Charles Jourdain asserts that only a part of Aristotle was known before 1200 A.D., and that this was through the translation of Boethius. (See Ueberweg: Hist. Philos., I., 367.) So that if Hermannus Contractus translated Aristotle at so early a date, it shows that his rendering was in advance of most, if not of nearly all those which were used in the Western schools. He had a brother, or uncle, Manegold, who died in Palestine. He had another brother Werner, who afterward became a legate to Gregory VII. (Hildebrand) in the fierce struggle between Pope and Emperor in 1077. And he was further well placed both by his family connections and his situation at a centre of learning, to secure the best manuscripts and the best Arabic instruction. (See an elaborate dissertation in Wegelin: _Thes. Rerum Suevicarum_, II., p. 120.) It evinces decided wisdom and toil on his part to have undertaken and completed this translation; and there is no doubt that the humble paralytic from his bed of suffering influenced materially the scholastic movements of the coming centuries. Could he have seen the swarming thousands who built the abbey of the Paraclete; could he have witnessed in vision the uprising of such schools as St. Victor in France and Oxford in England; could he have heard Roger Bacon confess his indebtedness to those pages; could he have foreseen the infinite consequences both to the preservation and the hindrance of human thought, with what strange zeal he would have traced each painful line! But he could not know it. He had removed at thirty years of age to his perpetual celibacy at Reichenau—Augia the Rich, as it is called in the Latin tongue. It is built on an island in the western arm of the Lake of Constance. And there, with great mountains to gaze upon and fair waters to catch for him the rosy light of evening; with the brethren of the convent laboring cheerfully in their fields or toiling in their cells, Hermann of Vöhringen, Hermann of Reichenau, Hermannus Contractus, Hermann der Gebrechliche, Hermann the Cripple, spent his uneventful life.