730 SCIENCE IN EARLY ENGLAND. 



(5) Boger Bacon, Opus Minus, Opus Tertium, and Compendium 

 Philosophise, edited by J. S. Brewer. 1859. Also in the Bolls series. 



Many fragments have also been gleaned from the Encyclopaedia 

 Britannica and the Dictionary of National Biography. 



This country, in its earlier days, lay quite outside the sphere of 

 scientific influence; remote from Egypt, Borne, or Greece, and the 

 arena of constant struggles between the native races and their 

 invaders, it offered more attractions to warriors and missionaries than 

 to philosophers, consequently we may pass over not only the whole 

 Roman period, but a considerable interval after the invasion of the 

 Saxons in 449, without finding a single circumstance to dwell upon. 

 The conversion of this people to Christianity was begun in 597 by 

 Augustine, at the instance of Pope Gregory the Great, and the intel- 

 lectual awakening which followed from this event soon bore fruit in 

 the development of the language and literature. The poems of Csed- 

 mon, Cynewulf, and the legendary Beowulf are the earliest specimens 

 of Anglo-Saxon achievements in a most difficult art, and date from 

 660 to 700 or thereabouts. 



In the eighth century the cultivation of letters was taken up even by 

 women, many of whom wrote Latin and French with equal ease, while 

 all ranks were in the habit of making journeys to Borne, whence they 

 returned laden with books and ideas which they did their best to 

 disseminate. 



The want of Anglo-Saxon scientific terms delayed the translation of 

 books into the vernacular, and those which existed in any language suf- 

 fered severely between the ninth and eleventh centuries at the hands 

 of the Danes, and in a minor degree from an unfortunate custom of 

 scraping the letters off old MSS. to make room for new matter. 



The barbarous Northmen, who have been described as the curse of 

 England at that period, were especially bitter against monasteries and 

 the treasures they contained, and from the sacking of Lindisfarne or 

 Holy Island in 793 till the reign of Canute did incalculable damage. 

 Under this monarch, himself a Dane, the country had a temporary 

 prosperity. After him came the English restoration, then the Norman 

 Conquest, and so on. At no time were the sword and implements 

 of war laid by for long, and those whose bent would have been toward 

 philosophy under happier circumstances were forced to keep silence or 

 to fall in with the popular current. These things must be borne in 

 mind before we judge our ancestors too harshly. It is well known that 

 the Saxons made furnaces for the evaporation of salt in Cheshire and 

 Worcestershire, and contrived dishes of metal and even of transparent 

 glass for domestic purposes, while their agriculture was conducted upon 

 sound principles, though with rude instruments. 



The sources of their scientific information were, in the first place, 

 Greek and Roman ; but as they accepted without question the authority 

 of Aristotle and Pliny, they made no advance worth speaking of till 



