"And here," says the French historian of mathematics, whom I have followed in the preceding relation, "it is impossible not to reflect that all those men who, if they did not augment the treasure of the sciences, at least served to transmit it, were monks, or had been such originally. Convents were, during these stormy ages, the asylum of sciences and letters. Without these religious men, who, in the silence of their monasteries, occupied themselves in transcribing, in studying, and in imitating the works of the ancients, well or ill, those works would have perished; perhaps not one of them would have come down to us. The thread which connects us with the Greeks and Romans would have been snapt asunder; the precious productions of {199} ancient literature would no more exist for us, than the works, if any there were, published before the catastrophe that annihilated that highly scientific nation, which, according to Bailly, existed in remote ages in the centre of Tartary, or at the roots of Caucasus. In the sciences we should have had all to create; and at the moment when the human mind should have emerged from its stupor and shaken off its slumbers, we should have been no more advanced than the Greeks were after the taking of Troy." He adds, that this consideration inspires feelings towards the religious orders very different from those which, when he wrote, were prevalent among his countrymen. Except so far as their religious opinions interfered, it was natural that men who lived a life of quiet and study, and were necessarily in a great measure removed from the absorbing and blinding interests with which practical life occupies the thoughts, should cultivate science more successfully than others, precisely because their ideas on speculative subjects had time and opportunity to become clear and steady. The studies which were cultivated under the name of the Seven Liberal Arts, necessarily tended to favor this effect. The _Trivium_,[18\4] indeed, which consisted of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, had no direct bearing upon those ideas with which physical science is concerned; but the _Quadrivium_, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, could not be pursued with any attention, without a corresponding improvement of the mind for the purposes of sound knowledge.[19\4] [Note 18\4: Bruck. iii. 597.] [Note 19\4: Roger Bacon, in his _Specula Mathematica_, cap. i., says "Harum scientiarum porta et clavis est mathematica, quam sancti a principio mundi invenerunt, etc. Cujus negligentia _jam per triginta vel quadraginta annos_ destruxit totum studium Latinorum." I do not know on what occasion this neglect took place.]