, but his 

 writings were not read till late in the Anglo-Saxon period.) 

 Later on, somewhere between 11 10 and 1120, he founded 

 a school in France, where he taught the then new and 

 unpopular sciences he had learned. 



Philippe de Thaun, writer of a Bestiary, to be noticed 

 presently; William of Newbury, who gave currency to 

 the fables of animals imbedded in rocks surviving their 

 accidental release, and to legends of dragons and other 

 monstrous creatures (probably founded on fossil bones), 

 Alexander Neckam (1157-1217); Grosseteste, Bishop of 

 Lincoln (died 1253) 5 an d Roger Bacon complete a list which 



