SCIENCE AT THE MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITIES 45 * 



may have been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects of the 

 many-sided mind of man. For these studies did really contain, at any rate in 

 embryo, sometimes it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, 

 mathematical and physical science and art. And I doubt if the curriculum, of 

 any modem university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is 

 meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrwium does. 



It would be entirely a mistake, however, to think that these great 

 writers and teachers who influenced the medieval universities so deeply 

 and whose works were the text-hooks of the universities for centuries 

 after, only had the principles of physical and experimental science and 

 did not practically apply them. As a matter of fact their works are 

 full of observation. Once more, the presumption that they wrote only 

 nonsense with regard to science comes from those who do not know 

 their writings at all, while great scientists who have taken the pains to 

 study their works are enthusiastic in praise. Humboldt, for instance, 

 says of Albertus Magnus, after reading some of his works with care: 



Albertus Magnus is equally active and influential in promoting the study 

 of natural science and of the Aristotelian philosophy. His works contain some 

 exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants. 

 One of his works bearing the title of " Liber Cosmographicus De Natura 

 Locorum " is a species of physical geography. I have found in it considera- 

 tions on the dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude and elevation 

 and on the effect of different angles of the sun's rays in heating the ground 

 which have excited my surprise. 



It is with regard to physical geography of course that Humboldt is 

 himself a distinguished authority. 



Humboldt's expression that he found some exceedingly acute re- 

 marks on the organic structure and physiology of plants in Albert the 

 Great's writings will prove a great surprise to many people. Meyer, 

 the German historian of botany, however, has reechoed Humboldt's 

 praise with emphasis. The extraordinary erudition and originality of 

 Albert's treatise on plants drew from Meyer the comment : 



No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared with him unless 

 Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted; and after him none has 

 painted nature in such living colors or studied it so profoundly until the time 

 of Conrad Gessner and Csesalpino. 



These men, it may be remarked, come three centuries after Albert's 

 time. A ready idea of Albert's contributions to physical science can be 

 obtained from his life by Sighart, which has been translated into 

 English by Dixon and was published in London in 1870. Pagel, in 

 Puschmann's " History of Medicine," already referred to, gives a list 

 of the books written by Albert on scientific matters with some com- 

 ments which are eminently suggestive, and furnish solid basis for the 

 remark that I have made, that men's minds were occupied with nearly 

 the same problems in science in the thirteenth century as we are now, 

 while the conclusions they came to were not very different from ours, 

 though reached so long before us. 



