Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus | Page 7

say. Hamlet, when he bursts from his friends, explains his
vigour by the rush of the spirit into the arteries, which makes
"Each petty artery of this body As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve."
The natural spirit is generated in the liver, the seat of digestion, "there
where our nourishment is administered"; it then passes to the heart, and
manifests itself as the spirit of life; from thence it passes to the brain,
where it is the animal spirit--"spirit animate" Rossetti calls it--dwelling
in the brain.
In the brain there are three ventricles or chambers, the foremost being

the "cell fantastike" of the "Knight's Tale," the second the logistic, and
the third the chamber of memory, where "memory, the warder of the
brain," keeps watch over the passage of the spirit into the "sinews" of
moving. Into the foremost cell come all the perceptions of sight,
hearing, etc., and thus we have the opportunity for
"Fantasy, That plays upon our eyesight,"
to freak it on us. The pedant, Holofernes, in _Love's Labour's Lost,_
characteristically puts the origin of his good things in the ventricle of
memory.
As a specimen of the physical science of the time the Editor gives
extracts from the chapter on light.
The introduction of extracts enough to give some idea of the mediaeval
astronomy would have made such large demands on the patience of the
reader that the Editor has decided with some regret to omit them
altogether. The universe is considered to be a sphere, whose centre is
the earth and whose circumference revolved about two fixed points.
Our author does not decide the nice point in dispute between the
philosophers and the theologians, the former holding that there is only
one, the latter insisting on seven heavens-the fairy, ethereal, olympian,
fiery, firmament, watery, and empyrean.
The firmament, that
"Majestical roof, fretted with golden fire,"
is the part of heaven in which the planets move. It carries them round
with it; it governs the tides; it stood with men for the type of irresistible
regularity. Each of the planets naturally has a motion of its own,
contrary in direction to that of the firmament, which was from east to
west. All the fixed stars move in circles whose centre is the centre of
the universe, but the courses of the planets (among which the moon is
reckoned) depend on other circles, called eccentric, since their centre is
elsewhere. Either the centre or the circumference of the circle in which
the planet really moves is applied to the circumference of the eccentric
circle, and in this way all the movements of the planets are fully
explained. Our author is sorely puzzled to account for the existence of
the watery heavens above the fiery, they being cold and moist, but is
sure from scriptural reasons that they are there, and ventures the
hypothesis that their presence may account for the sluggish and evil
properties of Saturn, the planet whose circle is nearest them.

Having considered the simpler substances, those composed of pure
elemental forms, and those resembling them--the meteors--we turn to
the perfect compounds, those which have assumed substantial forms, as
metals, stones, etc. Our author retains the Aristotelian
classification--earthy, and those of other origin, as beasts, roots, and
trees. Earths may be metals or fossils; metals being defined as hard
bodies, generated in the earth or in its veins, which can be beaten out
by a hammer, and softened or liquefied by heat; while fossils include
all other inanimate objects.
A large number of extracts have been made from this part of the subject,
because the book gives the position of positive, as distinguished from
speculative, Alchemy at the time. It is the Editor's desire to show that at
this period there was a system of theory based on the practical
knowledge of the day.
Chemistry took its rise as a science about four hundred years before our
era. In the fragments of two of the four books of Democritus we have
probably the earliest treatise on chemical matters we are ever likely to
get hold of. Whether it is the work of Democritus or of a much later
writer is uncertain. But merely taking it as a representative work of the
early stage of chemistry, we remark that the receipts are practicable,
and some of them, little modified, are in use to-day in goldsmith's
shops. The fragments remaining to us are on the manufacture of gold
and silver, and one receipt for dyeing purple. In this state of the science
the collection of facts is the chief point, and no purely chemical theory
seems to have been formed. Tradition, confirmed by the latest
researches, associates this stage with Egypt.
The second stage in the history of Chemistry--the birth of Alchemy in
the Western World--occurred when the