732 SCIENCE IN EAELY ENGLAND. 



times as Pope Sylvester II, and his followers, Elthelwold of Winchester 

 (925-984), and Dunstan of Glastonbury (925-988), the latter of whom 

 subsequently became Archbishop of Canterbury. Gerbert, though not 

 an Englishman, may be introduced as having made Europeans ac- 

 quainted with the Indian numerals and algebra, and with various 

 mechanical inventions, such as the clock pendulum. He had studied 

 at Cordova and Toledo, and acquired a great reputation, not unmixed 

 with obloquy as a dabbler in forbidden arts. Ethelwold was famed as 

 an ingenious mechanic, and a treatise by him on the quadrature of the 

 circle is in existence at the Bodleian Library. Dunstan fell under the 

 same imputation as Gerbert, and is recorded to have possessed a magic 

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

 once survived the ordeal of being thrown into a pond. His favorite 

 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 leg 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. 



Bobert, 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 mathematical tables. 



Next we find Athelard of Bath, whose name is said to be the great- 

 est in English science up to the days of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. 

 He traveled 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 Bcetius, who lived from 475 to 

 525, but his writings were not read till late in the Anglo-Saxon period.) 

 Later on, somewhere between 1110 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 

 embedded in rocks surviving their accidental release, and to legeuds 

 of dragons and other monstrous creatures (probably founded on fossil 

 bones) ; Alexander Neckani (1157-1217) ; Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 

 (died 1253), and Boger Bacon completed a list, which is only meant to 

 include the principal names. Of Neckain and Bacon, I shall have more 

 to say presently. Grosseteste has been favorably noticed by George 

 Boole as having had a glimpse of the principle of least action. Start- 

 ing with a datum derived from Aristotle, that there is greater union 

 and unity in a straight line than any other, and assuming that all 

 united virtue is more powerful than that which is not united, he deduces 

 that nature, operating in straight lines, operates in the best manner 



