out in these lines of human
accomplishment in the preceding centuries. Taken in this sense, the
word Renaissance is entirely a misnomer. Magnificent achievements in
art and letters and every form of education preceded the Renaissance
by at least three or four centuries. The Gothic cathedrals and the
enduring artistic development that took place in their making, the
magnificent organization of technical education in the training of
artist artisans by the guilds of the time (we would be glad if our
technical schools could accomplish {91} anything like the same
results, for evidently, though the name technical education is our
invention, these medieval peoples had the reality to a high degree),
and finally the universities, which have remained essentially the same
down to our own day--all these serve to show how much was done for
every form of education many centuries before the beginning of the
Renaissance so-called.

It is not surprising that with this much of education abroad in the
land men succeeded in making enduring literature in every form and in
every country in Europe, and in setting examples of style in prose and
verse that succeeding generations have nearly always gone back to
admire lovingly. Such an amount of education and development of
thinking could not have come without profound attention to science,
and, as a matter of fact, there was much more anticipation of even
what is most modern in our scientific thinking than most scholars seem
to have any idea of. Personally, I have found, in writing the history
of The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries, more that interested me
in the science of this century than in almost any other department of
its wonderful educational development.

We have already seen that while anatomy had during preceding centuries
only the beginning of the development that it was destined to reach
during the sixteenth century, it would be a serious mistake to think
that the study of anatomy, having died in the old classical days, was
not re-born until the sixteenth century. This would be to commit the
error that many ardent devotees of the Renaissance make with regard to
all the accomplishments of this period. In spite of the contrary
almost universal impression, the Renaissance was not original {92} to
any marked degree. With the touch of the Greek spirit that had come
again into the world, it only carried the preceding work of great
original thinkers to a high order of perfection. T