and had carried
away with it in its course nearly everything precious that men had
gained during the four centuries immediately preceding. Art,
education, science, liberty, democracy--everything worth while had
been hurt; most of them had been ruined for the time. Even the
nineteenth century did not succeed in bringing us back to a level with
the earlier centuries in all the intellectual and esthetic
accomplishments.

Another striking evidence of the deep interest of these generations in
science of all kinds and in details of information with regard to
which they are generally said to have been quite incurious, was the
publication of the famous encyclopedia, the first work of its kind
ever issued, which was written about the middle of the thirteenth
century by Vincent of Beauvais. It is only when a generation actually
calls for it, and when the want of it has been for a good while felt,
that such a work is likely to be undertaken. This immense literary
undertaking was completed under the patronage of King Louis IX. by
Vincent, a Dominican friar, who died at the beginning of the last
quarter of the thirteenth century. His Majus Speculum is not the first
book of general information, but it is the first deserving the name of
Encyclopedia in the full sense of the word that we have. It is divided
into three parts--the Speculum Naturale, Doctrinale, and Historiale.
The only one which interests us here is the Speculum Naturale, which
fills a huge folio volume of nearly a thousand pages, closely printed
in double columns. It is divided into 32 books and some 4,000
chapters. The Encyclopaedia Brittanica says of it:--

"It was, as it were, the great temple of medieval {335} science,
whose floor and walls are inlaid with an enormous mosaic of
skilfully arranged passages from Latin, Greek, Arabic, and even
Hebrew authors. To each quotation, as he borrows it, Vincent
prefixes the name of the book and the author from which it is taken,
distinguishing, however, his own remarks by the word 'actor.'"

The interest aroused by Vincent's compilation outside of professional
and educational circles strictly so-called, can be very well
appreciated from the fact that, besides King Louis's interest, his
Queen Margaret, their son Philip and son-in-law, King Theobald V., of
Champagne and Navarre, were, according to tradition, among those who
encouraged him in the work and aided him in bearing the expenses of
it. It is rather curio