The Saracenic conquests in Spain brought in vast stores of oriental knowledge, and frequent intercourse with that land, and with Palestine, for devotional or commercial purposes, tended greatly to increase the treasure, and a taste for its enjoyment. But Arabian literature was a forced plant in Europe, and was as transient in its bloom as it was unnatural in its maturity. Some traces of a more substantial cultivation, however, were yet extant within the walls of Bagdad, and thence the crusaders secured whatever could be advantageously employed. But the fire of inventive genius, expressed in literary and scientific research, which once characterized the Arabians, had passed away; the seeds of preliminary culture had been sown, and their mission ended with the predestined work of their hands. The arts and sciences of the Arabians were as unique as their authors; too practical to be elegant, and too fanciful for ordinary use. To their skill in medicine, and the exactness of arithmetic, they added the vagueness of the talisman and horoscope. Astronomy was lost in astrology, chemistry in alchymy, and medicine in empiricism. But amid the darkness of their errors dwelt gleams of scientific light superior to any the world had yet seen. The principal utility lay in the fact that these dim intimations prompted western Europe to break through habitual associations in matters of taste and knowledge, and rendered her the instrument of her own intellectual resuscitation, by exciting an ardor in mental pursuits hitherto unknown.
The crusades happily exhausted the military spirit of Europe, and prepared the way for advancement in the arts of peace. This done, the decline of the feudal system was hastened by the necessity of meeting the enormous expenses thereby incurred. Many baronial estates were consequently sold, and thus by degrees were abolished those impediments which had long been adverse to all the varied forms of culture by which the afflictions of man are mitigated, or his toils abridged. The great evil which then required to be abolished had given strength to a greater good that was to succeed; the commerce which was mainly created to carry supplies to the crusaders, was ready, on the decline of martial renown, to go still further in search of a new world, or to hold mercantile speculations with the remotest regions of the old. Consequent upon the facilities and refinements of navigation, followed all those arts of utility and convenience by which the productions of nature are applied or improved. The arts of weaving and dyeing, the perfection of paper and the press, as well as gunpowder and the compass, were the results of quickened industry and enlarged commerce. All great civilizing powers then attained a simultaneous and distinct culmination over a new field and under brighter auspices, when each department of progressive pursuit, the commercial, the literary, and the military, was furnished, at the fall of the feudal system, with its own peculiar instrument of invincible conquest.
Bearing in mind that Charles Martel, Peter the Hermit, Richard of the Lion Heart, and John Sobieski, with their mighty co-agents in the great preparatory work above described, all arose on the western edge of the field and age we are now exploring, let us proceed briefly to notice the still grander developments which followed thereupon.
The westward track on high was determined by the early astronomers of Egypt. Thales, the father of Greek astronomy, made great advances upon the speculations he derived from the Egyptians, and expounded them in his own country. A scholar of his was the first person who pointed out the obliquity of the circle in which the sun moves among the stars, and thus "opened the gate of nature." Certainly he who had a clear view of that path in the celestial sphere, made that first step which led to all the rest. But when Greek science fell with Ptolemy, there was apparently no further advance till the rise of Copernicus. During this interval of thirteen hundred and fifty years, as before stated, the principal cultivators of astronomical science were the Arabians, who won their attainments from the Greeks whom they conquered, and from whom the conquerors of western Europe again received back their treasure when the love of science and the capacity for its use had been sufficiently awakened in their minds. In mechanics, also, no marked advancement was made from Archimedes till the time of Galileo and Stevinus. The same was true of hydrostatics, the fundamental problems of which were solved by the same great teacher, whose principles remained unpursued till the age of Leo X. began to give perfection to the true Archimedean form of science. As early as Euclid, mathematicians drew their conclusions respecting light and vision by the aid of geometry; as, for instance, the convergence of rays which fall on a concave speculum. But, down to a late period, the learned maintained that seeing is exercised by rays proceeding from the eye, not to it; so little was the real truth of optical science understood. In this respect, as in most others, it was attempted to explain the kind of causation in which scientific action originates, rather than to define the laws by which the process is controlled.
In the darkest period of human history, astronomy was the Ararat of human reason; but it became especially the support and rallying point of the scientific world, when intellect at large was astir to investigate the new wonders which rose to view with the effulgent noon of the middle age. Alphonso, king of Castile, in the year 1252, corrected the astronomical tables of Ptolemy; and Copernicus, of Thorn, revived the true solar system, about 1530. Tycho Brahe and Longomontanus brought forward opposing systems, but which were soon rejected. Kepler, soon after, gave the first analysis of planetary motions, and discovered those laws on which rests the theory of universal gravitation. Galileo advocated the Copernican system; and by the aid of one of the first telescopes, discovered the satellites of Jupiter. Hygens discovered Saturn's ring, and fourth satellite; and four others were soon after noticed by Cassini. Thus was the great secret of the sidereal universe read, its movements comprehended, and the glories thereof proclaimed, while emancipated and sublimated thought, from the loftiest throne of observation began forever to soar aloft.
As a ray of light became the conductor of mind upward into infinite space, so a bit of gray stone projected the invisible bridge which spans from continent to continent, and makes the path over trackless oceans plain as a broad highway. The properties of this wonderful mineral were not unknown to the ancients, who, Pliny says, gave the name "Magnet" to the rock near Magnesia, in Asia Minor; and the poet Hesiod also makes use of the term "magnet stone." The compass was employed twelve hundred and fifty years before the time of Ptolemy, in the construction of the magnetic carriage of the emperor Tsing-wang; but the Greeks and Romans were completely ignorant of the needle's pointing toward the north, and never used it for the purpose of navigation. Before the third crusade, the knowledge of the use of the compass for land purposes had been obtained from the East, and by the year 1269 it was common in Europe. But as the time approached when God would advance, by mightier strides than before, the work of civilization, he discovered the nations one to another, through the agency of a tiny instrument, then first made to vibrate on the broadest sublunary element, and the throne of grandest power. The discovery of the polarity of the magnet, and the birth of scientific navigation resulting therefrom, was as simple as it was providential. Some curious persons were amusing themselves by making swim in a basin of water a loadstone suspended on a piece of cork. When left at liberty, they observed it point to the north. The discovery of that fact soon changed the aspect of the whole world. This invention, which is claimed by the Neapolitans to have been made by one of their citizens about the year 1302, and by the Venetians as having been introduced by them from the East, about 1260, led to the discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492. When the mariner's compass was needed, it was produced, and from the most western port of the Old World, mind shot outward forever! Like the relation between the earth's axis and the auspicious star which attracts the eye of the wanderer, and shows the North in the densest wilderness or on the widest waste, so from eternity the magnetic influence had reference to the business of navigation, and the true application of this arrived at the destined moment, when, in connection with correlative events, in like manner prepared, it would produce the greatest good. After eastern talent had proved the form of earth, western genius discovered the vastness of oceanic wealth. The Pillars of Hercules were passed by the great adventurers at sea in the fifteenth century, and trophies were won richer by far than ever graced the triumphs of an Alexander on shore. The works of creation were doubled, and every kingdom forced its treasures upon man's intellect, along with the strongest inducements to improve recent sciences as well as ancient literatures, for the widest and most beneficent practical ends.
The style of working with Providence is, to attain some grand result, compatibly with ten thousand remote and subordinate interests. One yet higher and more comprehensive instrumentality was requisite to garner all the past, ennoble the present, and enrich the future, and at the fitting moment for its appearance and use, the press stood revealed.
Though the Chinese never carried the art of writing to its legitimate development in the creation of a perfect phonetic alphabet, they yet preceded all other nations in the discovery of a mode of rapidly multiplying writings by means of printing, which was first practiced by Fung-taou as early as four centuries before its invention in Europe. Beyond that first step the old East never advanced; there each page of a book is still printed from an entire block cut for the occasion, having no idea of the new western system of movable types. What astrology was to astronomy, alchemy to chemistry, and the search for the universal panacea to the system of scientific medicine, the crude process of block-printing was to the perfected press. Engraved wooden plates were re-invented by Coster, at Harlaem, as early as 1430; but the great invention of typography is accredited to Guttenberg, who was assisted by Schoeffer and Faust. This occurred in 1440; and stereotype printing, from cast metallic plates, is due to Vander-Mey, of Holland, who first matured it about 1690.
The time had come when men were required to comprehend the ancients, in order to go beyond them; and at the needful crisis, printing was given to disseminate all precious originals throughout the world, in copies innumerable. Had the gift been bestowed at an earlier period, it would have been disregarded or forgotten, from the want of materials on which to be employed; and had it been much longer postponed, it is probable that many works of the highest order, and most desirable to be multiplied, would have been totally lost. Coincident with this most conservative invention, was the destruction of the Roman empire in the East. In the year 1453, Constantinople was captured by the Turks, and the encouragement which had been shown to literature and science at Florence, induced many learned Greeks to seek shelter and employment in that city. Thus, the progressive races were favored with multiplied facilities for gathering and diffusing those floods of scientific illumination vouchsafed to deliver from the fantasies that had hitherto peopled the world—from the prejudices that had held the human mind in thrall. When Guttenberg raised the first proof-sheet from movable types, the Mosaic record—"God said, let there be light, and light was"—flashed upon earth and heaven with unprecedented glory, and that light of intellect must shoot outward, upward, and abroad forever! It was not a lucky accident, but the golden fruit of omniscient design, an invention made with a perfect consciousness of its power and object, to congregate once isolated inquirers and teachers beneath one temple, wherein divine aspirations might unite and crown with success all the scattered and divided efforts for extending the empire of love and science over the whole civilized earth.
On the banks of the same river Rhine, where printing first attained a practical use in the hands of a soldier, the discovery of gunpowder was made by a priest. Its properties were obscurely known long before the crusades, but are said to have been first traced in their real nature by Berthold Schwartz, and were made known in 1336, ten years before cannon appeared in the field of Crecy. Small arms were unknown until nearly two centuries afterward, and were first used by the Spaniards, about the year 1521. Fortified with this new power, Cortez, with a handful of soldiers, was able to conquer the natives of Mexico, the most civilized and powerful of all the nations then on this western continent. From the hour when the blundering monk was blown up by his own experiment, gross physical strength was surrendered to expert military science; and gunpowder has increasingly exalted intellect in the conduct of war, not less than in the triumphs of peace.