Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus | Page 7

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 Egyptian practical receipts, the neo-Greek philosophies, and the Chinese dreams of an "elixir vitae" were fused into one by the Arab and Syriac writers. Its period of activity ranges from the seventh to the tenth centuries. Little is really known about it, or can be, until the Arabic texts, which are abundant in Europe, are translated and classified both from the scholar's and the chemist's standpoint. Many works were translated into Latin about the end of the tenth century, such