[Footnote 36: Much of the remainder of this chapter is taken from the chapter on What and How They Studied at the Universities, in my book The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries. (Catholic Summer School Press, N. Y.) Some of the sources from which the material is obtained will be found more fully referred to there, and further information with regard to scientific studies at these universities will be found in the chapter on Post-graduate Work in the same book, from which a certain amount of material is used again here.] {303} Anyone who studies the works of the professors at these medieval universities can scarcely fail to become entirely sympathetic toward these scholars, who devoted themselves with so much ardor to every form of learning that interested them, and who did not fail to accomplish at least as much for future generations, as any other generation of university men in history. Professor George Saintsbury in his book On the Rise of Romance and the Flourishing of Allegory, which is really the story of thirteenth century literature in Europe, in the series of Periods of European Literature, [Footnote 37] in summing up the contributions of these medieval professors to human knowledge, said: [Footnote 37: Scribners, 1896.] "Yet, there has always, in generous souls who have some tincture of philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over the work of these generations of mainly disinterested scholars, who, whatever they were, were thorough, and whatever they could not do, could think. And there have been in these latter days some graceless ones who have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century, after an equal interval, will be of any more positive value--whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to the Scholasticism of the thirteenth."