nt
neither matter nor form, that is, neither the material substance nor
the energy which is contained in it. He meant, then, that no energy
would ever be destroyed as well as no matter would ever be
annihilated. He was teaching the conservation of energy as well as the
indestructibility of matter. Here once more the experimental
demonstration of the doctrine was delayed for over six centuries and a
half. The truth itself, however, had been reached by this medieval
master-mind, and was the subject of his teaching to the university
students in Paris in the thirteenth century. These examples should, I
think, serve to illustrate that the minds of medieval students were
occupied with practically the same questions as those which are now
taught to the university students of our day, and that the content of
the teaching was identical with ours.

{315}

The scholars of the Middle Ages are usually said to have been
profoundly ignorant as regards the shape of the earth, its size, and
the number of its inhabitants, and to have cherished the queerest
notions, when they really permitted themselves any ideas at all, as to
the antipodes. This is very true if the ideas of the ignorant masses
of the people and the second-rate authors and thinkers be taken as the
standard of medieval thought. Unfortunately, such sources as these
have only too often served as authorities for modern historians of
education and modern essayists on the history of science. This state
of affairs would painfully suggest the curiously inverted notion of
the supposed ideas entertained with regard to science in our day, that
would be obtained by some thirtieth century student, were he to judge
our scientific opinions from some of the queer books written by
pretentiously ignorant writers, who have pet scientific hobbies of
their own and exploit them at the expense of a long-suffering world,
if by some accident of fortune these books should be preserved and the
really great contributions to science be either actually lost or lost
to sight. It is from Albert the Great and such men, and not from their
petty contemporaries, that the true spirit of the science of the age
must be deduced. Albert's biographer said:

"He treats as fabulous the commonly-received idea, in which
Venerable Bede had acquiesced, that the region of the earth south of
the equator was uninhabitable, and considers, that from the equator
to the South Pole, the earth was not only habitable