Art. 11.-THE COMING OF ALCHEMY.

1. Les origines de l'alchimie. Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs. La chimie au moyen âge. Archéologie et histoire des sciences. By M. P. E. Bertholet. Paris, 1885-1906.

2. Studies in the History of Mediaval Science. By C. H. Haskins. Milford, 1924.

3. Knowledge acquired concerning the Cultivation of Gold. Translated by E. J. Holmyard. Paris: Geuthner, 1923.

4. Chemistry to the Time of Dalton. By E. J. Holmyard. Milford, 1925.

5. Enstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchimie. By E. O. von Lippman. Berlin, 1919.

6. Arabische Alchemisten, 1924. Tabula Smaragdina. By Julius Ruska. Winter: Heidelberg, 1926.

7. Des manuscrits grecs (alchemiques) des îles brittaniques. By D. W. Singer in collaboration with A. and W. J. Anderson. Bruxelles, 1924.

8. The Story of Early Chemistry. By J. M. Stillman. Appelton, 1924.

In

THE recovery of European civilisation from the almost universal barbarism of the Dark Ages was slow and uneven. It was a barbarism rooted in devastation repeated over wide areas again and again for two centuries by the Magyar from the east, the Saracen from the south, and the Northmen from the sea. England, the Low Countries, France and the Rhineland, and the North of Spain, every human activity was bent on the mere preservation of life for nearly two centuries, and if in rare parts of what we may call Atlantic Europe something a little beyond this bare modicum was possible, it was because an easier and richer prey offered itself to the sea-rover, because the Saracen invader was civilised and knew the value of settled order in his subjects. But the land of France as a whole was a waste: the legislation and good order which were the great and abiding glory of Charlemagne had been so trampled to the dust in the wars and dissensions of his successors that when invasion came from without there was none to meet it.

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All that was left was the age-long organisation of the Church with its dioceses, each linked with its central city, and the monasteries-no longer places of study and devotion. Hardly a city in the land escaped fire and sword over and over again, hardly was there a monastery not levelled to the ground and rebuilt and destroyed again. And when, after the invaders retreated, the surviving monks returned and began to rebuild their ruined home, it would be long before their thoughts could turn to any but the most pressing needs of their discipline, or the need for science or literature be felt. Such needs are the product of comparative leisure and growing wealth, and when curiosity as to the world around them and the history of the past began to revive, the means of gratifying it were far to seek.

There were indeed two great civilisations, still at the height of their powers, with a foothold in Europe throughout the Dark Ages, the Byzantine and the Arab. But Byzantium, with its long inheritance of wealth and its specialised learning, was cut off from Atlantic Europe by the invasions from the plains of Asia which had closed its natural avenue of the Danube route; while the communication of its learning through Italy was hindered by theological discussion and intermittent warfare, so that its share in our revival of learning was small. The Arab civilisation, on the other hand, seems from the first moment of reviving curiosity as to science to have been that to which all eyes turned, in spite of the difference of religion and language. As the wave of Mohammedan conquest slowly receded, Christian and Moslem lived side by side, and it became known that much of the ancient knowledge could be found in the schools of Spain. Even before the end of the tenth century the future Pope Sylvester had sought to learn from them, and though throughout the eleventh century the intellectual energies of Europe were engaged in the double conflict of the Church against paganism among the people on the one hand, and on the other against the more dangerous attempts of the temporal power to draw its organisation and its growing wealth into the service of an irreligious bureaucracy, the way was open, few indeed followed in his steps. Until this conflict had been fought out and its result assured, no other forms

of mental activity could hope for attention: the problem of security in this life and in that to come was too insistent to allow of any dalliance with the less pressing claims of the mind and intellect.

By the opening years of the twelfth century a great part of this needful preliminary had been accomplished. A settled law was in process of evolution everywhere in Europe, while the Church, aided by the revival of monasticism, had asserted itself with vigour in the religious as in the political world. The last of the great barbarian irruptions had finally ceased, and the Normans had established themselves as supporters of the institutions they had erstwhile shattered, as patrons of the arts and learning which they had almost succeeded in annihilating in a long-drawn-out orgy of destruction. The Crusades had in their turn come to the help of the body politic by relieving it of the hot blood which would have been a continued menace to its growing civilisation, while at home peace and relative good government gave an opportunity for the growth of comfort and wealth.

It was then that the revival of the study of letters began. The tradition of the schools founded by Charlemagne had persisted, and even in the worst times of the two centuries following him the Latin classics were being read and copied, now here now there, with reverential accuracy, but their influence was restricted in the highest degree, and their study was subject to the passing whims of those in authority, to the accidents of time or destruction by fire or neglect. If the work of only some two-score men between the sixth and the twelfth centuries could have been annihilated, almost the whole of classical literature would have been lost to us: on such weak threads does the continuance of civilisation depend! They survived, however, and as from each school or abbey copies were made and exchanged, by the middle of the twelfth century the small but growing learned world of Western Europe was tolerably familiar with nearly everything in classical Latin that we read to-day, and with some books we have lost. For a learned world had come into being, a world of great schools and eager scholars who pursued learning from one teacher to another, a world in which the medieval university was already foreshadowed. The

list of books read and quoted from by John of Salisbury, friend and secretary of Thomas à Becket, will show the range of its reading, while the number of works of real value produced in the century will prove its claim to intellectual importance. But the twelfth-century renaissance was a literary renaissance: it knew nothing of science; its notions of the universe, of the earth, of living things, or of inanimate bodies were vague and inaccurate to the last degree, gathered from misunderstandings of Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Isidore.

It must not, however, be thought that there were no students of science at the time; there was no lack of isolated students, but the schools were too busy forging the tools of thought to feel any need of scientific material on which to use them. Medicine and astronomy were the first of the physical sciences to attract students to pass beyond the borders of Christendom in search. of knowledge. Medicine, first as an art and then as a science, was obviously better taught and practised in Arab-speaking lands, and Arab treatises on medicine were the earliest translated. Astronomy was a science which forced itself on the attention of every one interested in the external universe, a science now reintroduced into Europe with a perfected instrument for observation-the astrolabe. Next came improved methods of calculation: addition and subtraction could be done and had been done on the old-fashioned counting board or abacus with great success, but the more difficult processes of multiplication and division on the abacus cried out for simplification, which came in its turn from the East.

By this time it was known that the whole body of Greek learning was to be had from Arab sources. The Moslem world had absorbed the masterpieces of Hellenic thought, almost forgotten in Byzantium, and had made them the centre of their teaching. The presence of a Christian side by side with a Moslem Spain made access to it comparatively simple, while, on the other hand, Sicily, with its Norman rulers, its mixed population of Moslem faith and blood, of Italians and of Levantine Greeks, with its memories of the near-by Magna Grecia, furnished a commodious jumping-off place for students

eager to learn what Byzance could teach them as well as the wisdom of the East. By these two gates Science entered Europe.

The story of the translations and of the men who made them, as told by Prof. Haskins, is in itself almost a romance. Setting aside Constantine the African and his medical works, perhaps translated through the Hebrew, the first European name we meet is that of an Englishman, Adelard of Bath, from his early youth a wanderer in search of learning of all kinds. Skilful enough in music to be called on to play before a queen, he left France to travel into Sicily and Southern Italy during the early years of the twelfth century. By 1126 he had learned Arabic and translated the astronomical tables of Cordova. Soon after he produced the version of Euclid which was used in one form or another throughout the Middle Ages. By 1130 he was back in England, having lived for seven years in Syria, and his last work, dedicated to the future Henry II, was written about 1146. His interests extended from falconry on one side (he wrote the earliest Latin treatise on the subject) to technical chemistry on the other. After Adelard come Plato of Tivoli, of whom we know nothing but his work, another Englishman, Robert of Chester, Hermann of Carinthia, Rudolf of Bruges, and, greatest of all, Gerard of Cremona, while of native Spaniards and Jewish scholars there were not a fewall of them except Gerard working in the first half of the twelfth century.

Among the other Greek sciences which had passed over into the East and were there commented on and assimilated, Alchemy was not overlooked. Robert of Chester, who, with his literary partner Hermann of Carinthia, had been employed at Toledo in 1143 on the translation of the Koran, made the first dated version of a work on Alchemy from the Arabic in 1144; Gerard of Cremona, who died in 1187, had before then produced translations of three important works on the subject; and early in the 13th century a considerable number of other treatises were available, though we know nothing of their translators and suspect the attributed authorship. Unfortunately no twelfth-century manuscripts of these books have survived; our earliest