he saw the Blessed in the shape of a great white rose on the banks of the river of light; and the white-robed angels, with wings of gold and faces of flame, as they fly unceasingly back and forth from the seats of the saints to the effulgent river, are compared to bees, following their inborn instinct to make honey, flying from flower to flower, burying themselves in the chalice, and then rising heavily to carry their burden to their hives. In another passage their buzzing noise is compared to the noise of a distant waterfall;"--a touch of nature that could only have come from familiarity with the insects. In is with regard to ants even more than bees that Dante's proclivities for nature study are most evident. When in the Purgatorio, in the twenty-sixth canto, Dante would describe the meeting of souls in Paradise who kiss each other as they speed on their way, he compares them to the ants who as they meet one another touch antennae, thus communicating various messages, and then go on their way. The passage is very striking because, as Dean Plumptre remarks, the picture drawn reminds one almost of Sir John Lubbock's ant studies, or the remarkable descriptions of ant life in Bishop Ken's Hymnotheo. Dante's lines are as follows:-- {360} "So oft, within their dusk brown host proceed This ant and that, till muzzle muzzle meet; Spying their way, or how affairs succeed." Thus did Dante know the whole round of science in his time better than any modern university man. People who take exception to his knowledge fail to realize its environment. They may smile a little scornfully now at his complacent acceptance of the Ptolemaic system without a question, but it must not be forgotten that for three centuries after his time educated men still continued to accept it, and that even the distinguished Jesuit astronomer, Clavius, to whom we owe the Gregorian reformation of the calendar and the restoration of the year to its proper place as regards the heavens, not only accepted it, but worked out his calendar reform problems by means of it. Clavius's great contemporary, Tycho-Brahe, the distinguished Danish astronomer, found no reason to reject it. Even Lord Bacon, who with perverted historical sense is still proclaimed the father of modern experimental science, also accepted the Ptolemaic system, and found that it thoroughly explained all the phenomena of the heavens, while he rejected the Copernican system, then nearly a century before the world, because he thought it did not. The surprise, however, is not in Dante's knowledge of astronomy, but in his familiarity with details of biology that enables him to reason, though in poetic language, with straightforward and logical directness with regard to basic thought in this science that is usually considered so thoroughly modern.