utworn traditions. Kropotkin's studies in what the free
cities accomplished by the union of the guilds for every fraternal
purpose, and the coordination of their citizens for every detail of
the commonweal, has made him realize that common or public school
education was an important feature of medieval free city life, and
strange as that fact may appear to many modern minds, that such public
school education occupied at least as prominent a position as it does
with us in our own time. In the quotation from him it will be seen
that he considers that Florence was not alone in this matter, and he
ventures to place Nueremberg on a level with her. Doubtless other
German cities, as certainly other Italian cities, provided similar
facilities for general education.

Kropotkin says: "In 1336 it (Florence) had 8,000 to 10,000 boys and
girls in its primary schools, 1,000 to {346} 1,200 boys in its seven
middle schools, and from 550 to 600 students in its four universities.
The thirty communal hospitals contained over 1,000 beds for a
population of 90,000 inhabitants. (Capponi, ii. 249 seq.) It has more
than once been suggested by authoritative writers, that education
stood, as a rule, at a much higher level than is generally supposed.
Certainly so in democratic Nueremberg."

The content of this educational system is our main subject of interest
at the present moment.

"Seven hundred young men received the higher education. (This in a
city of less than 100,000 inhabitants. How do our cities of 100,000
inhabitants compare with it?) The very spirit of the arts was
scholastic in Dante's day. You read the story in the oratory of
Orsanmichele, in which each art with its masterpiece receives a crown;
you read it in the chapters of Santa Maria Novella, in Gaddi's
painting of the Trivium and Quadrivium; you read it in Giotto's
sculpture of the same subject upon this marvelous campanile. Here was
the atmosphere in which Dante's boyhood and early manhood were
passed."

We shall not be surprised, then, to find in Dante, the typical product
of this form of education, an interest in every form of erudition and
in all details of information.

I have preferred to take the evidence for Dante's knowledge of science
from others, rather than attempt to supply it entirely by means of
quotations from his works. This latter would be the most scholarly
way, but Dante is not easy reading even in a good translation, and one
needs to be familiar with