Learning in Europe was greatly advanced by the foundation of the famous monastery of Monte Cassino, by ST. BENEDICT, near Naples, in the year 529. The religious houses of this order, of which Monte Cassino was the parent, were the means of sheltering in those troublous times the men who devoted themselves to literature and secular learning, as well as to the severities of the religious life. In these peaceful abodes men learned how to make the desert blossom as the rose, agriculture and other civilizing occupations were studied and successfully practised, and from the sixth century to the ninth such medical knowledge as existed in Europe chiefly emanated from these abodes of piety, industry, and temperance. Missionaries issued from them to convert and civilize the nations; and wherever the monks went, they acted as the healers of the sick, as well as the spiritual advisers of the sinner. Everywhere they cultivated medicinal plants, whose properties they learned to understand; by interchange of thought and comparison of opinions every monastery, with its constant going and coming of the brethren, became an exchange of knowledge: the science of Spain was carried to Italy, that of Italy to France and England, which in their turn contributed to the general stock of information such items of knowledge as they possessed. “If science,” says Schlegel,[721] “was then of a very limited range, it was still quite proportioned to the exigencies and intellectual cultivation of the age; for mankind cannot transcend all the degrees of civilization by a single bound, but must mount slowly and in succession its various grades.”