hese brilliant
men, the so-called Scholasts or Schoolmen, were really very intelligent,
but they had obtained their information exclusively from books, and
never from actual observation. If they wanted to lecture on the sturgeon
or on caterpillars, they read the Old and New Testaments and Aristotle,
and told their students everything these good books had to say upon
the subject of caterpillars and sturgeons. They did not go out to the
nearest river to catch a sturgeon. They did not leave their libraries
and repair to the backyard to catch a few caterpillars and look at these
animals and study them in their native haunts. Even such famous scholars
as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas did not inquire whether the
sturgeons in the land of Palestine and the caterpillars of Macedonia
might not have been different from the sturgeons and the caterpillars of
western Europe.

When occasionally an exceptionally curious person like Roger Bacon
appeared in the council of the learned and began to experiment with
magnifying glasses and funny little telescopes and actually dragged the
sturgen and the caterpillar into the lecturing room and proved that they
were different from the creatures described by the Old Testament and by
Aristotle, the Schoolmen shook their dignified heads. Bacon was going
too far. When he dared to suggest that an hour of actual observation
was worth more than ten years with Aristotle and that the works of that
famous Greek might as well have remained untranslated for all the good
they had ever done, the scholasts went to the police and said, "This man
is a danger to the safety of the state. He wants us to study Greek that
we may read Aristotle in the original. Why should he not be contented
with our Latin-Arabic translation which has satisfied our faithful
people for so many hundred years? Why is he so curious about the insides
of fishes and the insides of insects? He is probably a wicked magician
trying to upset the established order of things by his Black Magic." And
so well did they plead their cause that the frightened guardians of the
peace forbade Bacon to write a single word for more than ten years. When
he resumed his studies he had learned a lesson. He wrote his books in
a queer cipher which made it impossible for his contemporaries to read
them, a trick which became common as the Church became more desperate in
its attempts to prevent people from asking questions which would lead to
doubts and infidel