"Tell faith it's fled the city,

Tell how the country erreth, Tell manhood shakes off pity,

Tell virtue least preferreth *; And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

"So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing; Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing; Yet stab at thee who will, No stab the soul can kill."

* Virtue leads not to preferment.

CHAP. IX.

SCIENCE AND ITS MARTYRS.

THE history of science is similar to that of literature, and intimately connected with it. Its records show that many ancient nations had an extensive and reverential, if not absolutely accurate, scientific knowledge. Then came the dark ages of Europe, when distorted traditions and superstitions usurped the place of truth, and effectually blinded the eyes of those who, from leisure and station, might otherwise have engaged in useful inquiries into the wonders of the world around them. The Chaldeans of old knew something of the stars, and the Arabians added to that knowledge. The art of measuring time by a sundial was known to the Hebrews in the time of Hezekiah; and, far earlier, the annual inundations. of the Nile, by compelling the Egyptians to measure their land after the waters had abated, gave rise to a knowledge of geometry. This introduced the study of arithmetic, which is the foundation of all the exact sciences. Mathematics and mechanics were carefully studied, and brought to great perfection by the Greeks. The ancients

seem to have divided knowledge into three partsarithmetic, geometry, and dialectics or language.

Since the Christian era, the Arabians were, until the tenth century, the most literary and scientific people. To them modern Europe was indebted for numerals, chemistry, and improvements in architecture and poetry. They founded numerous schools in Spain, and established the earliest libraries. Their false religious faith, however, made the Christians receive their discoveries with dread and suspicion; and a long period of gross darkness prevailed, in which natural phenomena were regarded with mere stupid wonder by some, and with awe-stricken dread by others; and any attempt to understand those wonders was thought an unlawful study, and any successful knowledge a proof of magical power, justly subjecting its possessor to suspicion, hatred, and persecution.

The first man in England who dared to investigate nature, and introduce those laws we term science, was Roger Bacon (born 1214). He is the most memorable instance on record of a man living before his age, and becoming the servant, not of his contemporaries, but of posterity. He was intimately acquainted with geography and astronomy, and made many valuable discoveries in optics and chemistry; he, also, was not ignorant of the composition of gunpowder. This great

L

man's knowledge was so little appreciated, that it made him numerous enemies, particularly among the monks of his own fraternity, and consigned him twice to close imprisonment. For a brief period between those imprisonments, a pope (Clement IV.), more enlightened than the clergy generally, liberated him, and took him under his protection. But this patron died, and ten years of yet stricter imprisonment for Bacon followed. So little were his works and labours valued or understood, that the name of Friar Bacon has come down to modern times rather as a necromancer of the middle ages than as a scientific discoverer. It has been remarked, that in the character of his mind and writings, and in the mode of his studies, his great namesake of the sixteenth century resembled him who, more than three hundred years after, effected such changes in those pursuits of science which were at once the blessing and the bane, the joy and grief, of the life of the philosopher of the thirteenth century. It has been conjectured, and with every show of reason, that had the art of printing been discovered at the time Roger Bacon lived, such was the sluggishness of mind at that period, and the complete prevalence of superstition, that it would have been rejected with horror and smothered in its birth. Fortunately, as we have seen, that art came at a time when the clouds were rapidly breaking

away, and the morning stars of literature in the south had heralded the coming day.

The most important scientific discovery of the fourteenth century was that of the Mariner's Compass by Flavio Gioja, a Neapolitan. This instrument, in more senses than one, led the way to the maritime discoveries of the Portuguese in the fourteenth century, and the ever memorable discoveries of Columbus in the fifteenth; the latter having increased the known boundaries of the world one half, and received as his reward a life of anxiety, disappointment, and ingratitude.

The sixteenth century was not only the age of literary greatness, but science then made rapid strides. We have already adverted to Lord Bacon, but other names deserve honourable mention for their genius and their sufferings.

It was natural that the grandest of the sciences, astronomy, which had long ministered more to the ambition and credulity of mankind than to their real knowledge, should be the first to emancipate herself from the dreams of astrologers. Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler, were the four distinguished astronomers of the period: thus Poland, Italy, Denmark, and Germany, furnished each a philosopher destined to pave the way for a more enlightened age, and, a century later, a far more distinguished and fortunate successor in Sir Isaac Newton.