10 INTRODUCTION 



of the Portuguese in the east and of the Spaniards in the 

 west. 



Though intellectual life abounded during all these 

 years, hardly any attention was paid to science. One 

 or two names indeed, such as those of Eoger Bacon and 

 Regiomontanus, show that the aptitude for scientific 

 research already existed, though it was liable to be fatally 

 discouraged by the church (which claimed the exclusive 

 right of teaching), the scholastic philosophy and the 

 popular dread of magic. In the remarkable but still 

 imperfectly understood career of Roger Bacon we note 

 the stimulus which he received from Arabian science, his 

 indignant protests against the ignorance and presump- 

 tion of the scholastics, the interdiction of his lectures 

 at Oxford by one general of the Franciscans, and his 

 imprisonment for many years by another. Brunetto 

 Latino remarked, when he saw Bacon's magnetised 

 needle pointing to the pole, that no navigator would 

 dare to use it for fear of being called a magician. 

 Science was rarely tolerated in the thirteenth, four- 

 teenth and fifteenth centuries, except when it took its 

 least exciting forms, or was patronised by some great 

 churchman. 



We form some notion of the state of natural history 

 during the later middle ages by examining the treatise 

 De proprietatihus rerum, written by Bartholomew of 

 England, a mendicant friar, before the middle of the 

 thirteenth century, and translated into English in 1397. 

 We are not surprised to find that Bartholomew had but 

 an indistinct notion of Egypt, India and the " moun- 

 tains hyperborean," of dragons, griffins and sirens, but 

 we are amused to see how little pains he took to 

 observe and interpret the commonest natural facts. 

 The succession of colours in the rainbow is given as 



