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BOOK also attached to the science, which made it more attractive to the scholar." They pursued it, because, unlike the scholastic metaphysics, it concerned real being, and led them to know the phenomena of created matter.38

To be distinguished, and to excel in some line of human action or other, was the general passion; and hence even PULPIT ORATORY practised new exertions, took new fields of display," and ventured to attempt gigantic publicity," and a style, which we

enlarged the views of the medical mind which finally condemned them, and his experiments were advantageous to medical chemistry. His opera, tho full of random matter, are yet worth inspection. They form two volumes, Geneva, 1658.

37 I find Democritus Philosophus' quoted in some of the alchemists, and there are still some Greek MSS. existing in the German libraries, attributed to him, which have never been printed. Shaw's Boerhaave, v. 1. Some have thought these to be the compositions of later Grecians. But I observe, that Petronius Arbiter in the time of Nero, notices him in remarking that it was the desire of discovering something useful to mankind, which led Democritus to distil the juices of every kind of plant, and to employ his life in making a great number of experiments to find out the properties of minerals and herbs.' Petron. Satyr. These words imply, that treatises of Democritus on chemical subjects existed in the first century.

38 Their best works make this distinction. Petrus Bonus, of 1330, in his Margarita Pretiosa, lays it down as one of his first principles, that Scientia Alchemiæ sit de ente reali,' and as such discusses it. p. 1. So R. Lully establishes it as his two first principia, that the Deity is the Creator of all things, and their mover; and his third, that matter has been created by him, and that every thing under the globe of the moon has been created and formed as such matter.' On this foundation he proceeds to consider the facts of alchemy as the phenomena or effects of this matter. See his Testamentum, I Manget, p. 710.

39 One of the new scenes and uses of preaching was to accompany armies in their campaigns. This habit was noticed by the bishop of Modena, in his letter of May 1542: I have ordered M. Bavadagli to go to the camp in Hungary, where the Lutheran preachers will be, as I am assured that he may induce these preachers to relinquish their dogmas, when they exhort the soldiers to fight. There will be also many Italian soldiers there, with their Catholic preachers.' Ep. Poli. Quern. 3. p. 269.

40 In 1452, the minor fryar John de Capistrano was sent to convert the Bohemians, and to preach in Germany. He visited Thuringia, Saxony, Misnia and Moravia, and was received every where with banners,

may call, with no intention of abuse, but merely as its descriptive character, the field preaching of Popery." Projects of new traffic, and of exploring new regions, if not new worlds; large views, high thoughts and high daring agitated others, as the mysterious direction of the magnet to the Pole, presented to NAVIGATION an invisible guide, which made the mariner an enthusiast, gave security to the boldest adventures, and excited a passion for remote voyages and investigations. The astonishing discoveries which

42

crosses and processions, like a sovereign prince. He preached at Erfurd to SIXTY THOUSAND PERSONS; the men arranged on one side, the women on the other. He only knew Latin; but a doctor interpreted as he went on. Mag. Chron. Belg. 2. This far outdid our Whitfield, whose clearest or fullest exertion of voice did not reach beyond 20,000 people.

The Magnum Chronicon mentions that more Italico he preached with his hands and feet, as well as with his voice. p. 382. This corresponds with Henry Wharton's account of him; He itinerated thro the cities and towns, addressing sermons to the people, in the highways and market places, against the enemies of the Roman Church. Among the Germans and those who were ignorant of Italian, he is said to have affected the minds of his audience in a wonderful manner, by using gesticulations instead of words.' Cave's Script. Eccl. add. p. 98. How he managed to teach the papal faith, and to confute heresy by stage acting and dumb show, has not been recorded. Yet nothing else could have had any effect on the largest half of an audience of sixty thousand persons. The most violent exertion of manual eloquence, among the Roman orators, was that of striking the thigh. But Capistrano must have multiplied his oratorical gestures far beyond this small circum

stance.

42 The conquest of Ceuta on the Morocco coast, by the Portuguese in 1415, under John I. began the taste for African discoveries and possessions; and his intelligent son Henry cherished the new maritime passion. He saw how effectually the magnetic compass would assist in exploring new and distant lands. His pilots soon doubled both Cape Noir and Cape Bajedor, and by 1420 had discovered the Isle of Madeira and the Canaries. The Azores and the Cape de Verd islands only stimulated curiosity to advance, and before Henry's death, in 1463, Sierra Leone was reached and passed. By 1484, they had explored and began to conquer in the kingdom of Congo, to the surprise and gratification of Europe; and twelve years afterwards, under John II. the intrepid Diez surmounted the stormy Cape, now of Good Hope. Following his steps, in the reign of Emanuel the Great, the Greater Vasco de Gama in 1498, astonished, and delighted all the thinking world by sailing to the East

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rewarded their fortitude and sufferings, made all that thought and talked in society as visionary and as elated as themselves; a sudden ardor of imitation, new dreams of commerce and geography became the reasonings of the gravest and the pursuit of the most prudent." ANATOMY, basing itself on the searching inspection of the human fabric, instead of apes and dogs like the ancients,"-BOTANY, the largest, the most beautiful, the most essential to man, and the most inexhaustible by his curiosity, of all the king

Indies; thereby beginning a revolution in all the commerce of the East, and exalting Portugal to the sovereignty of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The disclosure of the West Indies by Columbus in 1492, acted like the revelation of a new world to mankind, and produced a transport and an exultation in his contemporaries, which their letters and writings largely express.

Thus Metamorus felt and contended, that Christopher Colonus, as he terms him, had conquered a greater glory than the ancient Bacchus, who pervaded the East, or than Hercules, who penetrated to the West, or even than Alexander the Great. He exclaims with rapture, that there should be such things as the Antipodes; ' He saw with his own eyes, men walking with their feet opposite to ours, and would I think have convinced both Lactantius and St. Austin of it, if they had been alive.' p. 821.

"Our cautious Henry VII. whom Mariana states to have refused the offer of Christoval Colon' (Hist. Ep. v. 9. p. 197,) became so interested by his success, that on 5 March 1496, he granted a patent to J. Cabot and his two sons, to sail at their own expense in search of new countries, giving to the king one-fifth of the profit. And on 9 Dec. 1502, a similar patent was obtained from him by two Bristol merchants, Elyot and another, and two Portuguese, to make a voyage for the same purpose. They are in Rymer, v. 12. p. 595. v. 13. p. 37. In 1481 English merchants had prepared a fleet for a trading voyage on the coast of Africa, when the Portuguese king interfered and stopped it. Henry Hist. p. 247. 45 Sylvius, who died 1555; Fallopius, who died in 1563; and Vesalius, who, on his way to succeed him at Venice, by the invitation of the senate, perished by famine in a desert part of the isle of Zante, where he was shipwrecked in 1564; (De Thou, v. 4. p. 632.) enriched anatomy with discoveries which gave new features to Physiology.

This last student of it was the medical attendant of Charles V. who at his request consulted the doctors of Salamanca, whether he might with a safe conscience dissect the dead body, to learn its structure. He became acquainted with it so exactly, that he offered to be blindfolded, and yet name every bone that was presented to him, on only feeling it. He succeeded with all.

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doms of the divine creation;6-and the Mathematics, CHAP. that noble science, whose principles and laws are those of the Divine mind, and were recognized and felt to be so by Plato," had each their zealous votaries, emulating all the other successful inquirers, and, like them, also achieving, with a suddenness and an unaccountable felicity that looked like inspiration, discoveries of unknown facts, or of recondite truths, which became the parents of an endless progeny, 48 and obtained their proportion also of elevating celebrity. New theatres and new treasures of na

49

46 The five first publishers of Botanical Catalogues, appeared in the sixteenth century; and Gesner, who first suggested the arrangement of plants by classes, orders, genera and species, was born in 1516. He, like Cesalpinus, whose birth was in 1519, made the fruit his criterion. Thompson's Hist. Roy. Soc. p. 20.

47 Gassendi dwells with delight and eloquence on Plato's celebrated answer to the question, what the Deity was doing, гewμεTρEL TOV Oεov, 'The Deity geometrizes;' and expatiates on the geometrical science and configurations with which the world has been composed, in his Oratio inauguralis.

48 Cusa mentions to Nicholas V. Nor would you have Geometry neglected; for you delivered to me in Greek the geometry of the great Archimedes, which had been presented to you, and which you procured to be translated into Latin. This has seemed to me so admirable, that I could not but labor to complete it, and I have done so, and send my 'Mathematices complementum' to you.' Cusæ Op. p. 1004.

In Cusa's century, the fifteenth, Leonard of Pisa travelled into the East to learn Algebra from the Arabians, and returned with it to Europe, where Purbach, who died in 1461, was improving Trigonometry, and where Regiomontanus, who died in 1476 first developed our present system of decimal fractions, and translated a great number of the Greek mathematicians, for the benefit of the studious. As he was employed to reform the calendar, his sudden death may have kept it in that state which occasioned Copernicus to be consulted about it, and led him to the imagination of his new system. Tartaglia discovered the resolution of the cubic equations. Thomps. Roy. Soc. 255-8.

49 A. Piccolomini, in 1560, in his treatise to prove that mathematical demonstrations are not in the highest order of certainties, indicates in several passages the lofty spirit of intellect then pervading the world. He says that man is born to contemplate as well as to act, and therefore pursues the knowlege of truth as well as the acquisition of good. p. 70. So on the mechanical questions, he intimates that the wise burn with thesciendi cupiditare.' They do not admire the things which the vulgar dread, as earthquakes, eclipses, comets or inundations, because

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BOOK tural history opened to all, from the recently unveiled regions of Africa, America, and the Oriental oceans. Nor was the female world insensible to the love of distinguishing praise, nor without making some efforts to obtain it by literary display, by kind patronage, or by intellectual cultivation.50 Diseases unknown to Europe before,"1 and new medicines with new treatment equally strange, opposed and fanatically urged," had also their share in agitating the mind, and rousing it to new conduct.

they know the causes of these; but what they search into and highly value, are those 'quorum latet causa;' the causes of such things, omni conatu inquirentes philosophantur.' p.

50 Margaret, the sister of Francis I., and some of the high-born ladies of the court of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. and Henry's two daughters, are specimens of this new spirit in the female sex. See Hist. Henry VIII. v. 2. p. 187. Ascham repeatedly extols such in England.

It was at the instance of the duchess of Ferrara, a lady of Arragon, that Caraffa, in the fifteenth century, composed his work on the duties of a good prince. His other treatise 'de institutione vivendi,' was written in characters of gold, on azure and green colored parchment, for Beatrice, the wife of the celebrated M. Corvino, king of Hungary. His tract de lo optimo cortesano,' was dedicated to the same princess. She was also from Arragon. Tirab. v. 6. p. 431. The duke of Milan placed his daughter Hippolita under the instruction of Lascaris to learn the Greek language; who composed for her his Greek Grammar, printed at Milan 1476, the first Greek book printed in Italy. Hodii Græc. Ill.

51 One of these was the scurvy, which Fabricius mentions in 1486, as a new and unheard-of malady, much dreaded, and extremely dangerous. The mariners of Saxony called it den schorbock. He makes it contagious. Ann. Mis. 1. 2. p. 71. It spread gradually into most parts of Europe. The probability is, that it began and increased with the long voyages, which the discoveries of de Gama and Columbus led to. Another complaint, which at this period established itself in Europe, apparently from the West Indies, caused great anxieties and perturbations. Gonsalvo Ferrand, finding no cure in Italy, went to the West Indies, on purpose to find out how the inhabitants there treated it, and brought back Guaiacum as the great specific. Friend's Hist. Phys. 2. p. 365.

52 Thus Bazil Valentine pressed the extensive use of Antimony in his Currus triumphalis antimonii; and Paracelsus vaunted his mercurial preparations with the most extravagant pretensions and tales. See Boerhaave's notice of his life.-Chem. v. 1.

It was at this period that Pharmacy, which had hitherto been confined to vegetable simples, enlarged its stores by the introduction of drugs and mineral medicines, chiefly from the experiments of those who sought for their wonderful elixir.