nd understood
and taught very definitely the rotundity of the earth and other
doctrines that are usually supposed to be much more recent, and that
are often said to have brought their holders into ecclesiastical
odium. Far from this, Albert was always in high favor and was made a
bishop and canonized as a saint after his death.

Roger Bacon studied light, declared that it moved with a definite
velocity and gathered and made good use in his teaching of an immense
amount of information in the departments of knowledge that we now call
astronomy and geography. Humboldt declared that it was a passage from
Roger Bacon which more than anything else, even the Toscanelli
letters, roused Columbus to his life purpose of sailing westwards.
Roger Bacon's books, the one with the paragraph now famous because of
its connection with Columbus among the number, were issued at the
request of the Pope and it seems very probable that we would have had
no idea of his marvellous anticipation of many modern scientific
truths only for the definitely expressed wish of the Pope to know the
English Franciscan's thought. We have just celebrated the seventh
centenary of Roger Bacon's birth, and this has brought home to us how
much of a loss to the history of human culture would have been the
missing of Bacon's works. Bacon's difficulties in life were with his
Order and were personal matters not directly connected with his
science.

With the beginning of the Renaissance the stimulating effect of the
study of Greek science on the men of the fifteenth century was exerted
and one of those who was most deeply touched by the Greek spirit was
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, or Cusanus, as he is called from the Latin
name of his birthplace. He wrote a series of books touching many
matters in science and treating various phases of mathematics. He
dwelt particularly on certain problems relating to geography and
astronomy. I have summed up his scientific career in a chapter of "Old
Time Makers of Medicine" (N. Y., 1911). He taught the rotundity of the
earth and that the earth was the same sort of a body as the other
stars in the heavens, that it was not and could not be the centre of
the universe and that it had a movement of its own. Far from such
revolutionary teaching leading to his persecution or bringing him
under the suspicion {472} of the ecclesiastical authorities he was, on
the contrary, looked up to for his scholarship, received successive
ecclesiastica