most evident. When in the
Purgatorio, in the twenty-sixth canto, Dante would describe the
meeting of souls in Paradise who kiss each other as they speed on
their way, he compares them to the ants who as they meet one another
touch antennae, thus communicating various messages, and then go on
their way. The passage is very striking because, as Dean Plumptre
remarks, the picture drawn reminds one almost of Sir John Lubbock's
ant studies, or the remarkable descriptions of ant life in Bishop
Ken's Hymnotheo. Dante's lines are as follows:--

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"So oft, within their dusk brown host proceed
This ant and that, till muzzle muzzle meet;
Spying their way, or how affairs succeed."

Thus did Dante know the whole round of science in his time better than
any modern university man. People who take exception to his knowledge
fail to realize its environment. They may smile a little scornfully
now at his complacent acceptance of the Ptolemaic system without a
question, but it must not be forgotten that for three centuries after
his time educated men still continued to accept it, and that even the
distinguished Jesuit astronomer, Clavius, to whom we owe the Gregorian
reformation of the calendar and the restoration of the year to its
proper place as regards the heavens, not only accepted it, but worked
out his calendar reform problems by means of it. Clavius's great
contemporary, Tycho-Brahe, the distinguished Danish astronomer, found
no reason to reject it. Even Lord Bacon, who with perverted historical
sense is still proclaimed the father of modern experimental science,
also accepted the Ptolemaic system, and found that it thoroughly
explained all the phenomena of the heavens, while he rejected the
Copernican system, then nearly a century before the world, because he
thought it did not. The surprise, however, is not in Dante's knowledge
of astronomy, but in his familiarity with details of biology that
enables him to reason, though in poetic language, with straightforward
and logical directness with regard to basic thought in this science
that is usually considered so thoroughly modern.

Another surprising feature is the knowledge of the habits of birds and
of insects. Our modern students of {361} nature are supposed to be the
first who went deeply enough into these subjects to make them material
for literature. Here, however, is Dante describing, in a few
picturesque words, characteristic peculiarities of birds and insects