CHAPTER XVII.

HISTORY OF PHYSICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE, FROM 1500 TO 1600.

SECT. I.--ON MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE.

_Algebraists of this Period--Vieta--Slow Progress of Copernican Theory--Tycho Brahe--Reform of Calendar--Mechanics--Stevinus--Gilbert._

|Tartaglia and Cardan.|

1. The breach of faith towards Tartaglia, by which Cardan communicated to the world the method of solving cubic equations, having rendered them enemies, the injured party defied the aggressor to a contest, wherein each should propose thirty-one problems to be solved by the other. Cardan accepted the challenge, and gave a list of his problems, but devolved the task of meeting his antagonist on his disciple Ferrari. The problems of Tartaglia are so much more difficult than those of Cardan, and the latter’s representative so frequently failed in solving them, as to show the former in a higher rank among algebraists, though we have not so long a list of his discoveries.[1345] This is told by himself in a work of miscellaneous mathematical and physical learning, Quesiti ed invenzioni diverse, published in 1546. In 1555, he put forth the first part of a treatise intitled Trattato di numeri e misure, the second part appearing in 1560.

[1345] Montucla, p. 568.

|Algebra of Pelletier.|

2. Pelletier of Mans, a man advantageously known both in literature and science, published a short treatise on algebra in 1554. He does not give the method of solving cubic equations, but Hutton is mistaken in supposing that he was ignorant of Cardan’s work, which he quotes. In fact he promises a third book, this treatise being divided into two, on the higher parts of algebra; but I do not know whether this be found in any subsequent edition. Pelletier does not employ the signs + and -, which had been invented by Stifelies, using _p_ and _m_ instead, but we find the sign √ of irrationality. What is perhaps the most original in this treatise, is that its author perceived that, in a quadratic equation, where the root is rational, it must be a divisor of the absolute number.[1346]

[1346] Pelletier seems to have arrived at this not by observation, but in a scientific method. Comme _x_² = 2_x_ + 15. (I substitute the usual signs for clearness), il est certain que _x_ que nous cherchons doit estre contenu également en 15, puisque _x_² est égal à deux _x_, et 15 davantage, et que tout nombre _censique_ (quarré) contient les racines également et précisément. Maintenant puisque 2 _x_ font certain nombre de racines, il faut donc que 15 fasse l’achèvement des racines qui sont nécessaires pour accomplir _x_². p. 40. (Lyon, 1554.)

|Record’s Whetstone of Wit.|

3. In the Whetstone of Wit, by Robert Record, in 1557, we find the signs + and -, and, for the first time, that of equality =, which he invented.[1347] Record knew that a quadratic equation has two roots. The scholar, for it is in dialogue, having been perplexed by this as a difficulty, the master answers, “That variety of roots doth declare that one equation in number may serve for two several questions. But the form of the question may easily instruct you which of these two roots you shall take for your purpose. Howbeit, sometimes you may take both.”[1348] He says nothing of cubic equations, having been prevented by an interruption, the nature of which he does not divulge, from continuing his algebraic lessons. We owe therefore nothing to Record but his invention of a sign. As these artifices not only abbreviate, but clear up the process of reasoning, each successive improvement in notation deserves, even in the most concise sketch of mathematical history, to be remarked. But certainly they do not exhibit any peculiar ingenuity, and might have occurred to the most ordinary student.

[1347] “And to avoid the tedious repetition of these words, “is equal to,” I will set, as I do often in work use, a pair of parallels, _gemowe_ lines of one length thus =, because no two things can be more equal.” The word _gemowe_, from the French _gemeau_, twin (Cotgrave) is very uncommon: it was used for a double ring, a _gemel_ or _gemou_ ring. Todd’s Johnson’s Dictionary.

[1348] This general mode of expression might lead us to suppose, that Record was acquainted with negative, as well as positive roots, the fictæ radices of Cardan. That a quadratic equation of a certain form has two positive roots, had long been known. In a very modern book, it is said that Mohammed ben Musa, an Arabian of the reign of Almamon, whose algebra was translated by the late Dr. Rosen in 1831, observes that there are two roots in the form _ax_² + _b_ = _cx_, but that this cannot be in the other three cases. Libri, Hist. des Sciences Mathématiques en Italie, vol. ii. (1838). Leonard of Pisa had some notion of this, but did not state it, according to M. Libri, so generally as Ben Musa. Upon reference to Colebrook’s Indian Algebra, it will appear that the existence of two positive roots in some cases, though the conditions of the problem will often be found to exclude the application of one of them, is clearly laid down by the Hindoo algebraists. But one of them says, “People do not approve a negative absolute number.”

|Vieta.|

|His discoveries.|

4. The great boast of France, and indeed of algebraical science generally, in this period, was Francis Viète, oftener called Vieta, so truly eminent a man that he may well spare laurels which are not his own. It has been observed in another place, that after Montucla had rescued from the hands of Wallis, who claims everything for Harriott, many algebraical methods indisputably contained in the writings of his own countryman, Cossali has stepped forward, with an equal cogency of proof, asserting the right of Cardan to the greater number of them. But the following steps in the progress of algebra may be justly attributed to Vieta alone. 1. We must give the first place to one less difficult in itself, than important in its results. In the earlier algebra, alphabetical characters were not generally employed at all, except that the Res, or unknown quantity, was sometimes set down R. for the sake of brevity. Stifelius, in 1544, first employed a literal notation, A. B. C. to express unknown quantities, while Cardan, and according to Cossali, Luca di Borgo, to whom we may now add Leonard of Pisa himself, make some use of letters to express indefinite numbers.[1349] But Vieta first applied them as general symbols of quantity, and by thus forming the scattered elements of specious analysis into a system, has been justly reckoned the founder of a science, which, from its extensive application, has made the old problems of mere numerical algebra appear elementary and almost trifling. “Algebra,” says Kästner, “from furnishing amusing enigmas to the Cossists,” as he calls the first teachers of the art, “became the logic of geometrical invention.”[1350] It would appear a natural conjecture, that the improvement, towards which so many steps had been taken by others, might occur to the mind of Vieta simply as a means of saving the trouble of arithmetical operations in working out a problem. But those who refer to his treatise entitled, De Arte Analytica isagoge, or even the first page of it, will, I conceive, give credit to the author for a more scientific view of his own invention. He calls it logistice speciosa, as opposed to the logistice numerosa of the older analysis;[1351] his theorems are all general, the given quantities being considered as indefinite, nor does it appear that he substituted letters for the known quantities in the investigation of particular problems. Whatever may have suggested this great invention to the mind of Vieta, it has altogether changed the character of his science.

[1349] Vol. i. p. 54. A modern writer has remarked, that Aristotle employs letters of the alphabet to express indeterminate quantities, and says it has never been observed before. He refers to the Physics, in Aristot. Opera, i. 543, 550, 565, &c., but without mentioning any edition. The letters α [alpha], β [beta], γ [gamma], &c. express force, mass, space or time. Libri, Hist. des Sciences Mathématiques en Italie, i. 104. Upon reference to Aristotle, I find many instances in the sixth book of the Physicæ Auscultationes, and in other places.

Though I am reluctant to mix in my text which is taken from established writers, any observations of my own on a subject wherein my knowledge is so very limited as in mathematics, I may here remark, that although Tartaglia and Cardan do not use single letters as symbols of known quantity, yet, when they refer to a geometrical construction, they employ in their equations double letters, the usual signs of lines. Thus we find, in the Ars Magna, AB _m_ AC, where we should put _a_ - _b_. The want of a good algorithm was doubtless a great impediment, but it was not quite so deficient as from reading modern histories of algebraical discovery, without reference to the original writers, we might be led to suppose.

The process by which the rule for solving cubic equations was originally discovered, seems worthy, as I have intimated in another place (p. 221), of exciting our curiosity. Maseres has investigated this in the Philosophical Transactions for 1780, reprinted in his Tracts on Cubic and Biquadratic Equations, p. 55-69, and in Scriptores Logarithmici, vol. ii. It is remarkable, that he does not seem to have been aware of what Cardan has himself told us on the subject in the sixth chapter of the Ars Magna; yet he has nearly guessed the process which Tartaglia pursued; that is, by a geometrical construction. It is manifest, by all that these algebraists have written on the subject, that they had the clearest conviction they were dealing with continuous, or geometrical, not merely with discreet, or arithmetical, quantity. This gave them an insight into the fundamental truth, which is unintelligible so long as algebra passes for a specious _arithmetic_, that _every_ value, which the conditions of the problem admit, may be assigned to unknown quantities, without distinction of rationality and irrationality. To abstract number itself irrationality is inapplicable.

[1350] Geschichte der Mathematik, i. 63.

[1351] Forma autem Zetesin ineundi ex arte propria est, non jam in numeris suam logicam exercente, quæ fuit oscitantia veterum analystarum, sed per logisticen sub specie noviter inducendam, feliciorem multo et potiorem numerosa, ad comparandum inter se magnitudines, proposita primum homogeniorum lege, &c. p. i. edit. 1646.

A profound writer on algebra, Mr. Peacock, has lately defined it, “the science of general reasoning by symbolical language.” In this sense there was very little algebra before Vieta, and it would be improper to talk of its being known to the Greeks, Arabs, or Hindoos. The definition would also include the formulas of logic. The original definition of algebra seems to be, the science of finding an equation between known and unknown quantities, per oppositionem et restaurationem.

5. Secondly, Vieta understood the transformation of equations, so as to clear them from coefficients or surd roots, or to eliminate the second term. This however is partly claimed by Cossali for Cardan. Yet it seems that the process employed by Cardan was much less neat and short than that of Vieta, which is still in use.[1352] 3. He obtained a solution of cubic equations in a different method from that of Tartaglia. 4. “He shows,” says Montucla, “that when the unknown quantity of any equation may have several positive values, for it must be admitted that it is only these that he considers, the second term has for its coefficient the sum of these values with the sign -, the third has the sum of the products of these values multiplied in pairs; the fourth the sum of such products multiplied in threes, and so forth; finally, that the absolute term is the product of all the values. Here is the discovery of Harriott pretty nearly made.” It is at least no small advance towards it.[1353] Cardan is said to have gone some way towards this theory, but not with much clearness, nor extending it to equations above the third degree. 5. He devised a method of solving equations by approximation, analogous to the process of extracting roots, which has been superseded by the invention of more compendious rules.[1354] 6. He has been regarded by some as the true author of the application of algebra to geometry, giving copious examples of the solution of problems by this method, though all belonging to straight lines. It looks like a sign of the geometrical relation under which he contemplated his own science, that he uniformly denominates the first power of the unknown quantity _latus_. But this will be found in older writers.[1355]

[1352] It is fully explained in his work De Recognitione Æquationum, cap. 7.

[1353] Some theorems given by Vieta very shortly and without demonstration, show his knowledge of the structure of equations. I transcribe from Maseres, who has expressed them in the usual algebraic language. Si _a_ + _b_ × _x_ - _x_² æquetur _ab_, _x_ explicabilis est de qualibet illarum duarum _a_ vel _b_. The second theorem is:--

a} ab} Si x³ - b}x² + ac}x c} bc}

æquetur _abc_, _x_ explicabilis est de qualibet illarum trium _a_, _b_, vel _c_. The third and fourth theorems extend this to higher equations.

[1354] Montucla, i. 600. Hutton’s Mathematical Dictionary. Biog. Univers. art. Viète.

[1355] It is certain that Vieta perfectly knew the relation of algebra to magnitude as well as number, as the first pages of his In Artem Analyticam Isagoge fully show. But it is equally certain that Tartaglia and Cardan, and much older writers, Oriental as well as European, knew the same; it was by help of geometry, which Cardan calls _via regia_, that the former made his great discovery of the solution of cubic equations. Cossali, ii. 147. Cardan, Ars Magna, ch. xi.

_Latus_ and _radix_ are used indifferently for the first power of the unknown quantity in the Ars Magna. Cossali contends that Fra Luca had applied algebra to geometry. Vieta, however, it is said, was the first who taught how to construct geometrical figures by means of algebra, Montucla, p. 604. But compare Cossali, p. 427.

A writer lately quoted, and to whose knowledge and talents I bow with deference, seems, as I would venture to suggest, to have overrated the importance of that employment of letters to signify quantities, known or unknown, which he has found in Aristotle, and in several of the moderns, and in consequence to have depreciated the real merit of Vieta. Leonard of Pisa, it seems, whose algebra this writer has for the first time published, to his own honour and the advantage of scientific history, makes use of letters as well as lines, to represent quantities. Quelquefois il emploie des lettres pour exprimer des quantités indéterminées, connues ou inconnues, sans les représenter par des lignes. On voit ici comment les modernes ont été amenés à se servir des lettres d’Alphabet (même pour exprimer des quantités connues) long temps avant Viète, à qui on a attribué à tort une notation qu’il faudrait peut-être faire remonter jusqu’à Aristote, et que tant d’Algébraistes modernes ont employée avant le géomètre Français. Car outre Leonard di Pise, Paciolo et d’Autres géomètres Italiens firent usage des lettres pour indiquer les quantités connues, et c’est d’eux plutôt que d’Aristote que les modernes ont appris cette notation. Libri, vol. ii. p. 34. But there is surely a wide interval between the use of a short symbolic expression for particular quantities, as M. Libri has remarked in Aristotle, or even the _partial_ employment of letters to designate known quantities, as in the Italian algebraists, and the method of stating general relations by the exclusive use of letters, which Vieta first introduced. That Tartaglia and Cardan, and even, as it now appears, Leonard of Pisa went a certain way towards the invention of Vieta, cannot much diminish his glory; especially when we find that he entirely apprehended the importance of his own logistice speciosa in science. I have mentioned above, that, as far as my observation has gone, Vieta does not work particular problems by the specious algebra.

6. “Algebra,” says a philosopher of the present day, “was still only an ingenious art, limited to the investigation of numbers; Vieta displayed all its extent, and instituted general expressions for particular results. Having profoundly meditated on the nature of algebra, he perceived that the chief characteristic of the science is to express relations. Newton with the same idea defined algebra an universal arithmetic. The first consequences of this general principle of Vieta were his own application of his specious analysis to geometry, and the theory of curve lines, which is due to Descartes; a fruitful idea, from which the analysis of functions, and the most sublime discoveries, have been deduced. It has led to the notion that Descartes is the first who applied algebra to geometry; but this invention is really due to Vieta; for he resolved geometrical problems by algebraic analysis, and constructed figures by means of these solutions. These investigations led him to the theory of angular sections, and to the general equations which express the values of chords.”[1356] It will be seen in the notes that some of this language requires a slight limitation.

[1356] M. Fourier, quoted in Biographie Universelle.

7. The Algebra of Bombelli, published in 1589, is the only other treatise of the kind during this period that seems worthy of much notice. Bombelli saw better than Cardan the nature of what is called the irreducible case in cubic equations. But Vieta, whether after Bombelli or not, is not certain, had the same merit.[1357] It is remarkable that Vieta seems to have paid little regard to the discoveries of his predecessors. Ignorant, probably, of the writings of Record, and perhaps even of those of Stifelius, he neither uses the sign = of equality, employing instead the clumsy word Æquatio, or rather Æquetur,[1358] nor numeral exponents; and Hutton observes that Vieta’s algebra has, in consequence, the appearance of being older than it is. He mentions, however, the signs + and -, as usual in his own time.

[1357] Cossali. Hutton.

[1358] Vieta uses =, but it is to denote that the proposition is true both of + and -; where we put ±. It is almost a presumption of copying one from another, that several modern writers say Vieta’s word is _æquatio_. I have always found it _æquetur_; a difference not material in itself.

|Geometers of this period.|

8. Amidst the great progress of algebra through the sixteenth century, the geometers, content with what the ancients had left them, seem to have had little care but to elucidate their remains. Euclid was the object of their idolatry; no fault could be acknowledged in his elements, and to write a verbose commentary upon a few propositions was enough to make the reputation of a geometer. Among the almost innumerable editions of Euclid that appeared, those of Commandin and Clavius, both of them in the first rank of mathematicians for that age, may be distinguished. Commandin, especially, was much in request in England, where he was frequently reprinted, and Montucla calls him the model of commentators for the pertinence and sufficiency of his notes. The commentary of Clavius, though a little prolix, acquired a still higher reputation. We owe to Commandin editions of the more difficult geometers, Archimedes, Pappus, and Apollonius; but he attempted little, and that without success, beyond the province of a translator and a commentator. Maurolycus of Messina had no superior among contemporary geometers. Besides his edition of Archimedes, and other labours on the ancient mathematicians, he struck out the elegant theory, in which others have followed him, of deducing the properties of the conic sections from those of the cone itself. But we must refer the reader to Montucla, and other historical and biographical works, for the less distinguished writers of the sixteenth age.[1359]

[1359] Montucla. Kästner. Hutton. Biogr. Univ.

|Joachim Rhæticus.|

9. The extraordinary labour of Joachim Rhæticus in his trigonometrical calculations, has been mentioned in our first volume. His Opus Palatinum de Triangulis was published from his manuscript by Valentine Otho, in 1594. But the work was left incomplete, and the editor did not accomplish what Joachim had designed. In his tables the sines, tangents, and secants are only calculated to ten, instead of fifteen places of decimals. Pitiscus, in 1613, not only completed Joachim’s intention, but carried the minuteness of calculation a good deal farther.[1360]

[1360] Montucla, p. 581.

|Copernican theory.|

10. It can excite no wonder that the system of Copernicus, simple and beautiful as it is, met with little encouragement for a long time after its promulgation, when we reflect upon the natural obstacles to its reception. Mankind can in general take these theories of the celestial movements only upon trust from philosophers; and in this instance it required a very general concurrence of competent judges to overcome the repugnance of what called itself common sense, and was in fact a prejudice as natural, as universal, and as irresistible as could influence human belief. With this was united another, derived from the language of Scripture; and though it might have been sufficient to answer, that phrases implying the rest of the earth and motion of the sun are merely popular, and such as those who are best convinced of the opposite doctrine must employ in ordinary language, this was neither satisfactory to the vulgar, nor recognised by the church. Nor were the astronomers in general much more favourable to the new theory than either the clergy or the multitude. They had taken pains to familiarise their understandings with the Ptolemaic hypothesis; and it may be often observed that those who have once mastered a complex theory are better pleased with it than with one of more simplicity. The whole weight of Aristotle’s name, which, in the sixteenth century, not only biassed the judgment, but engaged the passions, connected as it was with general orthodoxy and preservation of established systems, was thrown into the scale against Copernicus. It was asked what demonstration could be given of his hypothesis; whether the movements of the heavenly bodies could not be reconciled to the Ptolemaic; whether the greater quantity of motion, and the complicated arrangement which the latter required, could be deemed sufficient objections to a scheme proceeding from the Author of nature, to whose power and wisdom our notions of simplicity and facility are inapplicable; whether the moral dignity of man, and his peculiar relations to the Deity, unfolded in Scripture, did not give the world he inhabits a better claim to the place of honour in the universe, than could be pretended, on the score of mere magnitude, for the sun. It must be confessed, that the strongest presumptions in favour of the system of Copernicus were not discovered by himself.

11. It is easy, says Montucla, to reckon the number of adherents to the Copernican theory during the sixteenth century. After Rhæticus, they may be nearly reduced to Reinold, author of the Prussian tables; Rothman, whom Tycho drew over afterwards to his own system; Christian Wursticius (Ursticius), who made some proselytes in Italy; finally, Mæstlin, the illustrious master of Kepler. He might have added Wright and Gilbert, for the credit of England. Among the Italian proselytes made by Wursticius, we may perhaps name Jordano Bruno, who strenuously asserts the Copernican hypothesis; and two much greater authorities in physical science, Benedetti and Galileo himself. It is evident that the preponderance of valuable suffrages was already on the side of truth.[1361]

[1361] Montucla, p. 638.

|Tycho Brahe.|

12. The predominant disinclination to contravene the apparent testimonies of sense and Scripture had, perhaps, more effect than the desire of originality in suggesting the middle course taken by Tycho Brahe. He was a Dane of noble birth, and early drawn by the impulse of natural genius to the study of astronomy. Frederic III., his sovereign, after Tycho had already obtained some reputation, erected for him the observatory of Uraniburg in a small isle of the Baltic. In this solitude he passed above twenty years, accumulating the most extensive and accurate observations which were known in Europe before the discovery of the telescope and the improvement of astronomical instruments. These, however, were not published till 1606, though Kepler had previously used them in his Tabulæ Rodolphinæ. Tycho himself did far more in this essential department of the astronomer than any of his predecessors; his resources were much beyond those of Copernicus, and the latter years of this century may be said to make an epoch in physical astronomy. Frederic, Landgrave of Hesse, was more than a patron of the science. The observations of that prince have been deemed worthy of praise long after his rank had ceased to avail them. The emperor Rodolph, when Tycho had been driven by envy from Denmark, gave him an asylum and the means of carrying on his observations at Prague, where he died in 1601. He was the first in modern times who made a catalogue of stars, registering their positions as well as his instruments permitted him. This catalogue, published in his Progymnasmata in 1602, contained 777, to which, from Tycho’s own manuscripts, Kepler added 223 stars.[1362]

[1362] Montucla, p. 653-659.

|His system.|

13. In the new mundane system of Tycho Brahe, which, though first regularly promulgated to the world in his Progymnasmata, had been communicated in his epistles to the Landgrave of Hesse, he supposes the five planets to move round the sun, but carries the sun itself with these five satellites, as well as the moon, round the earth. Though this, at least at the time, might explain the known phenomena as well as the two other theories, its want of simplicity always prevented its reception. Except Longomontanus, the countryman and disciple of Tycho, scarce any conspicuous astronomer adopted an hypothesis which, if it had been devised some time sooner, would perhaps have met with better success. But in the seventeenth century, the wise all fell into the Copernican theory, and the many were content without any theory at all.

14. A great discovery in physical astronomy may be assigned to Tycho. Aristotle had pronounced comets to be meteors generated below the orbit of the moon. But a remarkable comet in 1577 having led Tycho to observe its path accurately, he came to the conclusion that these bodies are far beyond the lunar orbit, and that they pass through what had always been taken for a solid firmament, environing the starry orbs, and which plays no small part in the system of Ptolemy. He was even near the discovery of their elliptic revolution; the idea of a curve round the sun having struck him, though he could not follow it by observation.[1363]

[1363] Montucla, p. 662.

|Gregorian calendar.|

15. The acknowledged necessity of reforming the Julian calendar gave in this age a great importance to astronomy. It is unnecessary to go into the details of this change, effected by the authority of Gregory XIII., and the skill of Lilius and Clavius, the mathematicians employed under him. The new calendar was immediately received in all countries acknowledging the pope’s supremacy; not so much on that account, though a discrepancy in the ecclesiastical reckoning would have been very inconvenient, as of its real superiority over the Julian. The protestant countries came much more slowly into the alteration; truth being no longer truth, when promulgated by the pope. It is now admitted that the Gregorian calendar is very nearly perfect, at least as to the computation of the solar year, though it is not quite accurate for the purpose of finding Easter. In that age, it had to encounter the opposition of Mæstlin, an astronomer of deserved reputation, and of Scaliger, whose knowledge of chronology ought to have made him conversant with the subject, but who, by a method of squaring the circle, which he announces with great confidence as a demonstration, showed the world that his genius did not guide him to the exact sciences.[1364]

[1364] Montucla, p. 674-686.

|Optics.|

16. The science of optics, as well as all other branches of the mixed mathematics, fell very short of astronomy in the number and success of its promoters. It was carried not much farther than the point where Alhazen, Vitello, and Roger Bacon left it. Maurolycus of Messina, in a treatise published in 1575, though written, according to Montucla, fifty years before, entitled Theoremata de Lumine et Umbra, has mingled a few novel truths with error. He explains rightly the fact that a ray of light, received through a small aperature of any shape, produces a circular illumination on a body intercepting it at some distance; and points out why different defects of vision are remedied by convex or concave lenses. He had however mistaken notions as to the visual power of the eye, which he ascribed not to the retina but to the crystalline humour; and on the whole, Maurolycus, though a very distinguished philosopher in that age, seems to have made few considerable discoveries in physical science.[1365] Baptista Porta, who invented, or at least made known, the camera obscura, though he dwells on many optical phenomena in his Magia Naturalis, sometimes making just observations, had little insight into the principles that explain them.[1366] The science of perspective has been more frequently treated, especially in this period, by painters and architects than by mathematicians. Albert Durer, Serlio, Vignola, and especially Peruzzi, distinguished themselves by practical treatises; but the geometrical principles were never well laid down before the work of Guido Ubaldi in 1600.[1367]

[1365] Id. p. 695.

[1366] Montucla, p. 698.

[1367] Id. p. 708.

|Mechanics.|

17. This author, of a noble family in the Apennines, ranks high also among the improvers of theoretical mechanics. This great science, checked, like so many others, by the erroneous principles of Aristotle, made scarce any progress till near the end of the century. Cardan and Tartaglia wrote upon the subject; but their acuteness in abstract mathematics did not compensate for a want of accurate observation and a strange looseness of reasoning. Thus Cardan infers that the power required to sustain a weight on an inclined plane varies in the exact ratio of the angle, because it vanishes when the plane is horizontal, and becomes equal to the weight when the plane is perpendicular. But this must be the case if the power follows any other law of direct variation, as that of the sine of inclination, that is, the height, which it really does.[1368] Tartaglia, on his part, conceived that a cannon-ball did not indeed describe two sides of a parallelogram, as was commonly imagined even by scientific writers, but, what is hardly less absurd, that its point-blank direction and line of perpendicular descent are united by a circular arch, to which they are tangents. It was generally agreed, till the time of Guido Ubaldi, that the arms of a lever charged with equal weights, if displaced from the horizontal position, would recover it when set at liberty. Benedetti of Turin had juster notions than his Italian contemporaries; he ascribed the centrifugal force of bodies to their tendency to move in a straight line; he determined the law of equilibrium for the oblique lever, and even understood the composition of motions.[1369]

[1368] Id. p. 690.

[1369] Montucla, p. 693.

18. If, indeed, we should give credit to the sixteenth century for all that was actually discovered, and even reduced to writing, we might now proceed to the great name of Galileo. For it has been said that his treatise Della Scienza Mechanica was written in 1592, though not published for more than forty years afterwards.[1370] But as it has been our rule, with not many exceptions, to date books from their publication, we must defer any mention of this remarkable work to the next volume. The experiments, however, made by Galileo, when lecturer in mathematics at Pisa, on falling bodies, come strictly within our limits. He was appointed to this office in 1589, and left it in 1592. Among the many unfounded assertions of Aristotle in physics, it was one that the velocity of falling bodies was proportionate to their weights; Galileo took advantage of the leaning tower of Pisa to prove the contrary. But this important, though obvious experiment, which laid open much of the theory of motion, displeased the adherents of Aristotle so highly, that they compelled him to leave Pisa. He soon obtained a chair in the university of Padua.

[1370] Playfair has fallen into the mistake of supposing that this treatise was _published_ in 1592; and those who, on second thoughts, would have known better, have copied him.

|Statics of Stevinus.|

19. But on the same principle that we exclude the work of Galileo on mechanics from the sixteenth century, it seems reasonable to mention that of Simon Stevinus of Bruges; since the first edition of his Statics and Hydrostatics was printed in Dutch as early as 1585, though we can hardly date its reception among the scientific public before the Latin edition in 1608. Stevinus has been chiefly known by his discovery of the law of equilibrium on the inclined plane, which had baffled the ancients, and, as we have seen, was mistaken by Cardan. Stevinus supposed a flexible chain of uniform weight to descend down the sides of two connected planes, and to hang in a sort of festoon below. The chain would be in equilibrio, because, if it began to move, there would be no reason why it should not move for ever, the circumstances being unaltered by any motion it could have; and thus there would be a perpetual motion, which is impossible. But the part below, being equally balanced, must, separately taken, be in equilibrio. Consequently the part above, lying along the planes, must also be in equilibrio; and hence the weight of the two parts of the chain must be equal, or if that lying along the shorter plane be called the power, it will be to the other as the lengths; or if there be but one plane, and the power hang perpendicularly, as the height to the length.

20. It has been doubted whether this demonstration of Stevinus be satisfactory, and also whether the theorem had not been proved in a different manner by an earlier writer. The claims of Stevinus, however, have very recently been maintained by an author of high reputation.[1371] The Statics of this ingenious mathematician contain several novel and curious theorems on the properties of other mechanical powers besides the inclined plane. But Montucla has attributed to him what I cannot find in his works. “In resolving these questions (concerning the ratios of weights on the oblique pulley), and several others, he frequently makes use of the famous principle which is the basis of the Nouvelle Mécanique of M. Varignon. He forms a triangle, of which the three sides are parallel to the three directions, namely, of the weight and the two powers which support it; and he shows that these three lines express this weight and these powers respectively.”[1372] Playfair, copying Montucla, I presume, without looking at Stevinus, has repeated this statement, and it will be found in other modern histories of physical science. This theorem, however, of Varignon, commonly called the triangle of forces, will not, unless I am greatly mistaken, be discovered in Stevinus. Had it been known to him, we may presume that he would have employed it, as is done in modern works on mechanics, for demonstrating the law of equilibrium on the inclined plane, instead of his catenarian hypothesis, which is at least not so elegant or capable of so simple a proof. It is true that in treating of the oblique pulley, he resolves the force into two, one parallel, the other perpendicular to the weight; and thus displays his acquaintance with the composition of forces. But whether he had a clear perception of all the dynamical laws, involved in the demonstration of Varignon’s theorem, may possibly be doubtful; at least, we do not find that he has employed it.

[1371] Playfair’s Dissertation. Whewell’s Hist. of Inductive Sciences, ii. 11, 14. Compare Drinkwater’s Life of Galileo, p. 83. The reasoning which Mr. W. suggests for Stevinus, whether it had occurred to him or not, may be very just, but borders, perhaps, rather too much on the metaphysics of science.

[1372] Montucla, ii. 180.

|Hydrostatics.|

21. The first discovery made in hydrostatics since the time of Archimedes is due to Stevinus. He found that the vertical pressure of fluids on a horizontal surface is as the product of the base of the vessel by its height, and showed the law of pressure even on the sides.[1373]

[1373] Montucla, ii. 180.

|Gilbert on the Magnet.|

22. The year 1600 was the first in which England produced a remarkable work in physical science; but this was one sufficient to raise a lasting reputation to its author. Gilbert, a physician, in his Latin treatise on the Magnet, not only collected all the knowledge which others had possessed on that subject, but became at once the father of experimental philosophy in this island, and by a singular felicity and acuteness of genius, the founder of theories which have been revived after the lapse of ages, and are almost universally received into the creel of the science. The magnetism of the earth itself, his own original hypothesis, nova illa nostra et inaudita de tellure sententia, could not, of course, be confirmed by all the experimental and analogical proof, which has rendered that doctrine accepted in recent philosophy; but it was by no means one of those vague conjectures that are sometimes unduly applauded, when they receive a confirmation by the favour of fortune. He relied on the analogy of terrestrial phenomena to those exhibited by what he calls a _terrella_, or artificial spherical magnet. What may be the validity of his reasonings from experiment it is for those who are conversant with the subject to determine, but it is evidently by the torch of experiment that he was guided. A letter from Edward Wright, whose authority as a mathematician is of some value, admits the terrestrial magnetism to be proved. Gilbert was also one of our earliest Copernicans, at least as to the rotation of the earth;[1374] and with his usual sagacity inferred, before the invention of the telescope; that there must be a multitude of fixed stars beyond the reach of our vision.[1375]

[1374] Mr. Whewell thinks that Gilbert was more doubtful about the annual than the diurnal motion of the earth, and informs us that in a posthumous work he seems to hesitate between Tycho and Copernicus. Hist. of Inductive Sciences, i. 389. Gilbert’s argument for the diurnal motion would extend to the annual. Non probabilis modo sed manifesta videtur terræ diurna circumvolutio, cum natura semper agit per pauciora magis quam plura, atque rationi magis consentaneum videtur unum exiguum corpus telluris diurnam volutationem efficere quam mundum totum circumferri.

[1375] l. 6. c. 3. The article on Gilbert in the Biographie Universelle is discreditable to that publication. If the author was so very ignorant as not to have known anything of Gilbert, he might at least have avoided the assumption that nothing was to be known.

Sarpi, who will not be thought an incompetent judge, names Gilbert with Vieta, as the only original writers among his contemporaries. Non ho veduto in questo secolo uomo quale abbia scritto cosa sua propria, salvo Vieta in Francia e Gilberti in Inghilterra. Lettere di Fra Paolo, p. 31.

SECT. II.--ON NATURAL HISTORY.

_Zoology--Gesner, Aldrovandus. Botany--Lobel, Cæsalpin, and others._

|Gesner’s Zoology.|

23. Zoology and botany, in the middle of the sixteenth century, were as yet almost neglected fields of knowledge; scarce anything had been added to the valuable history of animals by Aristotle, and those of plants by Theophrastus and Dioscorides. But in the year 1551 was published the first part of an immense work, the History of Animals, by that prodigy of general erudition, Conrad Gesner. This treats of viviparous quadrupeds; the second, which appeared in 1554, of the oviparous; the third, in 1555, of birds; the fourth, in the following year, of fishes and aquatic animals; and one, long afterwards published in 1587, relates to serpents. The first part was reprinted with additions in 1560, and a smaller work of woodcuts and shorter descriptions, called Icones Animalium, appeared in 1553.

|Its character by Cuvier.|

24. This work of the first great naturalist of modern times is thus eulogised by one of the latest:--“Gesner’s History of Animals,” says Cuvier, “may be considered as the basis of all modern zoology; copied almost literally by Aldrovandus, abridged by Jonston, it has become the foundation of much more recent works; and more than one famous author has borrowed from it silently most of his learning; for those passages of the ancients, which have escaped Gesner, have scarce ever been observed by the moderns. He deserved their confidence by his accuracy, his perspicuity, his good faith, and sometimes by the sagacity of his views. Though he has not laid down any natural classification by genera, he often points out very well the true relations of beings.”[1376]

[1376] Biogr. Universelle, art. Gesner.

|Gesner’s arrangement.|

25. Gesner treats of every animal under eight heads or chapters: 1. Its name in different languages; 2. Its external description and usual place of habitation (or what naturalists call _habitat_); 3. Its natural actions, length of life, diseases, &c.; 4. Its disposition, or, as we may say, moral character; 5. Its utility, except for food and medicine; 6. Its use as food; 7. Its use in medicine; 8. The philological relations of the name and qualities, their proper and figurative use in language, which is subdivided into several sections. So comprehensive a notion of zoology displays a mind accustomed to encyclopedic systems, and loving the labours of learning for their own sake. Much of course would have a very secondary value in the eyes of a good naturalist. His method is alphabetical, but it may be reckoned an alphabet of genera; for he arranges what he deems cognate species together. In the Icones Animalium we find somewhat more of classification. Gesner divides quadrupeds into Animalia Mansueta and Animalia Fera; the former in two, the latter in four orders. Cuvier, in the passage above cited, writing probably from memory, has hardly done justice to Gesner in this respect. The delineations in the History of Animals and in the Icones are very rude; and it is not always easy, with so little assistance from engraving, to determine the species from his description.

|His additions to known quadrupeds.|

26. Linnæus, though professing to give the synonyms of his predecessors, has been frequently careless and unjust towards Gesner; his mention of several quadrupeds (the only part of the latter’s work at which I have looked), having been unnoticed in the Systema Naturæ. We do not find however that Gesner had made very considerable additions to the number of species known to the ancients; and it cannot be reckoned a proof of his acuteness in zoology, that he placed the hippopotamus among aquatic animals, and the bat among birds. In the latter extraordinary error he was followed by all other naturalists till the time of Ray. Yet he shows some judgment in rejecting plainly fabulous animals. In the edition of 1551 I find but few quadrupeds, except those belonging to the countries round the Mediterranean, or mentioned by Pliny and Ælian.[1377] The Reindeer, which it is doubtful whether the ancients knew, though there seems reason to believe that it was formerly an inhabitant of Poland and Germany, he found in Albertus Magnus; and from him too Gesner had got some notion of the Polar Bear. He mentions the Musk deer, which was known through the Arabian writers, though unnoticed by the ancients. The new world furnished him with a scanty list. Among these is the Opossum, or Semi-Vulpa (for which Linnæus has not given him credit), an account of which he may have found in Pinzon or Peter Martyr;[1378] the Manati, of which he found a description in Hernando’s History of the Indies; and the Guinea Pig, Cuniculus Indus, which he says was, within a few years, first brought to Europe from the New World, but was become everywhere common. In the edition of 1560, several more species are introduced. Olaus Magnus had, in the meantime, described the Glutton; and Belon had found an Armadillo among itinerant quacks in Turkey, though he knew that it came from America.[1379] Belon had also described the Axis deer of India. The Sloth appears for the first time in this edition of Gesner, and the Sagoin, or Ouistiti, as well as what he calls Mus Indicus alius, which Linnæus refers to the Racoon, but seems rather to be the Nasua, or Coati Mondi. Gesner has given only three cuts of monkeys, but was aware that there were several kinds, and distinguishes them in description. I have not presumed to refer his cuts to particular species, which probably, on account of their rudeness, a good naturalist would not attempt. The Simia Inues, or Barbary ape, seems to be one, as we might expect.[1380] Gesner was not very diligent in examining the histories of the New World. Peter Martyr and Hernando would have supplied him with several he has overlooked, as the Tapir, the Pecary, the Anteater, and the fetid Polecat.[1381]

[1377] In Cardan, De Subtilitate, lib. 10, published in 1550, I find the anteater, ursus formicarius, which, if I am not mistaken, Gesner has omitted, though it is in Hernando d’Oviedo; also a cercopithecus, as large as man, which persists long in standing erect, amat pueros et mulieres, conaturque concumbere, quod nos vidimus. This was probably one of the large baboons of Africa.

[1378] In the voyage of Pinzon, the companion of Columbus in his last voyage, when the continent of Guiana was discovered, which will be found in the Novus Orbis of Grynæus, a specimen of the genus Didelphis is mentioned with the astonishment which the first appearance of the marsupial type would naturally excite in a European. Conspexere etiamnum ibi animal quadrupes, prodigiosum quidem; nam pars anterior vulpem, posterior vero simiam præsentabat, nisi quod pedes effingit humanos; aures autem habet noctuæ, et infra consuetam alvum aliam habet instar crumenæ, in qua delitescunt catuli ejus tantisper, donec tuto prodire queant, et absque parentis tutela cibatum quærere, nec unquam exeunt crumenam, nisi cum sugunt. Portentosum hoc animal cum catulis tribus Sibiliam delatum est; et ex Sibilia Illiberim, id est Granatam, in gratiam regum, qui novis semper rebus oblectantur, p. 116, edit. 1532. In Peter Martyr, De Rebus Oceanicis, dec. i. lib. 9, we find a longer account of the monstrosum illud animal vulpino rostro, cercopithecea cauda, verpertilioneis auribus, manibus humanius, pedibus simiam æmulans; quod natos jam filios alio gestat quocunque proficiscatur utero exteriore in modum magnæ crumenæ. This animal, he says, lived some months in Spain, and was seen by him after its death. Several species are natives of Guiana.

[1379] Tatus, quadrupes peregrina. The species figured in Gesner is Dasypus novem cinctus. This animal, however, is mentioned by Hernando d’Oviedo under the name Bardati.

[1380] Sunt et cynocephalorum diversa genera, nec unum genus caudatorum. I think he knew the leading characteristics founded on the tail, but did not attend accurately to subordinate distinctions, though he knew them to exist. The three principal Simian divisions were familiarly known in Europe not very long after the time of Gesner, as we find by an old song of Elizabeth’s time:--

The ape, the monkey, and baboon did meet A breaking of their fast in Friday Street. British Bibliographer, i. 342.

[1381] The Tapir is mentioned by Peter Martyr, the rest in Hernando.

|Belon.|

27. Less acquainted with books but with better opportunities of observing nature than Gesner, his contemporary Belon made greater accessions to zoology. Besides, his excellent travels in the Levant and Egypt, we have from him a history of fishes in Latin, printed in 1553, and translated by the author into French, with alterations and additions; and one of birds, published in French in 1555, written with great learning, though not without fabulous accounts, as was usual in the earlier period of natural history. Belon was perhaps the first, at least in modern times, who had glimpses of a great typical conformity in nature. In one of his works he places the skeletons of a man and a bird in apposition, in order to display their essential analogy. He introduced also many exotic plants into France. Every one knows, says a writer of the last century, that our gardens owe all their beauty to Belon.[1382] The same writer has satisfactorily cleared this eminent naturalist from the charge of plagiarism, to which credit had been hastily given.[1383] Belon may on the whole be placed by the side of Gesner.

[1382] Liron, Singularités Historiques, i. 456.

[1383] Id. p. 438. It had been suspected that the manuscripts of Gilles, the author of a compilation from Ælian, who had himself travelled in the east, fell into the hands of Belon who published them as his own. Gesner has been thought to insinuate this; but Liron is of opinion that Belon was not meant by him.

|Salviani and Rondelet’s Ichthyology.|

28. Salviani published in 1558 a history of fishes (Animalium Aquatilium Historia), with figures well executed, but by no means numerous. He borrows most of his materials from the ancients, and having frequently failed in identifying the species they describe, cannot be read without precaution.[1384] But Rondelet (De Piscibus Marinis, 1554), was far superior as an ichthyologist, in the judgment of Cuvier, to any of his contemporaries, both by the number of fishes he has known, and the accuracy of his figures, which exceed three hundred for fresh-water and marine species. His knowledge of those which inhabit the Mediterranean Sea was so extensive that little has been added since his time. “It is the work,” says the same great authority, “which has supplied almost everything which we find on that subject in Gesner, Aldrovandus, Willoughby, Artedi, and Linnæus; and even Lacepede has been obliged, in many instances, to depend on Rondelet.” The text, however, is far inferior to the figures, and is too much occupied with an attempt to fix the ancient names of the several species.[1385]

[1384] Biogr. Univ. (Cuvier.)

[1385] Biogr. Univ.

|Aldrovandus.|

29. The very little book of Dr. Caius on British Dogs, published in 1570, the whole of which I believe has been translated by Pennant in his British Zoology, is hardly worth mentioning; nor do I know that zoological literature has anything more to produce till almost the close of the century, when the first and second volumes of Aldrovandus’s vast natural history was published. These, as well as the third, which appeared in 1603, treat of birds; the fourth is on insects; and these alone were given to the world by the laborious author, a professor of natural history at Bologna. After his death in 1605, nine more folio volumes, embracing with various degrees of detail most other parts of natural history, were successively published by different editors. “We can only consider the works of Aldrovandus,” says Cuvier, “as an immense compilation without taste or genius; the very plan and materials being in a great measure borrowed from Gesner; and Buffon has had reason to say that it would be reduced to a tenth part of its bulk by striking out the useless and impertinent matter.”[1386] Buffon, however, which Cuvier might have gone on to say, praises the method of Aldrovandus and his fidelity of description, and even ranks his work above every other natural history.[1387] I am not acquainted with its contents; but according to Linnæus, Aldrovandus, or the editors of his posthumous volumes, added only a very few species of quadrupeds to those mentioned by Gesner, among which are the Zebra, the Jerboa, the Musk Rat of Russia, and the Manis or Scaly Anteater.[1388]

[1386] Id.

[1387] Hist. Naturelle, Premier Discours. The truth is that all Buffon’s censures on Aldrovandus fall equally on Gesner, who is not less accumulative of materials not properly bearing on natural history, and not much less destitute of systematic order. The remarks of Buffon on this waste of learning are very just, and applicable to the works of the sixteenth century on almost every subject as well as zoology.

[1388] Collections of natural history seem to have been formed by all who applied themselves to the subject in the sixteenth century; such as Cordus, Mathiolus, Mercati, Gesner, Agricola, Belon, Rondelet, Ortelius, and many others. Hakluyt mentions the cabinets of some English collectors from which he had derived assistance. Beckmann’s Hist. of Inventions, ii. 57.

|Botany; Turner.|

30. A more steady progress was made in the science of botany, which commemorates, in those living memorials with which she delights to honour her cultivators, several names still respected, and several books that have not lost their utility. Our countryman, Dr. Turner, published the first part of a New Herbal in 1551; the second and third did not appear till 1562 and 1568. “The arrangement,” says Pulteney, “is alphabetical according to the Latin names, and after the description he frequently specifies the places and growth. He is ample in his discrimination of the species, as his great object was to ascertain the Materia Medica of the ancients, and of Dioscorides in particular, throughout the vegetable kingdom. He first gives names to many English plants; and allowing for the time when specifical distinctions were not established, when almost all the small plants were disregarded, and the Cryptogamia almost wholly overlooked, the number he was acquainted with is much beyond what could easily have been imagined in an original writer on his subject.”[1389]

[1389] Pulteney’s Historical Sketch of the Progress of Botany in England, p. 68.

|Maranta; Botanical Gardens.|

31. The work of Maranta, published in 1559, on the method of understanding medicinal plants, is, in the judgment of a later writer of considerable reputation, nearly at the head of any in that age. The author is independent, though learned, extremely acute in discriminating plants known to the ancients, and has discovered many himself, ridiculing those who dared to add nothing to Dioscorides.[1390] Maranta had studied in the private gardens formed by Pinelli at Naples. But public gardens were common in Italy. Those of Pisa and Padua were the earliest, and perhaps the most celebrated. One established by the Duke of Ferrara, was peculiarly rich in exotic plants procured from Greece and Asia.[1391] And perhaps the generous emulation in all things honourable between the houses of Este and Medici led Ferdinand of Tuscany, sometime afterwards near the end of the century, to enrich the gardens of Pisa with the finest plants of Asia and America. The climate of France was less favourable; the first public garden seems to have been formed at Montpellier, and there was none at Paris in 1558.[1392] Meantime the vegetable productions of newly discovered countries became familiar to Europe. Many are described in the excellent History of the Indies by Hernando d’Oviedo, such as the Cocos, the Cactus, the Guiacum. Another Spanish author, Carate, first describes the Solanum Tuberosum, or potato, under the name of Papas.[1393] It has been said that tobacco is first mentioned, or at least first well described by Benzoni, in Nova Novi Orbis Historia, (Geneva, 1578).[1394] Belon went to the Levant soon after the middle of the century, on purpose to collect plants; several other writers of voyages followed before its close. Among these was Prosper Alpinus, who passed several years in Egypt, but his principal work, De Plantis Exoticis is posthumous, and did not appear till 1627. He is said to be the first European author who has mentioned coffee.[1395]

[1390] Sprengel Historia Rei Herbariæ (1807), i. 345.

[1391] Id. 360.

[1392] Id. 363.

[1393] Id. 378.

[1394] Id. 373.

[1395] Id. 384. Corniani, vi. 25. Biogr. Univ. Yet, in the article on Rauwolf, a German naturalist, who published an account of his travels in the Levant as early as 1581, he is mentioned as one of the first qui ait parlé de l’usage de boire du café, et en ait décrit la preparation avec exactitude. It is possible that this book of Rauwolf being written in German, and the author being obscure in comparison with Prosper Alpinus, his prior claim has been till lately overlooked.

|Gesner.|

32. The critical examination of the ancients, the establishment of gardens, the travels of botanists thus furnished a great supply of plants; it was now required to compare and arrange them. Gesner first undertook this; he had formed a garden of his own at Zurich, and has the credit of having discovered the true system of classifying plants according to the organs of fructification; which however he does not seem to have made known, nor were his botanical writings published till the last century. Gesner was the first who mentions the Indian Sugarcane and the Tobacco, as well as many indigenous plants. It is said that he was used to chew and smoke tobacco, “by which he rendered himself giddy and in a manner drunk.”[1396] As Gesner died in 1564, this carries back the knowledge of tobacco in Europe several years beyond the above-mentioned treatise of Benzoni.

[1396] Sprengel, 373, 390.

|Dodoens.|

33. Dodoens, or Dodonæus, a Dutch physician, in 1553, translated into his own language the history of plants by Fuchs, to which he added 133 figures. These, instead of using the alphabetical order of his predecessor, he arranged according to a method which he thought more natural. “He explains,” says Sprengel, “well and learnedly the ancient botanists, and described many plants for the first time;” among these are the Ulex Europæus and the Hyacinthus non scriptus. The great aim of rendering the modern Materia Medica conformable to the ancient seems to have made the early botanists rather inattentive to objects before their eyes. Dodoens himself is rather a physician than a botanist, and is more diligent about the uses of plants than their characteristics. He collected all his writings, under the title Stirpium Historiæ Pemptades Sex, at Antwerp in 1583, with 1341 figures, a greater number than had yet been published.

|Lobel.|

34. The Stirpium Adversaria by Pena and Lobel, the latter of whom is best known as a botanist, was published at London in 1570. Lobel indeed, though a native of Lille, having passed most of his life in England, may be fairly counted among our botanists. He had previously travelled much over Europe. “In the execution of this work,” says Pulteney, “there is exhibited, I believe, the first sketch, rude as it is, of a natural method of arrangement, which however extends no further than throwing the plants into large tribes, families, or orders, according to the external appearance or habit of the whole plant or flower, without establishing any definitions or characters. The whole forms forty-four tribes. Some contain the plants of or two modern genera, others many, and some, it must be owned, very incongruous to each other. On the whole they are much superior to Dodoens’s divisions.”[1397] Lobel’s Adversaria contains descriptions of 1200 or 1500 plants with 272 engravings; the former are not clear or well expressed, and in this he is inferior to his contemporaries; the latter are on copper, very small, but neat.[1398] In a later work, the Plantarum Historia, Antwerp, 1576, the number of figures is very considerably greater, but the book has been less esteemed, being a sort of complement to the other. Sprengel speaks more highly of Lobel than the Biographie Universelle.

[1397] Historical Sketch, p. 102.

[1398] Sprengel, 399.

|Clusius.|

35. Clusius or Lecluse, born at Arras, and a traveller, like many other botanists, over Europe, till he settled at Leyden as professor of botany in 1593, is generally reckoned the greatest master of his science whom the age produced. His descriptions are remarkable for their exactness, precision, elegance, and method, though he seems to have had little regard to natural classification. He has added a long list to the plants, already known. Clusius began by a translation of Dodoens into Latin; he published several other works within the century.[1399]

[1399] Sprengel, 407. Biogr. Univ. Pulteney.

|Cæsalpin.|

36. Cæsalpin was not only a botanist, but greater in this than in any other of the sciences he embraced. He was the first (the writings of Gesner, if they go so far, being in his time unpublished) who endeavoured to establish a natural order of classification on philosophical principles. He founded it on the number, figure, and position of the fructifying parts, observing the situation of the calix and flower relatively to the germen, the divisions of the former, and in general what has been regarded in later systems as the basis of arrangement. He treats of trees and of herbs separately, as two grand divisions, but under each follows his own natural system. The distinction of sexes he thought needless in plants, on account of their greater simplicity; though he admits it to exist in some, as in the hemp and the juniper. His treatise on Plants, in 1583, is divided into sixteen books; in the first of which he lays down the principles of vegetable anatomy and physiology. Many ideas, says Du Petit Thouars, are found there of which the truth was long afterwards recognised. He analysed the structure of seeds, which he compares to the eggs of animals; an analogy, however, which had occurred to Empedocles among the ancients. “One page alone,” the same writer observes, “in the dedication of Cæsalpin to the Duke of Tuscany, concentrates the principles of a good botanical system so well that notwithstanding all the labours of later botanists, nothing material could be added to his sketch, and if this one page out of all the writings of Cæsalpin remained, it would be enough to secure him an immortal reputation.”[1400] Cæsalpin unfortunately gave no figures of plants, which may have been among the causes that his system was so long overlooked.

[1400] Biogr. Univ. Sprengel, after giving an analysis of the system of Cæsalpin, concludes: En primi systematis carpologici specimen, quod licet imperfectum sit, ingenii tamen summi monumentum et aliorum omnium ad Gærtnerium usque exemplar est, p. 430.

|Dalechamps; Bauhin.|

37. The Historia Generalis Plantarum by Dalechamps, in 1587, contains 2731 figures, many of which, however, appear to be repetitions. These are divided into eighteen classes according to their form and size, but with no natural method. His work is imperfect and faulty; most of the descriptions are borrowed from his predecessors.[1401] Tabernæmontanus, in a book in the German language, has described 5800 species, and given 2480 figures.[1402] The Phytopinax of Gerard Bauhin (Basle, 1596) is the first important work of one who, in conjunction with his brother John, laboured for forty years in the advancement of botanical knowledge. It is a catalogue of 2460 plants, including, among about 250 others that were new, the first accurate description of the potato, which, as he informs us, was already cultivated in Italy.[1403]

[1401] Sprengel, 432.

[1402] Id. 496.

[1403] Id. 451.

|Gerard’s Herbal.|

38. Gerard’s Herbal, published in 1597, was formed on the basis of Dodoens, taking in much from Lobel and Clusius; the figures are from the blocks used by Tabernæmontanus. It is not now esteemed at all by botanists, at least in this first edition; “but,” says Pulteney, “from its being well timed, from its comprehending almost the whole of the subjects then known, by being written in English, and ornamented with a more numerous set of figures than had ever accompanied any work of the kind in this kingdom, it obtained great repute.”[1404]

[1404] Hist. Sketch, p. 122.

SECT. III.--ON ANATOMY AND MEDICINE.

_Fallopius, Eustachius, and other Anatomists--State of Medicine._

|Anatomy; Fallopius.|

39. Few sciences were so successfully pursued in this period as that of anatomy. If it was impossible to snatch from Vesalius the pre-eminent glory that belongs to him as almost its creator, it might still be said that two men now appeared who, had they lived earlier, would probably have gone as far, and who, by coming later, were enabled to go beyond him. These were Fallopius and Eustachius, both Italians. The former is indeed placed by Sprengel even above Vesalius, and reckoned the first anatomist of the sixteenth century. No one had understood that delicate part of the human structure, the organ of hearing, so well as Fallopius, though even he left much for others. He added several to the list of muscles, and made some discoveries in the intestinal and generative organs.[1405]

[1405] Portal. Sprengel, Hist. de la Médecine.

|Eustachius.|

|Coiter.|

40. Eustachius, though on the whole inferior to Fallopius, went beyond him in the anatomy of the ear, in which a canal, as is well known, bears his name. One of his biographers has gone so far as to place him above every anatomist for the number of his discoveries. He has treated very well of the teeth, a subject little understood before, and was the first to trace the vena azygos through all its ramifications. No one before had exhibited the structure of the human kidneys, Vesalius having examined them only in dogs.[1406] The scarcity of human subjects was in fact an irresistible temptation to take upon trust the identity between quadrupeds and man, which misled the great anatomists of the sixteenth century.[1407] Comparative anatomy was therefore not yet promoted to its real dignity, both as an indispensable part of natural history, and as opening the most conclusive and magnificent views of teleology. Coiter, an anatomist born in Holland, but who passed his life in Italy, Germany, and France, was perhaps the first to describe the skeletons of several animals; though Belon, as we have seen, had views far beyond his age in what is strictly comparative anatomy. Coiter’s work bears the date of 1575; in 1566 he had published one on human osteology, where that of the fœtus is said to be first described, though some attribute this merit to Fallopius. Coiter is called in the Biographie Universelle one of the creators of pathological anatomy.

[1406] Portal.

[1407] The church had a repugnance to permit the dissection of dead bodies, but Fallopius tells us that the Duke of Tuscany was sometimes obliging enough to send a living criminal to the anatomists, _quem interficimus nostro modo et anatomisamus_. Sprengel suggests that “nostro modo” meant by opium; but this seems to be merely a conjecture. Hist. de la Médecine, iv. 11.

|Columbus.|

|Circulation of the blood.|

41. Columbus (De Re Anatomica, Venice, 1559), the successor of Vesalius at Padua, and afterwards professor at Pisa and Rome, has announced the discovery of several muscles, and given the name of vomer to the small bone which sustains the cartilage of the nose, and which Vesalius had taken for a mere process of the sphenoid. Columbus, though too arrogant in censuring his great predecessor, generally follows him.[1408] Arrantius, in 1571, is among the first who made known the anatomy of the gravid uterus, and the structure of the fœtus.[1409] He was also conversant, as Vidius, a professor at Paris of Italian birth, as early as 1542, had already been, with the anatomy of the brain. But this was much improved by Varoli in his Anatomia, published in 1573, who traced the origin of the optic nerves, and gave a better account than any one before him of the eye and of the voice. Piccolomini (Anatomiæ Prælectiones, 1586) is one of the first who described the cellular tissue, and in other respects has made valuable observations. Ambrose Paré, a French surgeon, is deemed the founder of chirurgic science, at least in that country. His works were first collected in 1561; but his treatise on gunshot wounds is as old as 1545. Several other names are mentioned with respect by the historians of medicine and anatomy; such as those of Alberti, Benivieni, Donatus, and Schank. Never, says Portal, were anatomy and surgery better cultivated, with more emulation or more encouragement, than about the end of the sixteenth century. A long list of minor discoveries in the human frame are recorded by this writer and by Sprengel. It will be readily understood that we give these names, which of itself it is rather an irksome labour to enumerate, with no other object than that none of those who by their ability and diligence carried forward the landmarks of human knowledge, should miss, in a history of general literature, of their meed of remembrance. We reserve to a later chapter those passages in the anatomists of this age, which have seemed to anticipate the great discovery that immortalizes the name of Harvey.

[1408] Portal, i. 541.

[1409] Portal, vol. ii. p. 3.

|Medicinal science.|

42. These continual discoveries in the anatomical structure of man tended to guide and correct the theory of medicine. The observations of this period became more acute and accurate. Those of Plater and Foresti, especially the latter, are still reputed classical in medical literature. Prosper Alpinus may be deemed the father in modern times of diagnostic science.[1410] Plater, in his Praxis Medica, made the first, though an imperfect attempt, at a classification of diseases. Yet the observations made in this age, and the whole practical system, are not exempt from considerable faults; the remedies were too topical, the symptoms of disease were more regarded than its cause; the theory was too simple and general; above all, a great deal of credulity and superstition prevailed in the art.[1411] Many among the first in science believed in demoniacal possessions and sorcery, or in astrology. This was most common in Germany, where the school of Paracelsus, discreditably to the national understanding, exerted much influence. The best physicians of the century were either Italian or French.

[1410] Sprengel, iii. 173.

[1411] Id. 156.

43. Notwithstanding the bigoted veneration for Hippocrates that most avowed, several physicians, not at all adhering to Paracelsus, endeavoured to set up a rational experience against the Greek school, when they thought them at variance. Joubert of Montpelier, in his Paradoxes (1566), was a bold innovator of this class; but many of his paradoxes are now established truths. Botal of Asti, a pupil of Fallopius, introduced the practice of venesection on a scale before unknown, but prudently aimed to show that Hippocrates was on his side. The faculty of medicine, however, at Paris condemned it as erroneous and very dangerous. His method, nevertheless, had great success, especially in Spain.[1412]

[1412] Sprengel, iii. p. 215.

SECT. IV.--ON ORIENTAL LITERATURE.

|Syriac version of New Testament.|

44. This is a subject over which, on account of my total ignorance of eastern languages, I am glad to hasten. The first work that appears after the middle of the century is a grammar of the Syriac, Chaldee and Rabbinical, compared with the Arabic and Ethiopic languages, which Angelo Canini, a man as great in oriental as in Grecian learning, published at Paris in 1554. In the next year Widmanstadt gave, from the press of Vienna, the first edition of the Syriac version of the New Testament.[1413] Several lexicons and grammars of this tongue, which is in fact only a dialect not far removed from the Chaldee, though in a different alphabetical character, will be found in the bibliographical writers. The Syriac may be said to have been now fairly added to the literary domain. The Antwerp Polyglot of Arias Montanus, besides a complete Chaldee paraphrase of the Old Testament, the Complutensian having only contained the Pentateuch, gives the New Testament in Syriac, as well as Pagnini’s Latin translation of the Old.[1414]

[1413] Schelhorn, Amœnitates Literariæ, xiii. 234. Biogr. Universelle. Andrès, xix. 45. Eichhorn, v. 435. In this edition the Syriac text alone appeared; Henry Stephens reprinted it with the Greek and with two Latin translations.

[1414] Andrès, xix. 49. The whole edition is richer in materials than that of Ximenes.

|Hebrew critics.|

45. The Hebrew language was studied, especially among the German protestants, to a considerable extent, if we may judge from the number of grammatical works published within this period. Among these Morhof selects the Erotemata Linguæ Hebrææ by Neander, printed at Basle in 1567. Tremellius, Chevalier, and Drusius among protestants, Masius and Clarius in the church of Rome, are the most conspicuous names. The first, an Italian refugee, is chiefly known by his translation of the Bible into Latin, in which he was assisted by Francis Junius. The second, a native of France, taught Hebrew at Cambridge, and was there the instructor of Drusius, whose father had emigrated from Flanders on the ground of religion. Drusius himself, afterwards professor of Hebrew at the university of Franeker, has left writings of more permanent reputation than most other Hebraists of the sixteenth century; they relate chiefly to biblical criticism and Jewish antiquity, and several of them have a place in the Critici Sacri and in the collection of Ugolini.[1415] Clarius is supposed to have had some influence on the decree of the council of Trent, asserting the authenticity of the Vulgate.[1416] Calasio was superior probably to them all, but his principal writings do not belong to this period. No large proportion of the treatises published by Ugolini ought, so far as I know their authors, to be referred to the sixteenth century.

[1415] Drusius is extolled by all critics except Scaliger (Scaligerana Secunda), who seems to have conceived one of his personal prejudices against the Franeker professor, and depreciates his moral character. Simon thinks Drusius the most learned and judicious writer we find in the Critici Sacri. Hist. Critique du V. T., p. 498. Biogr. Univ. Blount.

[1416] Clarius, according to Simon, knew Hebrew but indifferently, and does little more than copy Munster, whose observations are too full of Judaism, as he consulted no interpreters but the rabbinical writers. Masius, the same author says, is very learned, but has the like fault of dealing in rabbinical expositions, p. 499.

|Its study in England.|

46. The Hebrew language had been early studied in England, though there has been some controversy as to the extent of the knowledge which the first translators of the Bible possessed. We know that both Chevalier read lectures on Hebrew at Cambridge not long after the queen’s accession, and his disciple Drusius at Oxford, from 1572 to 1576.[1417] Hugh Broughton was a deeply learned rabbinical scholar. I do not know that we could produce any other name of marked reputation; and we find that the first Hebrew types, employed in any considerable number, appear in 1592. These are in a book not relating directly to Hebrew, Rheses Institutiones Linguæ Cambro-Britannicæ. But a few Hebrew characters, very rudely cut in wood, are found in Wakefield’s Oration, printed as early as 1524.[1418]

[1417] Wood’s Hist. and Antiquities. In 1574, he was appointed to read publicly in Syriac.

[1418] Preface to Herbert’s Typographical Antiquities.

|Arabic begins to be studied.|

47. The Syriac and Chaldee were so closely related to Hebrew, both as languages, and in the theological purposes for which they were studied, that they did not much enlarge the field of oriental literature. The most copious language, and by far the most fertile of books, was the Arabic. A few slight attempts at introducing a knowledge of this had been made before the middle of the century. An Arabic as well as Syriac press at Vienna was first due to the patronage of Ferdinand I. in 1554, but for a considerable time no fruit issued from it. But the increasing zeal of Rome for the propagation of its faith, both among infidels and schismatics, gave a larger sweep to the cultivation of oriental languages. Gregory XIII. founded a Maronite College at Rome in 1584, for those Syrian Christians of Libanus who had united themselves to the catholic church; the cardinal Medici, afterwards grand Duke of Florence, established an oriental press in the city about 1580 under the superintendence of John Baptista Raimondi; and Sixtus V. in 1588 that of the Vatican, which, though principally designed for early Christian literature, was possessed of types for the chief eastern languages. Hence the Arabic, hitherto almost neglected, began to attract more attention; the gospels in that language were published at Rome in 1590 or 1591; some works of Euclid and Avicenna had preceded; one or two elementary books on grammar appeared in Germany; and several other publications belong to the last years of the century.[1419] Scaliger now entered upon the study of Arabic with all his indefatigable activity. Yet, at the end of the century, few had penetrated far into a region so novel and extensive, and in which the subsidiary means of knowledge were so imperfect. The early grammars are represented by Eichhorn as being very indifferent, and in fact very few Arabic books had been printed. The edition of the Koran by Pagninus in 1529 was unfortunately suppressed, as we have before mentioned, by the zeal of the court of Rome. Casaubon, writing to Scaliger in 1597, declares that no one within his recollection had even touched with the tips of his fingers that language, except Postel in a few rhapsodies; and that neither he nor any one else had written anything on the Persic.[1420] Gesner however in his Mithridates, 1558, had given the Lord’s Prayer in twenty-two languages; to which Rocca at Rome, in 1591, added three more; and Megiser increased the number, in a book published next year at Frankfort, to forty.[1421]

[1419] Eichhorn, v. 641, et alibi. Tiraboschi, viii. 195. Ginguéné, vol. vii. p. 258.

[1420] Nostra autem memoria, qui eas linguas vel ακρῳ [akrô], quod aiunt, δακτυλῳ [daktulô], attigerit, novi neminem, nisi quod Postellum nescio quid muginatum esse de lingua Arabica memini. Sed illa quam tenuia, quam exilia! de Persicâ, quod equidem memini, neque ille, neque alius quisquam vel γρὺ το λεγομενον [grhu to legomenon]. Epist. ciii.

[1421] Biogr. Univ. arts. Megiser and Rocca.

SECT. V.--ON GEOGRAPHY.

_Voyages in the Indies--Those of the English--Of Ortelius and others._

|Collection of Voyages by Ramusio.|

48. A more important accession to the knowledge of Europe as to the rest of the world, than had hitherto been made through the press, is due to Ramusio, a Venetian who had filled respectable offices under the republic. He published in 1550 the first volume of his well-known collection of Travels; the second appeared in 1559, and the third in 1565. They have been reprinted several times, and all the editions are not equally complete. No general collection of travels had hitherto been published, except the Novus Orbis of Grynæus, and though the greater part perhaps of those included in Ramusio’s three volumes had appeared separately, others came forth for the first time. The Africa of Leo Africanus, a baptized Moor, with which Ramusio begins, is among these; and it is upon this work that such knowledge as we possessed, till very recent times, as to the interior of that continent, was almost entirely founded. Ramusio in the remainder of this volume gives many voyages in Africa, the East Indies, and Indian Archipelago, including two accounts of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world, and one of Japan, which had very lately been discovered. The second volume is dedicated to travels through northern Europe and Asia, beginning with that of Marco Polo, including also the curious, though very questionable voyage of the Zeni brothers, about 1400, to some unknown region north of Scotland. In the third volume we find the conquests of Cortes and Pizarro, with all that had already been printed of the excellent work of Hernando d’Oviedo on the western world. Few subsequent collections of voyages are more esteemed for the new matter they contain than that of Ramusio.[1422]

[1422] Biog. Univ.

|Curiosity they awakened.|

49. The importance of such publications as that of Ramusio was soon perceived, not only in the stimulus they gave to curiosity or cupidity towards following up the paths of discovery, but in calling the attention of reflecting minds, such as Bodin and Montaigne, to so copious a harvest of new facts, illustrating the physical and social character of the human species. But from the want of a rigid investigation, or more culpable reasons, these early narratives are mingled with much falsehood, and misled some of the more credulous philosophers almost as often as they enlarged their knowledge.

|Other Voyages.|

50. The story of the Portuguese conquests in the east, more varied and almost as wonderful as romance, was recounted in the Asia of Joam de Barros (1552), and in that of Castanheda in the same and two ensuing years; these have never been translated. The great voyage of Magellan had been written by one of his companions, Pigafetta. This was first published in Italian in 1556. The History of the Indies by Acosta, 1590, may perhaps belong more strictly to other departments of literature than to geography.

|Accounts of China.|

|India and Russia.|

51. The Romish missionaries, especially the Jesuits, spread themselves with intrepid zeal during this period over infidel nations. Things strange to European prejudice, the books, the laws, the rites, the manners, the dresses of those remote people, were related by them on their return, for the most part orally, but sometimes through the press. The vast empire of China, the Cathay of Marco Polo, over which an air of fabulous mystery had hung, and which is delineated in the old maps with much ignorance of its position and extent, now first was brought within the sphere of European knowledge. The Portuguese had some traffic to Canton, but the relations they gave were uncertain, till, in 1577, two Augustin friars persuaded a Chinese officer to take them into the country. After a residence of four months they returned to Manilla, and in consequence of their reports, Phillip II. sent, in 1580, an embassy to the court of Pekin. The History of China by Mendoza, as it is called, contains all the knowledge that the Spaniards were able to collect by these means; and it may be said, on comparison with later books on the same subject, to be as full and ample an account of China as could have been given in such circumstances. This book was published in 1585, and from that time, but no earlier, do we date our acquaintance with that empire.[1423] Maffei, in his History of India, threw all the graces of a pure Latin style over his description of the east. The first part of a scarce and curious collection of voyages to the two Indies, with the names of De Bry and Merian as its editors, appeared at Frankfort in 1590. Six other volumes were published at intervals down to 1634. Possevin, meantime, told us more of a much nearer state, Muscovy, than was before familiar to western Europe, though the first information had been due to England.

[1423] Biogr. Univ. This was translated into English by R. Parke in 1588; at least I believe it to be the same work, but have never seen the original.

|English discoveries in the Northern Seas.|

52. The spirit of lucre vied with that of religion in penetrating unknown regions. In this the English have most to boast: they were the first to pass the Icy Cape and anchor their ships in the White Sea. This was in the famous voyage of Chancellor in 1553. Anthony Jenkinson soon afterwards, through the heart of Russia, found his way to Bokhara and Persia. They followed up the discoveries of Cabot in North America; and, before the end of the century, had ascertained much of the coasts about Labrador and Hudson’s Bay, as well as those of Virginia, the first colony. These English voyages were recorded in the three parts of the Collection of Voyages, by Hakluyt, published in 1598, 1599, and 1600. Drake, second to Magellan in that bold enterprise, traversed the circumference of the world; and the reign of Elizabeth, quite as much as any later age, bears witness to the intrepidity and skill, if not strictly to the science, of our sailors. For these undaunted navigators traversing the unexplored wilderness of ocean in small ill-built vessels, had neither any effectual assistance from charts, nor the means of making observations themselves, or of profiting by those of others. Hence, when we come to geographical knowledge, in the proper sense of the word, we find it surprisingly scanty, even at the close of the sixteenth century.

|Geographical Books; Ortelius.|

53. It had not, however, been neglected, so far as a multiplicity of books could prove a regard to it. Ortelius, in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (the first edition of which was in 1570, augmented afterwards by several maps of later dates), gives a list of about 150 geographical treatises, most of them subsequent to 1560. His own work is the first general atlas since the revival of letters, and has been justly reckoned to make an epoch in geography, being the basis of all collections of maps since formed, and deserving, it is said, even yet to be consulted, notwithstanding the vast progress of our knowledge of the earth.[1424] The maps in the later editions of the sixteenth century bear various dates. That of Africa is of 1590; and though the outline is tolerably given, we do not find the Mauritius Isles, while the Nile is carried almost to the Cape of Good Hope, and made to issue from a great lake. In the map of America, dated 1587, the outline on the N. E. side contains New France, with the _city_ of Canada; the St. Lawrence traverses the country, but without lakes; Florida is sufficiently distinguished, but the intervening coast is loosely laid down. Estotiland, the supposed discovery of the Zeni, appears to the north, and Greenland beyond. The outline of South America is worse, the southern parts covering nearly as much longitude as the northern, an error which was in some measure diminished in a map of 1603. An immense solid land, as in all the older maps, connects Terra del Fuego with New Guinea. The delineation of the southern coasts of Asia is not very bad, even in the earlier maps of Ortelius, but some improvement is perceived in his knowledge of China and the adjacent seas in that of the world, given in the edition of 1588. The maps of Europe in Ortelius are chiefly defective as to the countries on the Baltic Sea and Russia; but there is a general incorrectness of delineation which must strike the eye at once of any person slightly experienced in geography.

[1424] Biog. Univ.

54. Gerard Mercator, a native of the duchy of Juliers, where he passed the greater part of his life, was perhaps superior to Ortelius. His fame is most diffused by the invention of a well-known mode of delineating hydrographical charts, in which the parallels and meridians intersect each other at right angles. The first of these was published in 1569; but the principle of the method was not understood till Edward Wright, in 1599, explained it in his Correction of Errors in Navigation.[1425] The Atlas of Mercator, in an edition of 1598, which contains only part of Europe, is superior to that of Ortelius; and as to England, of which there had been maps published by Lluyd in 1569, and by Saxton in 1580, it may be reckoned very tolerably correct. Lluyd’s map indeed is published in the Atlas of Ortelius. But, in the northern regions of Europe we still find a mass of arbitrary erroneous conjecture.

[1425] Montucla, ii. 651. Biogr. Univ. art. Mercator.

55. Botero, the Piedmontese Jesuit, mentioned in another place, has given us a cosmography, or general description of as much of the world as was then known, entitled Relazioni Universali; the edition I have seen is undated, but he mentions the discovery of Nova Zembla in 1594. His knowledge of Asia is very limited, and chiefly derived from Marco Polo. China, he says, extends from 17° to 52° of latitude, and has 22° of longitude. Japan is sixty leagues from China and 150 from America. The coasts, Botero observes, from Bengal to China are so dangerous, that two or three are lost out of every four ships, but the master who succeeds in escaping these perils is sure to make his fortune.

56. But the best map of the sixteenth century is one of uncommon rarity, which is found in a very few copies of the first edition of Hakluyt’s Voyages. This contains Davis’s Straits (Fretum Davis), Virginia by name, and the lake Ontario. The coasts of Chili is placed more correctly than the prior maps of Ortelius; and it is noticed in the margin that this trending of the coast less westerly than had been supposed was discovered by Drake in 1577, and confirmed by Sarmiento and Cavendish. The huge Terra Australis of the old geography is left out. Corea is represented near its place, and China with some degree of correctness; even the north coast of New Holland is partially traced. The Strait of Anian, which had been presumed to divide Asia from America, has disappeared, while a marginal note states that the distance between those two continents in latitude 38° is not less than 1200 leagues. The Ultra-Indian region is inaccurate; the sea of Aral is still unknown, and little pains have been taken with central and northern Asia. But upon the whole it represents the utmost limit of geographical knowledge at the close of the sixteenth century, and far excels the maps in the edition of Ortelius at Antwerp in 1588.

SECT. VI.--ON HISTORY.

|Guicciardini.|

57. The history of Italy by Guicciardini, though it is more properly a work of the first part of the century, was not published till 1564. It is well known for the solidity of the reflections, the gravity and impartiality with which it is written, and the prolixity of the narration; a fault, however, frequent and not unpardonable in historians contemporary and familiar with the events they relate. If the siege of Pisa in 1508 appeared so uninteresting a hundred years afterwards, as to be the theme of ridicule with Boccalini, it was far otherwise as to the citizens of Florence soon after the time. Guicciardini has generally held the first place among Italian historians, though he is by no means equal in literary merit to Machiavel. Adriani, whose continuation of Guicciardini extends to 1574, is little read, nor does he seem to be much recommended by style. No other historian of that country need be mentioned as having been published within the sixteenth century.

|French Memoirs.|

58. The French have ever been distinguished for those personal memoirs of men more or less conversant with public life, to which Philip de Comines led the way. Several that fell within this period are deserving of being read, nor only for their relation of events, with which we do not here much concern ourselves, but for a lively style, and occasionally for good sense and acute thinking. Those of Montluc may be praised for the former. Spain had a considerable historian in Mariana, twenty books of whose history were published in Latin in 1592, and five more in 1595; the concluding five books do not fall within the century. The style is vigorous and classical, the thoughts judicious. Buchanan’s history of Scotland has already been praised for the purity of its language. Few modern histories are more redolent of an antique air. We have nothing to boast in England; our historical works of the Elizabethan age are mere chronicles, and hardly good even as such. Nor do I know any Latin historians of Germany or the Low Countries who, as writers, deserve our attention.

SECT. VII.--GENERAL STATE OF LITERATURE.

|Universities in Italy.|

59. The great Italian universities of Bologna, Padua, Pisa, and Pavia, seem to have lost nothing of their lustre throughout the century. New colleges, new buildings in that stately and sumptuous architecture which distinguishes this period, bore witness to a continual patronage, and a public demand for knowledge. It is true that the best days of classical literature had passed away in Italy. But the revival of theological zeal, and of those particular studies which it fostered, might perhaps more than compensate in keeping up a learned class for this decline of philology. The sciences also of medicine and mathematics attracted many more students than before. The Jesuit colleges, and those founded by Gregory XIII., have been mentioned in a former part of this volume. They were endowed at a large expense in that palmy state of the Roman see.

|In other countries.|

60. Universities were founded at Altdorf and Leyden in 1575, at Helmstadt in 1576. Others of less importance began to exist in the same age. The University of Edinburgh derives its origin from the charter of James in 1582. Those of Oxford and Cambridge, reviving as we have seen after a severe shock at the accession of Elizabeth, continued through her reign to be the seats of a progressive and solid erudition. A few colleges were founded in this age. I should have wished to give some sketch of the mode of instruction pursued in these two universities. But sufficient materials have not fallen in my way; what I have been able to glean, has already been given to the reader in former pages of this volume. It was the common practice at Oxford, observed in form down to this century, that every candidate for the degree of bachelor of arts, independently of other exercises, should undergo an examination (become absolutely nominal), in the five sciences of grammar, logic, rhetoric, ethics, and geometry; every one for that of master of arts, in the additional sciences of physics, metaphysics, Hebrew, and some more. These were probably the ancient trivium and quadrivium; enlarged, perhaps after the sixteenth century, according to the increase of learning, and the apparent necessity of higher qualifications. But it would be, I conceive, a great mistake to imagine that the requisitions for academical degrees were ever much insisted upon. The universities sent forth abundance of illiterate graduates in every age. And as they had little influence, at least of a favourable sort, either on philosophy or polite literature, we are not to overrate their importance in the history of the intellectual progress of mankind.[1426]

[1426] Lord Bacon animadverts (De Cogitatis et Visis) on the fetters which the universities imposed on the investigation of truth; and Morhof ascribes the establishment of the academies in Italy to the narrow and pedantic spirit of the universities, l. i. c. 14.

|Libraries.|

61. Public libraries were considerably enlarged during this period. Those of Rome, Ferrara, and Florence in Italy, of Vienna and Heidelberg in Germany, stood much above any others. Sixtus V. erected the splendid repository of the Vatican. Philip II. founded that of the Escurial, perhaps after 1580, and collected books with great labour and expense; all who courted the favour of Spain contributing also by presents of rarities.[1427] Ximenes had established the library of Alcala; and that of Salamanca is likewise more ancient than this of the Escurial. Every king of France took a pride in adding to the royal library of Paris. By an ordinance of 1556, a copy of every book printed with privilege was to be deposited in this library. It was kept at Fontainebleau, but transferred to Paris in 1595. During the civil wars its progress was slow.[1428] The first prince of Orange founded the public library of Leyden, which shortly became one of the best in Europe. The catalogue was published in 1597. That bequeathed by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, to the university of Oxford, was dispersed in the general havoc made under Edward VI. At the close of the century, the university had no public library. But Sir Thomas Bodley had already, in 1597, made the generous offer of presenting his own, which was carried into effect in the first years of the ensuing age.[1429] In the colleges there were generally libraries. If we could believe Scaliger these were good; but he had never been in England, and there is no reason, I believe, to estimate them highly.[1430] Archbishop Parker had founded, or at least greatly enlarged, the public library of Cambridge. Many private persons of learning and opulence had formed libraries in England under Elizabeth; some of which still subsist in the mansions of ancient families. I incline to believe that there was at least as competent a stock of what is generally called learning among our gentry as in any continental kingdom; their education was more literary, their habits more peaceable, their religion more argumentative. Perhaps we should make an exception for Italy, in which the spirit of collecting libraries was more prevalent.

[1427] Mariana, in a long passage wherein he describes the Escurial palace, gives this account of the library; Vestibulo bibliotheca imposita, majori longitudine omnino pedum centum octoginta quinque, lata pedes triginta duos, libros servat præsertim Græcos manuscriptos, præcipuæ plerosque vetustatis; qui ex omnibus Europæ partibus ad famam novi operis magno numero confluxerunt: auro pretiosiores thesauri, _digni quorum evolvendorum major eruditis hominibus facultas contingeret_. _Quod enim ex captivis et majestate revinctis literis emolumentum?_ De rege et regis institutione, l. iii. c. 10. The noble freedom of Mariana breaks out, we see, in the midst of his praise of royal magnificence. Few, if any, libraries, except those of the universities, were accessible to men of studious habits; a reproach that has been very slowly effaced. I have often been astonished, in considering this, that so much learning was really acquired.

[1428] Jugler’s Hist. Literaria, c. iii. s. 5. This very laborious work of the middle of the last century, contains the most ample account of public libraries throughout Europe that I have been able to find. The German libraries, with the two exceptions of Vienna and Heidelberg, do not seem to have become of much importance in the sixteenth century.

[1429] Wood’s Hist. and Ant. p. 922.

[1430] Scalig. Secunda, p. 236. De mon temps, he says in the same place, il y avoit à Londres douze bibliothèques _complètes_, et à Paris quatre-vingt. I do not profess to understand this epithet.

|Collections of Antiquities in Italy.|

62. The last forty years of the sixteenth century, were a period of uninterrupted peace in Italy. Notwithstanding the pressure of governments always jealous, and sometimes tyrannical, it is manifest that at least the states of Venice and Tuscany had grown in wealth, and in the arts that attend it. Those who had been accustomed to endure the license of armies, found a security in the rule of law which compensated for many abuses. Hence that sort of property, which is most exposed to pillage, became again a favourite acquisition; and, among the costly works of art, which adorned the houses of the wealthy, every relic of antiquity found its place. Gems and medals, which the books of Vico and Erizzo had taught the owners to arrange and to appreciate, were sought so eagerly, that, according to Hubert Goltzius, as quoted by Pinkerton, there were in Italy 380 of such collections. The marbles and bronzes, the inscriptions of antiquity, were not less in request, and the well known word, _virtuosi_, applied to these lovers of what was rare and beautiful in art or nature, bespoke the honour in which their pursuits were held. The luxury of literature displayed itself in scarce books, elegant impressions, and sumptuous bindings.

|Pinelli.|

63. Among the refined gentlemen, who devoted to these graceful occupations their leisure and their riches, none was more celebrated than Gian Vincenzio Pinelli. He was born of a good family at Naples in 1538. A strong thirst for knowledge, and the consciousness that his birth exposed him to difficulties and temptations at home which might obstruct his progress, induced him to seek, at the age of twenty-four, the university of Padua, at that time the renowned scene of learning and of philosophy.[1431] In this city he spent forty-three years, the remainder of his life. His father was desirous that he should practise the law; but after a short study of this Pinelli resumed his favourite pursuits. His fortune indeed was sufficiently large to render any sacrifice of them unreasonable; and it may have been out of dislike of his compulsory reading, that in forming his vast library he excluded works of jurisprudence. This library was collected by the labour of many years. The catalogues of the Frankfort fairs, and those of the principal booksellers in Italy, were diligently perused by Pinelli; nor did any work of value appear from the press on either side of the Alps which he did not instantly add to his shelves. This great library was regularly arranged, and though he did not willingly display its stores to the curious and ignorant, they were always accessible to scholars. He had also a considerable museum of globes, maps, mathematical instruments, and fossils; but he only collected the scarcer coins. In his manners, Pinelli was a finely polished gentleman, but of weak health, and for this cause devoted to books, and seldom mingling with gay society, nor even belonging to the literary academies of the city, but carrying on an extensive correspondence, and continually employed in writing extracts or annotations. Yet he has left nothing that has been published. His own house was as it were a perpetual academy, frequented by the learned of all nations. If Pinelli was not a man of great genius, nor born to be of much service to any science, we may still respect him for a love of learning, and a nobleness of spirit, which has preserved his memory.[1432]

[1431] Animadverterat autem hic noster, domi, inter amplexus parentum et familiarium obsequia, in urbe deliciarum plena, militaribus et equestribus, quam musarum studiis aptiore, non perventurum sese ad eam gloriæ metam quam sibi destinaverat, ideo gymnasii Patavini fama permotus, &c. Gualdi, Vita Pinelli. This life by a contemporary, or nearly such, is republished in the Vitæ Illustrium Virorum by Bates.

[1432] Gualdi. Tiraboschi, vi. 214. The library of Pinelli was dispersed, and in great part destroyed by pirates not long afterwards. That long since formed by one of his family is well known to book collectors.

|Italian academies.|

64. The literary academies of Italy continued to flourish even more than before; many new societies of the same kind were founded. Several existed at Florence, but all others have been eclipsed by the Della Crusca, established in 1582. Those of another Tuscan city, which had taken the lead in such literary associations, did not long survive its political independence; the jealous spirit of Cosmo extinguished the Rozzi of Siena in 1568. In governments as suspicious as those of Italy, the sort of secrecy belonging to these meetings, and the encouragement they gave to a sentiment of mutual union, were at least sufficient reasons for watchfulness. We have seen how the academy of Modena was broken up on the score of religion. That of Venice, perhaps for the same reason, was dissolved by the senate in 1561, and did not revive till 1593. These, however, were exceptions to the rule; and it was the general policy of governments to cherish in the nobility a love of harmless amusements. All Lombardy and Romagna were full of academies; they were frequent in the kingdom of Naples, and in the ecclesiastical states.[1433] They are a remarkable feature in the social condition of Italy, and could not have existed perhaps in any other country. They were the encouragers of a numismatic and lapidary erudition, elegant in itself, and throwing for ever its little sparks of light on the still ocean of the past, but not very favourable to comprehensive observation, and tending to bestow on an unprofitable pedantry the honours of real learning. This, indeed, is the inherent vice of all literary societies, accessible too frequently to those who, for amusement or fashion’s sake, love as much knowledge as can be reached with facility, and from the nature of their transactions, seldom capable of affording scope for any extensive research.

[1433] Tiraboschi, viii. 125-179, is so full on this subject, that I have not had recourse to other writers who have, sometimes with great prolixity, investigated a subject more interesting in its details to the Italians than to us. Ginguéné adds very little to what he found in his predecessor.

|Society of Antiquaries in England.|

65. No academy or similar institution can be traced at this time, as far as I know, in France or Germany. But it is deserving of remark, that one sprung up in England, not indeed of the classical and polite character that belonged to the Infiammati of Padua, or the Della Crusca of Florence, yet useful in its objects, and honourable alike to its members and to the country. This was the Society of Antiquaries, founded by Archbishop Parker in 1572. Their object was the preservation of ancient documents, illustrative of history, which the recent dissolution of religious houses, and the shameful devastation attending it, had exposed to great peril. They intended also, by the reading of papers at their meetings, to keep alive the love and knowledge of English antiquity. In the second of these objects this society was more successful than in the first; several short dissertations, chiefly by Arthur Agard, their most active member, have been afterwards published. The Society comprised very reputable names, chiefly lawyers, and continued to meet till early in the reign of James, who, from some jealousy, thought fit to dissolve it.[1434]

[1434] See life of Agard, in Biogr. Brit. and in Chalmers. But the best account is in the Introduction to the first volume of the Archæologia. The present society of Antiquaries is the representative, but after long intermission, of this Elizabethan progenitor.

|New books and catalogues of them.|

66. The chief cities on this side of the Alps, whence new editions came forth, were Paris, Basle, Lyons, Leyden, Antwerp, Brussels, Strasburg, Cologne, Heidelberg, Frankfort, Ingolstadt, and Geneva. In all these, and in all other populous towns, booksellers, who were generally also printers, were a numerous body. In London at least forty or fifty were contemporaneous publishers in the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign; but the number elsewhere in England was very small. The new books on the continent, and within the Alps and Pyrenees, found their principal mart at the annual Frankfort fairs. Catalogues of such books began to be published, according to Beckmann, in 1554.[1435] In a collective catalogue of all books offered for sale at Frankfort, from 1564 to 1592, I find the number, in Latin, Greek, and German, to be about 16,000. No Italian or French appear in this catalogue, being probably reserved for another. Of theology in Latin there are 3200, and in this department the catholic publications rather exceed the protestant. But of the theology in the German language the number is 3700, not one-fourth of which is catholic. Scarcely any mere German poetry appears, but a good deal in both languages with musical notes. Law furnishes about 1600 works. I reckoned twenty-seven Greek and thirty-two Latin grammars, not counting different editions of the same. There are at least seventy editions of parts of Aristotle. The German books are rather more than one-third of the whole. Among the Latin I did not observe one book by a writer of this island. In a compilation by Clessius, in 1602, purporting to be a conspectus of the publications of the sixteenth century, formed partly from catalogues of fairs, partly from those of public libraries, we find, at least in the copy I have examined, but which seems to want one volume, a much smaller number of productions than in the former, but probably with more selection. The books in modern languages are less than 1000, half French, half Italian. In this catalogue also the catholic theology rather outnumbers the protestant, which is perhaps not what we should have expected to find.

[1435] Hist. of Inventions, iii. 120. “George Willer, whom some improperly call Viller, and others Walter, a bookseller at Augsburg, who kept a large shop, and frequented the Frankfort fairs, first fell upon the plan of causing to be printed every fair a catalogue of all the new books, in which the size and printers’ names were marked.” There seems to be some doubt whether the first year of these catalogues was 1554 or 1564: the collection mentioned in the text leads us rather to suspect the latter.

|Literary correspondence.|

67. These catalogues, in the total absence of literary journals, were necessarily the great means of communicating to all the lovers of learning in Cisalpine Europe (for Italy had resources of her own) some knowledge of its progress. Another source of information was the correspondence of scholars with each other. It was their constant usage, far more than in modern times, to preserve an epistolary intercourse. If their enmities were often bitter, their contentions almost always violent, many beautiful instances of friendship and sympathy might be adduced on the other side; they deemed themselves a distinct cast, a priesthood of the same altar, not ashamed of poverty, nor disheartened by the world’s neglect, but content with the praise of those whom themselves thought worthy of praise, and hoping something more from posterity than they obtained from their own age.

|Bibliographical works.|

68. We find several attempts at a literary or rather bibliographical history of a higher character than these catalogues. The Bibliotheca Universalis of Gesner was reprinted in 1574, with considerable enlargements by Simler. Conrad Lycosthenes afterwards made additions to it, and Verdier published a supplement. Verdier was also the author of a Bibliothèque Française, of which the first edition appeared in 1584. Another with the same title was published in the same year by La Croix du Maine. Both these follow the strange alphabetical arrangement by Christian instead of family names, so usual in the sixteenth century. La Croix du Maine confines himself to French authors, but Verdier includes all who had been translated. The former is valued for his accuracy and for curious particulars in biography; the second for the extracts he has given. Doni pretended to give a history of books in his Libreria, but it has not obtained much reputation, and falls, according to the testimony of those who are acquainted with it, below the compilations above-mentioned.[1436]

[1436] Morhof. Goujet. Biogr. Univ.

|Restraints on the Press.|

69. The despotism of the state, and far more of the church, bore heavily on the press in Italy. Spain, mistress of Milan and Naples, and Florence under Cosmo I., were jealous governments. Venice, though we are apt to impute a rigid tyranny to its senate, appears to have indulged rather more liberty of writing on political topics to its subjects, on the condition, no doubt, that they should eulogise the wisdom of the republic; and, comparatively to the neighbouring regions of Italy, the praise both of equitable and prudent government may be ascribed to that aristocracy. It had at least the signal merit of keeping ecclesiastical oppression at a distance; a Venetian might write with some freedom of the papal court. One of the accusations against Venice, in her dispute with Paul V., was for allowing the publication of books that had been censured at Rome.[1437]

[1437] Ranke, ii. 330.

|Index Expurgatorius.|

70. But Rome struck a fatal blow, and perhaps more deadly than she intended, at literature in the Index Expurgatorius of prohibited books. It had long been the regulation that no book should be printed without a previous license. This was of course a restraint on the freedom of writing, but it was less injurious to the trade of the printer and bookseller than the subsequent prohibition of what he had published or purchased at his own cost and risk. The first list of books prohibited by the church was set forth by Paul IV. in 1559. His Index includes all Bibles in modern languages, enumerating forty-eight editions, chiefly printed in countries still within the obedience of the church. Sixty-one printers are put under a general ban; all works of every description from their presses being forbidden. Stephens and Oporinus have the honour of being among these.[1438] This system was pursued and rigorously acted upon by the successors of the imperious Caraffa. The council of Trent had its own list of condemned publications. Philip II. has been said to have preceded the pope himself in a similar proscription. Wherever the sway of Rome and Spain was felt, books were unsparingly burned, and to this cause is imputed the scarcity of many editions.

[1438] Schelhorn, Amœnit. Liter. vii. 98. viii. 342 and 485. The two dissertations on prohibited books here quoted are full of curious information.

|Its effects.|

71. In its principle, which was apparently that of preserving obedience, the prohibitory system might seem to have untouched many great walks of learning and science. It is of course manifest that it fell with but an oblique blow upon common literature. Yet, as a few words or sentences were sufficient to elicit a sentence of condemnation, often issued with little reflection, it was difficult for any author to be fully secure; and this inspired so much apprehension into printers, that they became unwilling to incur the hazard of an obnoxious trade. These occupations, says Galluzzi, which had begun to prosper at Florence, never recovered the wound inflicted by the severe regulations of Paul IV. and Pius V.[1439] The art retired to Switzerland and Germany. The booksellers were at the mercy of an Inquisition, which every day contrived new methods of harassing them. From an interdiction of the sale of certain prohibited books, the church proceeded to forbid that of all which were not expressly permitted. The Guinti, a firm not so eminent as it had been in the early part of the century, but still the honour of Florence, remonstrated in vain. It seems probable, however, that after the death of Pius V., the most rigorous and bigoted pontiff that ever filled the chair, some degree of relaxation took place.

[1439] Ist. del Gran Ducato, iii. 442.

|Restrictions in England.|

72. The restraints on the printing and sale of books in England, though not so overpowering as in Italy, must have stood in the way of useful knowledge under Elizabeth. The Stationers’ Company, founded in 1555, obtained its monopoly at the price of severe restrictions. The Star Chamber looked vigilantly at the dangerous engine it was compelled to tolerate. By the regulations it issued in 1585, no press was allowed to be used out of London, except one at Oxford, and another at Cambridge. Nothing was to be printed without allowance of the council; extensive powers both of seizing books and of breaking the presses were given to the officers of the crown.[1440] Thus every check was imposed on literature, and it seems unreasonable to dispute that they had some efficacy in restraining its progress, though less, perhaps, than we might in theory expect, because there was always a certain degree of connivance and indulgence. Even the current prohibition of importing popish books, except for the use of such as the council should permit to use them, must have affected the trade in modern Latin authors beyond the bounds of theology.

[1440] Herbert, iii. 1668.

|Latin more employed on this account.|

73. These restrictions do not seem to have had any material operation in France, in Germany, or the Low Countries. And they certainly tended very considerably to keep up the usage of writing in Latin; or rather, perhaps, it may be said, they were less rigorously urged in those countries, because Latin continued to be the customary tongue of scholars. We have seen that great license was used in political writings in that language. The power of reading Latin was certainly so diffused, that no mystery could be affected by writing it; yet it seemed to be a voluntary abstaining from an appeal to the passions of the multitude, and passed better without censure than the same sense in a modern dress.

|Influence of literature.|

74. The influence of literature on the public mind was already very considerable. All kinds of reading had become deeper and more diffused. Pedantry is the usual, perhaps the inevitable, consequence of a genuine devotion to learning, not surely in each individual, but in classes and bodies of men. And this was an age of pedants. To quote profusely from ancient writers, seemed to be a higher merit than to rival them; they furnished both authority and ornament, they did honour to the modern, who shone in these plumes of other birds with little expense of thought, and sometimes the actual substance of a book is hardly discernible under this exuberance of rich incrustations. Tacitus, Sallust, Cicero, and Seneca (for the Greeks were in comparison but little read), and many of the Latin poets, were the books that, directly, or by the secondary means of quotation, had most influence over the public opinion. Nor was it surprising that the reverence for antiquity should be still undiminished; for, though the new literature was yielding abundant crops, no comparison between the ancients and moderns could as yet fairly arise. Montaigne, fearless and independent as he was, gave up altogether the pretensions of the latter; yet no one was more destined to lead the way to that renunciation of the authority of the former which the seventeenth century was to witness. He and Machiavel were the two writers who produced the greatest effect upon this age. Some others, such as Guevara and Castiglione, might be full as much read, but they did not possess enough of original thought to shape the opinions of mankind. And these two, to whom we may add Rabelais, seem to be the only writers of the sixteenth century, setting aside poets and historians, who are now much read by the world.

INDEX.

Page

Aberlard, Poetry of, 17 Academies, Italian Literary, 229 Academy del Cimento, The, 831 ---- French, Established, 630 ---- Neapolitan, 112 Afra Behn, Plays of, 808 Agricola, The first Mineralogist, 227 ---- Works of, 103 Agrippa, Cornelius, 192 Augustine, Antonio, 201 Alamanni, 202 Alciati, Andrew, 201 Aldine Editions, The, 109 Aldus, Press of, 125 Algebra, Descartes on, 650 ---- Earliest Work on, 118 Alchemy, Study of, 58 Amadis de Gaul, The, 66, 152 Aminto, Passo’s, 351 Amyot, His Translations, 371 Ana, The, 820 Anatomy, Fallopius on, 397 ---- Leaders in studying, 842 Andreæ, John Valentine, 532, _and note_ Anglo-Saxon, Change of, to English, 22 Antiquaries, Society of, founded, 405 Apianus, Cosmography of, 228 Apology, Jewell’s, 272 Arabic, Rise of Study of, 399 Arcadia, Sir Philip Sydney’s, 383 ---- Character of, 383 ---- Walpole on, 383 Aretin, Leonard, 44 ---- Plays of, 211 Argensola, The Brothers, 570 Arianism in Italy, 181 Ariosto, Satires of, 203 Aristotle countenanced by Melancthon, 189 ---- Veneration shown for, 189 Arithmetic of Sacro Bosco, 56 Arnauld on true and false ideas, 725 Art of Rhetoric, Cox’s, 219 Ascham, His Character of Cambridge, 168 ---- Writings of, 372 Astronomy in Middle Ages, 58 Augsburg, Confession of, 173 ---- Diet of, 259 Averroes on the Soul, 93 Avis aux Refugiéz, 772 Ayala, Balthazar, on War, 315

Bacon, Lord, 468 ---- Conception of his Philosophy, 469 ---- Essays of, 293, 529 ---- his fame on the Continent, 489 ---- his Instauratio Magna, 469 ---- ---- ---- ---- Analysis of, 469 ---- ignorant of Mathematics, 488 ---- Nature of his Philosophy, 472 ---- Novum Organum, 478 ---- Plan of Philosophy, 469 Bacon, Roger, 57 Balbi, Catholicon of, 40 Baldi, Sonnets of, 319 Ballads, Early Spanish, 59 Balzac, Letters of, 628 Bandello, Novels of, 380 Barbarism, A relapse into, 38 Barbarus, Hermolaus, 111 Barclay, his works, 642 Barlæus, Gaspar, 589 Barrow, Sermons of, 703 Basson, Sebastian, 463 Bath, Adelard of, 56 Bayle on the Comet, 819 ---- his Dictionary, 819 ---- Philosophical Commentary of, 700 Beaumont, Fletcher and, 611 Bellarmin, Works of, 273 Bellenden, de Statu, 534 Bello Francesco, 113 Belon, Zoology of, 394 Belphegor, Machiavel’s, 215 Bembo, Care of, 159 ---- Life of, 217 ---- Works of, 159, 201 Berigard, Claude, 463 Benserade, Poems of, 781 Bentley, Richard, the Critic, 682 Berchonius, 59 Beza, Works of, 27 Bible, Cranmer’s, 187 ---- First printed, 76 ---- Latin Versions of the, 137 ---- Mazarin, 77 ---- The Authorised Version, 457 Bibles, Early English, 187 Block-books, 75 Blood, Circulation of the, discovered, 665 Boccalini, Trajan, 624 Bodin, compared with Aristotle and Machiavel, 310 Bodleian, Foundation of the, 674 Boehm, Jacob, 464 Boethius, his Consolation of Philosophy, 1 ---- Poem on, 13 Boiardo, Works of, 112 Boileau, Works of, 780 Bookselling, Rise of, 121 ---- The Universities and, 123 Books, Early, price and form of, 122 ---- Number of, printed at close of the Fourteenth Century, 120 ---- Price of in Middle Ages, 52 ---- Sold by printers, 121 Bossu on Epic Poems, 816 Bossuet, Exposition of Faith, 688 ---- other Works, 689 ---- Sermons of, 702 Botany, Turner’s, 395 Botero, Giovanni, 301 Boucher, Treatise of, 299 Bouhours, Works by, 813 Bourdalone, Style of, 701 Boyle, Works of, 833 Brahé, Tycho, 387 ---- System of, 387 Brandt, Sebastian, 117 Browne, Thomas, 531 ---- his Religio Medici, 531 ---- William, 581 Bruno, characteristics of his system, 285 Buchanan, de Jure Regni, 296 ---- Poetry of, 349 Buda, Royal Library at, 81 Budæus, Budé on, 115 ---- his Commentaries, 161 ---- Style of, 162 Bunyan, John, 828 Burnet, his Theory of Earth, 841 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 637 Bury, Richard of, 39 Butler, Hudibras of, 783 Byzantine Literature, 48

Cabbala, The Jewishp, 100 Calderon, his Comedies, 593 ----- his Tragedies, 595 Calendar, Gregorian, 390 Calisto and Melibœa, Drama of, 128 Calvin, John, 177 ---- Institutes of, 177 Camoenss, The Lusiad of, 330 Cancionero General, The, 61 Cardan, Jerome, 193 ---- Discoveries of, 221 Carew, Poetry of, 584 Cartesian Theory, The, 655 Casa, Poems of, 318 Casaubon, Isaac, 248, 410 ---- Wavering of, 428, 430, _note_ Cassander, Consultation of, 265 Castalio, Sebastian, 270 Castelvetro, Ludovico, 377 Castile, Rhymes in Language of, 60 ---- The Language of, 21 Castillejo, 329 Casuistry, Schemes of, 523 Casuists, English, 527 ---- Literature of the, 521 Cathani, Labours of, 276 Catholicon, Balbi’s, 40 Cats, Father, 577 Caxton, First Works of, 79 Celio Magno, Odes of, 319 Celso Minop, 271 Cena de li Ceneri, The, 282 Century, Twelfth, Progress during, 6 Cervantes, his Don Quixote, 638 ---- Minor Novels, 640 Cesalpin, System of, 280 Ceva, Poems of, 791 Chapman, his Translation of Homer, 341 Charlemagne, Few schools before, 4 ---- Greeks under, 45 ---- Work effected by, 4 Charron, Pierre, 529 ---- on Wisdom, 529 Chaucer, Gower and, 24 Chaulieu, Poems of, 781 Cheke, Teaching of, 168 Chiabrera, Poems of, 569 ---- Style of, 569 Chillingworth, his Religion of Protestants, 436 China, Jesuits in, 401 Chivalry, Effects of, on Poetry, 64 ---- Romances of, 215 Christianismi Restitutio, The, 268, _note_ Christianity, Vindicators of, 699 Chronicle, The Saxon, 23 Chronology, Lydiat’s, 420 ---- Scaliger’s, 258 Chrysoloras, Disciples of, 49 Chrysostom, Saville’s, 412 Church, Early Learning in the, 2 ---- High, Rise of in England, 427, 435 Cicero, Editions of, 160 Ciceronianus, The, 159 ---- Scaliger on the, 160 Cid, The, 597 Citizens, Privileges of, 303 Clarendon, History of, 636 Classics, First Editions of, 231 Clergy, Discipline of the, 261 ---- Prejudices of, against profane learning, 2 ---- Use of their prejudices, 3 Codex, Chartaceus, 30 Colleges at Alcala and Louvain, 134 ---- not derived from Saracens, 9 Colonna, Vittoriap, 202 Columbus, the Anatomist, 398 Columns, Double, use of, 241 Comedies of the Restoration, 807 Comedy, First English, 214 Comenius, Popularity of, 409 Commès, Philip de, 118 Commentators, English, about 1600, 453 Commonwealths, Origin of, 303 Concord, Form of, 267 Congreve, Plays of, 807, 808 Conti, Account of the East by, 72 Controversy raised by Baius, 267 Copernican Theory, The, 386 Copernicus, Labours of, 222 Corneille, Pierre, Plays of, 597 ---- Style of, 598 Corneille, Thomas, 799 Cortesius, Paulus, 89 Costanzo, Poems of, 319 Cowley, Johnson’s Character of, 580 Crashaw and Donne, 580 Crellius, Ruanus and, 440 Cremonini, 281 Criticism in the Sixteenth Century, 375 Critics about 1600, 414 Cruquius of Ypres, 236 Cudworth, Ralph, 707 Cumberland, Richard, 747

Daillé on the Fathers, 435 Dalgarno, George, 735 Daniel, his History of England, 635 Dante, Petrarch and, 22 De Bergerac, Novels of, 827 De Gongora, Luis, 572 ---- Style of, 572 ---- Works of, 572 De Leon, Luis, 328 De Lisle, Map of the World by, 845 De Retz, Memoirs of, 846 De Sevigné, Madame, 812 De Vega, Lope, 353 ---- Fertility of, 353 ---- Popularity of, 354 ---- Style of, 354 ---- Versification of, 354 De Villegas, Manuel Estevan, 571 Dead, Dialogues of the, 811 Decline of German Poetry, 20 Defensio Fidei Nicenæ, The, 695 Deistical Writers, 277 Delineation, Arts of, 93 Della Causa, The, 282 Delphin Editions, 680 Denham, Sir John, 579 Descartes, René, 491 ---- Attacked by Gassendi, 497 ---- Charged with Plagiarism, 505 ---- Early Life, 491 ---- his Meditations, 495 ---- his Mental Labours, 492 ---- his Paradoxes, 499 ---- his Publications, 492 ---- his Superiority, 497 ---- Merits of his Writings, 503 ---- on Free will, 503 ---- on Intuitive Truth, 501 Desportes, Poems of, 335 Deventes, College at, 54 Devotional Works in 1600, 454 Dictionary, Della Crusca, 625 Dodorus, Clusius and, 396 D’Oliva, Perez, 195 Don Quixote, 638 Don Sancho Ortiz, Analysis of, 355 Donne, Crashaw and Cowley, 580 Dramatic Mysteries, Origin of, 105 Drayton, Michael, 581 ---- His Polyolbion, 591 Dryden, Early Poems, 787 ---- Fables, 789 ---- Odes, 790 ---- Style of, 821 ---- Tragedies, 805 ---- Translations, 790 Ductor Dubitantium, Taylor’s, 745 Dunbar, Poems of, 130 Dupin on Ancient Discipline, 686 Du Vair, Works of, 371

Earle, John, Works of, 637 Eastern Languages, Early Study of, 128 Ecclesiastical Polity, The, 289 Elizabeth, Learning under, 249 Encomium Moræ, The, 143 Encyclopædias of Middle Ages, 58 England, Reformed Tenets in, 178 England, Revival of Learning in, 3 English, Use of, 22 Equations, Cubic, Invention of, 220 Episcopius, Works of, 440 Erasmus, Adages of, 139 ---- Character of, 139 ---- Epistles of, 175 ---- First Visit to England, 116 ---- His Controversy with Luther, 174 ---- Jealousy of, 139 ---- Quotations from, 140 ---- Testament of, 142 ---- Zeal of, 114 Erastianism, Disputes on, 444 Ercilla, The Araucana of, 329 Erpenius, Works of, 671 Essays, Bacon’s, 293 ---- Montaigne’s, 290 ---- Sir W. Temple’s, 824 Essex, Earl of, 633 Etherege, Plays of, 808 Euclid, Early Translations of, 56 Europe, Language in, in 1400, 25 Eustachius on Anatomy, 397 Evelyn, Works of, 821

Faber of Savoy, 313 Fabricius on the Language of Brutes, 663 Faery Queen, The, 343 ---- Style of, 344 ---- Superiority of First Volume, 343 Fallopius on Anatomy, 397 Fanaticism, Growth of, 172 Farces, First Real, 107 Farquhar, Plays of, 809 Fenelon on Female Education, 761 ---- Works of, 696 Fermat, the Geometer, 651 Fernel, Works of, 220 Ferreira, 331 Ficinus, Works of, 98 Fiction, Popular Moral, 66 Figures in MSS. of Boethius, 55 Filacaja, Vincenzo, 777 Filli di Sciro, The, 592 Fléchier, Style of, 703 Fletcher, Beaumont and, 611 ---- Phineas and Giles, 577 Fleury, Ecclesiastical History, 687 Florence, Academy of, 229 ---- History of, 199 Fontenelle, Character of, 810, 817 ---- Poems of, 782 Ford, John, 621 France, Troubadours of, 21 Francesca of Rimini, 26 Franco-Gallia, The, 295 Free will, Molina on, 268 France, Classical Study in, 53 French, Diffusion of, 19 ---- During Eleventh Century, 14 ---- Early, 13 ---- in England, Disuse of, 24 ---- Whence it came, 13 Friars, Mendicant, The, 9 Fuchs, Leonard, 226 Fur Prædestinatus, Sancroft’s, 693

Galileo, compared with, Bacon, 486 ---- Discoveries of, 653 Gallantry, Effects of on Poetry, 64 ---- Probable Origin of, 64 Garnier, 357 Gascoyne, George, 337 Gasparin, Style of, 43 ---- Works of, 42, 43 Gassendi, Syntagma Philosophicum of, 710 ---- Bernier on, 713 ---- Works of, 467, 468 Gemalis Dies, The, 160 Genius, Want of, in Dark Ages, 5 Gentilis, Albenius, 316 ---- De Jure Belli, 377 Geology, Rise of the Science, 840 Gerard, Herbal of, 397 German Poetry, Decline of, 20 ---- ---- of Swabian Period, 19 Germany, Schools in, 89 Gesner, Conrad, 241, 392 ---- His Zoology, 392 ---- Quadrupeds discovered by, 393 Gilbert, his Treatise on the Magnet, 392 Glanvil, his Scepsis Scientifica, 733 ---- the Plus Ultra, 735 Glosa, Nature of the, 61 Glosses, Meaning of, 31 ---- Use of, 31 Gloucester, Library of Duke of, 54 Godefroy, James, 775 Gomberville, 641 Gorboduc, Sackville’s, 359 Governor, Sir T. Elyot’s, 195 Gower, Chaucer and, 24 Grammars of the Sixteenth Century, 239 _note_. ---- Provençal, 14 Greek, better known after 1580, 251 ---- Corruption of Language, 47 ---- Dawn of in England, 115 ---- Early Grammars and Lexicons, 112 ---- Latin Translations of, 50 ---- Learned by Petrarch, 48 ---- Learning in Middle Ages, 45 ---- Printing, Early, 84 ---- Revival of Study of, 44 ---- Study of at Paris, 91 ---- Taught by Chrysoloras, 49 ---- Taught to Boys, 167 Greeks, Emigration of, to Italy, 52 Grew, Discoveries of, 839 Grocyn, Linaire and, 135 Groot, Gerard, College of, 54 Grotius, De Imperio Circa Sacra, 444 ---- De Jure Belli, 544 _et seq._ ---- his Arrangement, 565 ---- his Defects, 565 ---- Objections to, 561 ---- Religious Doubts of, 428 ---- Vindicated against Rousseau, 565 ---- Works of, 414 Gruchius, Works of, 255 Gruter, his Collection of Inscriptions, 419 ---- his Suspicions, 413 Grymæus, Geography of, 228 Guevara, Treatise of, 194 Guiciardini, History of, 402 Guidi, Poems of, 777 Gymnasium, Roman, 131

Habington, 585 Hales on Schism, 438 Hardy, Plays of, 596 Harmonia Apostolica, Bull’s, 694 Harriott, Works of, 649 Harvey, his Anatomical Discoveries, 665 Havelok the Dane, 18 Hawes, Stephen, 153 Hebraists of the Fifteenth Century, 227 Hebrew, First Printed, 95 ---- in the Sixteenth Century, 670 Heinsius, Daniel, 413 Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 456, 465 Herrera, Works of, 329 Herrick, Robert, 586 Heterodoxy, Italian, 179 Heywood, Plays of, 622 ---- Thomas, 363 Hippocrates, Study of, 224 History, Natural, from 1600-1650, 662 Hobbes, Political Works of, 538 ---- The Leviathan of, 506 ---- Analysis of, 506 _et seq._ Hooft, Peter, 577 Hooke, Works of, 834 Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, 289 ---- his Theory of Natural Law, 290 Horace, Lambinus’s, 235 Hottoman, Francis, 295 Hudibras, Butler’s, 783 Huet, The Censura of, 715 Hymns, German, 206

Icon Basilice, The, 636 Immutable Morality, Cudworth’s, 745 Index Expurgatorius, The, 407 Ingulfus, History of, 15 Instauratio Magna, The, 469 Irnerius, Works of, 31 Italian, Early, 22 ---- Language, Origin of, 10 Italy, Printing in, 83

Jansenism, Rise of, 441 Jansenius, Tenets of, 691 Jesuits, Colleges of the, 262 ---- Patronized by Popes, 263 ---- Rise of the, 181 ---- Rising Influence of the, 261 ---- their Popularity, 181 Jewell, Apology of, 272 Joachim, Rhæticus, 388 Jodelle, Father of the French Theatre, 357 John II., Poetry under, 62 ---- of Ravenna, 41 ---- of Salisbury, 36 Jonson, Ben, 585 ---- his Every Man in his Humour, 369 ---- Plays of, 609 Journal des Sçavans, The, 817 Julian Period, Invention of the, 258 Jurisprudence, Golden Ages of, 311 ---- in 1500, 200 Jurists, Decline of, after Accursius, 32 ---- Early, 32 ---- Scholastic, 33

Kempis, Thomas à, Works of, 68 Kepler, Discoveries of, 652 King’s Quair, The, 63 Knolles, his History of the Turks, 634 Knowledge, Limited by Sense, 481

La Bruyere, Characters of, 758 La Fayette, Madame, 826 La Fontaine, Fables of, 779 La Forge, Regis and, 714 La Motte le Vayer, 632 La Noue, Works of, 301 Labbe, Philip, 411 Lacteals, Discoveries of the, 668 Land, Views of, 427 Lanfrance and his Schools, 35 Language, A New, formed from Latin, 12 Language, Early Imperfections of, 6 ---- Modern, Metres of, 15 Languet, Vindicæ of, 295 Latin becomes a New Language, 12 ---- Colloquial Corruption of, 11 ---- in the Lower Empire, 11 ---- in the Seventh Century, 12 ---- Origin of Rhyme in, 16 ---- Poems, Mediæval, 210 Latinists, Apology for the, 217 ---- in 1600, 415 Laws, Abridgments of, 31 Layamon, Works of, 23 Leaguers, Tenets of the, 298 Learned, Persecution of the, 81 Learning, Decline of in Sixth Century, 2 ---- Encouraged by a Pope, 51 ---- General, Rise of, 26 ---- in England, Revival of, 3 ---- in England under Edward VI., 249 Lebrixa, Character of, 86 Legal Study, Importance of, 30 Leibnitz on Roman Law, 775 ---- The Protogæa of, 841 Leipsic Acts, The, 819 Leo X., a Patron of Letters, 131 Letters, The Paston, 82 Lexicon, Constantin’s, 237 ---- Feirari’s, 672 ---- Scapula’s, 238, _note_. Libraries, New Public, 230 ---- Public, Want of, 169 Library, Bodleian, Founded, 674 ---- of Charles V., 39 ---- Vatican, Founded, 230 Lilly, his Euphues, 373 ---- Popularity of, 373 Lipsius, and other antiquaries, 256 Lister, Studies of, 836 Literature, Checks upon, 407 ---- Theological, of Sixteenth Century, 183 Loci Communes, The, 275 Locke on Education, 759 ---- on Government, 768 ---- on Human Understanding, 736 ---- on the Coin, 773 ---- on Toleration, 700 Logarithms, Invention of, 645 Logic, Aconcio’s, 286 ---- Campanella on, 460 ---- Inductive, 481 _et seq._ ---- Ramus’s, Success of, 288 Lombard, Peter, 7 London, First Theatre in, 360 Lotichius, 347 Love songs, Abelard’s, 17 ---- Spanish, 61 Lucan, May’s supplement to, 591 Lully, Raymond, 155 ---- his method, 155 Lusiad, The, 330 ---- Defects of, 330 ---- Excellencies of, 330 Luther, Character of, 182 ---- Dangerous tenets of, 148 ---- Differences from Zwingle, 172 ---- Theses of, 146 Lutrin, The, 780 Lydgate, Works of, 63 Lyndsay, Poems of, 207 Lyrics, Portuguese, early, 117

Machiavel, Nicolas, 196, 211 ---- Motives of, 197 ---- some of his rules not immoral, 197 ---- The Prince, of, 197 ---- Works of, 198 Malebranche, Theory of, 717 Malherbe, Poems of, 573 ---- Style of, 573 Malpighi, Discoveries of, 840 Manana, de Rege, 299 Mantuan, Works of, 111 Manuscripts, Copying of, 36 Manutius, de Civitate, 253 ---- Epistles of, 245 Maps, Early, 94 Maranta on gardening, 395 Margarita, Antoniana, The, 287 Marlowe, Plays of, 360 Marot, Poems of, 206 Marsham, Sir John, 685 Massinger, Philip, 618 Matthiola, System of, 226 Medici, Lorenzo de, 80 Medicine, Early Study of, 58 ---- Revival of Greek methods of, 223 Meigret, Orthography of, 219 Melancthon, Early Studies of, 127 ---- Tenets of, 266 Melville, Andrew, 253 Memoirs, Political, 301 Mendicant Friars, The, 9 Mendoza, Works of, 208, 673 Mercator, Gerard, 402 Metre, Romances in, 18 Metres of Modern Languages, 15 ---- Spanish, 60 Microscope, first used in Anatomy, 842 Milton, John, 586 ---- Allegro, 587 ---- Compared with Dante, 784 ---- Comus, 586 ---- Il Penseroso, 587 ---- Lycidas, 587 ---- Paradise Lost, 783 ---- Paradise Regained, 787 ---- Samson Agonistes, 787 ---- Sonnets, 588 Minot, Lawrence, 24 Mirandola, Picus of, 101 ---- Credulity of, 101 ---- Literary Works of, 102 Miscellanies of Politian, 95 Moliére, Plays of, 799 Montaigne, Essays of, 290 ---- Characteristics of, 291 Montesquieu, Bodin compared with, 310 Moralities, Early, 107 Morals, Italian writers on, 292 More, Henry, 709 More, Utopia of, 137 Morgante Maggiore, The, 97 Morison, Robert, 837 Motion, Laws of, 658 Mun, Thomas, on Foreign Trade, 773 Muretus, Marc Antony, 233 Mysteries, Desire to explore, 99 ---- Early English, 105

Naudé, Gabriel, 534 Napier, Works of, 645 Nizolius, Marius, 286 Norris, Essay of, 725 Northern Seas, Discoveries in, 401 Nosce Teipsum, The, 340 Novum Organum, The, 478 Numencia, The, of Cervantes, 356 Numerals, Arabic, 55 Numismatics, Works on, 257

Oceana, Harrington’s, 766 Opinion, Religious, in Fifteenth Century, 67 Opitz, Martin, 575 ---- Followers of, 576 Optics, Discoveries in, 660 Opus Magnus, Bacon’s, 57 Oracles, The History of, 811 Orientalists, Celebrated, 844 Orlando Furioso, The, 150 ---- a continuation of Boiardo, 150 ---- its popularity, 150 ---- its want of seriousness, 150 ---- Style of, 151 Orlando Innamorata, The, 112 Ortelius, Works of, 401 Otway, Plays of, 806 Oxford, University of, founded, 8

Paley, Compared with Puffendorf, 707 Pallavicino, Ferrante, 625 Pantheism, Bruno and, 283 Papal Power, Decline of, 425 Papal Power, Discussion of, 274 Paper, Cotton, First use of, 28 ---- Invention of, 28 ---- Linen, as old as 1100, 29 ---- ---- First use of, 28 ---- ---- Known to Peter of Clugni, 29 ---- of mixed materials, 29 Papias, Vocabulary of, 36 Papyrus, Use of the, 28 Paracelsus, Theophrastus, 191, 463 ---- his extravagances, 192 ---- his impostures, 192 Paradise Lost, Milton’s, 783 Parchment, Use of, 28 Paris, University of, founded, 6 ---- ---- increase of, 8 Paruta, Paolo, 302 Pascal, Malebranche and, 724 ---- Provincial letters of, 744 ---- Thoughts of, 697, 725 Pastor Fido, Guarini’s, 351 Pastourelles, Early, 18 Patrizzi, 281 Pearson on the Creed, 704 Peele, Greene and, 362 Pelletier, Algebra of, 385 Pellican, 227 Perkins, his Cases of Conscience, 527 Perrault, Charles, 816 Petavius, the Jesuit, 421 Peter Martyr, Epistles of, 156 Petrarch, Dante and, 22 ---- Latin Poems of, 41 ---- Restoration of Letters by, 40 ---- Style of, 41 Philology, Stephens’s Works on, 243 Philosophy, Consolation of, 1 ---- Scholastic, Defeat of, 188 ---- Scholastic, Origin of, 7 ---- Speculative, 188 ---- Stanley’s History of, 707 Pibrac, 335 Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 828 Pinelli, Occupations of, 404 Platonists, Aristotelians and, 74 Poem, Early, on Boethius, 13 Poetry, Early English, 62 ---- German, Decline of, 20 ---- German, of Swabian Period, 19 ---- Provençal, 16 Poets, Early Spanish, 203 ---- Elizabethan, 342 ---- Minor, from 1650-1700, 790 Poggio, Bracciolini, 42 ---- on the Views of Rome, 72 Politian, Works of, 95, 105 Political Philosophy in the Sixteenth Century, 294 Polyglott, Walton’s, 843 Pontanus, Works of, 111 Popery, Taylor’s Dissuasive from, 690 Port-Royal Writers, 679 Poynet on Politique Power, 296 Prerogative Argument, 485, _note_. Press, The, of Aldus, 125 Printing, Effects of, on Reformation, 124 ---- Invention of, 75 ---- Progress of, 79 ---- Restraint of, 124 Progress in the Tenth Century, 4 Prophesying, Taylor’s Liberty of, 449 Prose-writers under Elizabeth, 373 Protestantism Extinguished in Italy, 260 ---- ---- ---- ---- And Spain, 261 Protestants, use of the Term, 173 ---- The Religion of, 426 Provençal Grammar, 14 Psalter, Early Printed, 77 Publications, Early European, 85 Puffendorf, his Theory of Politics, 762 ---- The Law of Nature, 753 Pulci, Works of, 97 Purbach, Discoveries of, 78

Quevedo, Satires of, 571 ---- Visions of, 825

Rabelais, 216 Racine, Plays of, 793, 802 ---- Style of, 798 Raleigh, his History of the World, 635 Ramus, Peter, mentioned by Bacon, 191 ---- Peter, New Logic of, 190 Ramusio, Voyages of, 400 Rapin, René, on Gardens, 792 ---- Critical Works of, 815 Ray, Works of, 835, 838 Reading and Writing, Ignorance of, 25 Réflexions sur l’Eloquence, Les, 815 Reformation, Burnet’s History of the, 846 ---- Origin of the, 146 Regiomontanus, 93 Regnard, Plays of, 802 Regnier, Statues of, 574 Religion, Differences of, Effects of, on Poetry, 66 Republic, Analysis of the, 302 Reuchlin,, 104 ---- The Monks and, 145 Reviews, Early, 817 Rhetoric, Cox’s Art of, 219 Rhetorique, Wilson’s Art of, 379 Rhyme, Origin of in Latin, 16 Ribeyro, Works of, 205 Richard of Bury, 39 Richelieu, his Care for Liberty, 426 Rienzi, The Story of, 52 Rivinus, System of, 838 Rochefoucault, 757 Roger Bacon, Works of, 57 Roman Laws, never wholly unknown, 31 Romances, Metrical, 18 ---- of Chivalry, The, 65 Rome, Loss of Learning on Fall of, 1 ---- Conversions to, 263 ---- Supremacy of, 422 Ronsard, Poems of, 333 Roscelin, Story of, 7 Rose, Bishop of Senlis, 298 Rosmunda, The, 132 Rota, Bernardino, 320 Rowley, Thomas, 83 Royal Society, Origin of the, 832 Ruanus, Crellius and, 440 Rueda, Lope de, 212 Ruel, Studies of, 226 Rymer on Tragedy, 823

Sachs, Hans, Dramas of, 213 Sackville, Works of, 336 St. Evremond, 812 Salmasius, Works of, 412, 415 Salvator, Rosa, Satires of, 778 Sanchez, Minerva of, 244 ---- Sceptical Theory of, 285 Sansons, Maps of the, 844 Santeul, Latin Poems, 793 Sarpi, Fra Paolo, 423 Saville on Roman Militia, 257 Saxon Chronicle, The, 23 Scaliger, Joseph, 247 ---- as a Critic, 375 Scaliger assists Gruter, 419 Scarron, Roman Comique of, 826 Schools, Early teaching in, 136 ---- Greek Taught in, 251 Science in Sixteenth Century, 645 Sciences, Academy of, at Paris, 832 ---- of Middle Ages, 55 Scioppius, Work of, 416 Scot, Reginald, 278 Scotland, Learning in about 1550, 253 Scotus, 91 ---- Reasonings of, 92 Scripture, Early Translation of, 85 Sebonde, Raymond de, 69 ---- Real Objects of, 70 Secchia Rapita, The, 568 Secular Variation, Law of, 176 Segrais, Novels of, 827 Seicentisti, Opinions on the, 566 Selden, De Jure Naturali, 528 Semi-Pelagian School, The, 439 Sermons, Donne’s and Taylor’s, 454 ---- Latimer’s, 184 Serra, Antonio, 537 Servetus, Labours of, 180 ---- Life of, 269 Servitude, Domestic, 303 Shadwell, Plays of, 808 Shakspeare, William, 364, 602 ---- As You Like it, 369 ---- Comedy of Errors, 365 ---- First Writings, 364 ---- Historical Plays, 368 ---- Love’s Labours Lost, 365 ---- Lear, 604 ---- Lucrece, 340 ---- Measure for Measure, 603 ---- Merry Wives of Windsor, 603 ---- Midsummer Night’s Dream, 365 ---- Pericles, 605 ---- Poems, 340 ---- Roman Tragedies, 606 ---- Romeo and Juliet, 366 ---- Sonnets, 582 ---- Twelfth Night, 602 ---- Two Gentlemen of Verona, 365 ---- Venus and Adonis, 340 Shirley, Plays of, 621 Skelton, Works of, 154 Smith, Teaching of, 167 Societies, German Literary, 575 Socinianism, Rise of, 181 Sonnets, Shakspeare’s, 583 Soto, Dominic, 289 South, Sermons of, 704 Southern, Plays of, 807 Spain, Pastoral Romances of, 117 Spanish Language, Origin of, 10 Spenser, his Sense of Beauty, 344 ---- Resembles Ariosto, 344 ---- Shepherd’s Kalendar of, 337 ---- Style of, 345 Spregel, the Dutch Ennius, 576 Spinosa, Ethics of, 726, 746 ---- Politics of, 764 Stampa, Gaspara, 321 ---- her Love for Collalto, 321 ---- her Second Love, 322 ---- her Style, 322 Statics, Galileo’s, 657 Stephens, Thesaurus of, 163, 237 ---- Works of, 236 Stevinus, Statics of, 391 Strada, his Prolusiones, 627 Sturm on German Schools, 165 Suarez, of Granada, 524 ---- on Laws, 544 ---- Works of, 525 Surrey, Wyatt and, 207 Surville, Clotilde de, 83 Swift, his Tale of a Tub, 831 Sydney, Algernon, on Government, 767 ---- Sir Philip, his Defence of Poesie, 338 ---- his Poetry, 339 Syriac, New Testament in, 399

Table Talk, Selden’s, 532 Tacitus of Lipsius, The, 235 Tale of a Tub, The, 831 Talent, Deficiency of Poetical, in Tenth Century, 5 Tasso, Bernardo, The Amadigi of, 323 ---- Torquato, 324 ---- compared with others, 326 ---- his Jerusalem, 324 ---- ---- ---- Characters of, 325 ---- ---- ---- Faults in, 325 ---- his Styles, 324 ---- Virgil and, 326 Tassoni, Alessandro, 568 Taste, Prevalence of Bad, 5 Tauler, John, 25 Taylor, Bishop Jeromy, 447 Telemaque, Fenelon’s, 828 Telesio, System of, 281 Theatre, English, Revival of, 804 ---- First French, 107 Theosophists, Paracelsists, and, 463 Thesauri of Grævius and Gronovius, 683 Thesaurus Criticus, Gruter’s, 234 Thomas À Kempis, School of, 55 Tillotson, Sermons of, 704 Toleration, Arguments for, 446 Tournebœuf, or Turnebus, 233 Tournefort, System of, 838 Tractate, Milton’s, 758 Tracts, Statistical, 775 Treatise de Imitatione Christi, 68 Trent, Council of, 182 ---- ---- Efforts of, 264 Trinitarian Controversy, The, 268 Turkish Spy, The, 829 Tyndale, Bible of, 187 Tyrannicide, Poynet and, 297

Universities, Rise of, 8 Usher, Chronology of, 684 Usury, Noodt on, 776 Utopia, More’s, 137

Valla, Laurentius, 72 ---- Defects of his Work, 73 ---- Heeren’s Praise of it, 73 ---- Testament, Annotations on New, 73 Valors, Henry, 681 Van Helmont, 669 Vanbrugh, Plays of, 809 Vanini, Writings of, 455 Vatican Library, The, 230 Vesalius, Works of, 224 Victa, Francis, 385 Victoria, Learning of, 44 Vincent of Beauvais, 59 Vinci, Leonardo de, 108 Vocabulary of Papias, 36 Voiture, Poems of, 574 Vondel, 577 Vossius, Gerard, 417 Vulgar Errors, Browne’s, 677 Vulgate, The, 187 ---- Authenticity of, 278

Waller, Poetry of, 782 Walton, the Complete Angler, 824 Webster, Plays of, 622 White, Thomas, 706 Wilkins, Bishop, 736 Wit, Whetstone of, The, 385 Witchcraft, Scot on, 278 Writers, Romish, 183 Writing, Rise of Knowledge of, 27 Wyatt, Surrey and, 207 Wycherley, Plays of, 803

Ximenes, Cardinal, 134

Zerbi, Anatomy of, 130 Zwingle, Work of, 147

Transcriber’s Notes:

This volume contains the table of contents for both Volumes 1 and 2. The index, contained at the end of Volume 2, was duplicated and added to this book. Pages 1-408 pertain to this volume, 409-847 to