I have thought that perhaps the best way to bring out properly Albert's knowledge in the physical sciences would be to take up Humboldt's headings in their order and illustrate them by quotations from the great scholar's writings--the only scholar to whom the epithet has been applied in all history--and from condensed accounts as they appear in his life written by Sighart. [Footnote 40] These will serve to show at once the extent of Albert's knowledge and the presumptuous ignorance of those who make little of the science of the medieval period.
[Footnote 40: Sighart, Albertus Magnus: Sein Leben und Seine Wisenschaft, Ratisbon, 1857, or its translation by Dixon; Albert the Great, his life and scholastic labors. London, 1870.]
When we have catalogued, for instance, the many facts with regard to astronomy and the physics of light that are supposed to be of much later entrance into the sphere of human knowledge that were grasped by [{318}] Albert, and evidently formed the subject of his teaching at various times at both Paris and Cologne, since they are found in his authentic works, we can scarcely help but be amused at the pretentious lack of knowledge that has relegated their author to a place in education so trivial as is that which is represented in many minds by the term scholastic.
"He decides that the Milky Way is nothing but a vast assemblage of stars, but supposed, naturally enough, that they occupy the orbit which receives the light of the sun. The figures visible on the moon's disc are not, he says, as hitherto has been supposed, reflections of the seas and mountains of the earth, but configurations of her own surface. He notices, in order to correct it, the assertions of Aristotle that lunar rainbows appear only twice in fifty years; 'I myself,' he says, 'have observed two in a single year.' He has something to say on the refraction of a solar ray, notices certain crystals which have a power of refraction, and remarks that none of the ancients and few moderns were acquainted with the properties of mirrors."
Botany is supposed to be a very modern science, and to most people Humboldt's expression that he found in Albertus Magnus's writings some "exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants," will come as an supreme surprise. A few details with regard to Albert's botanical knowledge, however, will serve to heighten that surprise, and to show that the foolish tirades of modern sciolists, who have often expressed their wonder that with all the beauties of nature around them these scholars of the Middle Ages did not devote themselves to nature study, are absurd; because if the critics but knew it, there was profound interest in nature and all her manifestations, and a series of discoveries that anticipated not a little of what we [{319}] consider most important in our modern science. The story of Albert's botanical knowledge has been told in a single very full paragraph by his biographer. Sighart also quotes an appreciative opinion from a modern German botanist, which will serve to dispel any doubts with regard to Albert's position in botany that modern students might perhaps continue to harbor, unless they had good authority to support their opinion, though, of course, it will be remembered that the main difference between the medieval and the modern mind is only too often said to be that the medieval required an authority, while the modern makes its opinion for itself. Even the most skeptical of modern minds, however, will probably be satisfied by the following paragraph:
"He was acquainted with the sleep of plants, with the periodical opening and closing of blossoms, with the diminution of sap through evaporation from the cuticle of the leaves, and with the influence of the distribution of the bundles of vessels on the folial indentations. His minute observations on the forms and variety of plants intimate an exquisite sense of floral beauty. He distinguished the star from the bell-floral, tells us that a red rose will turn white when submitted to the vapor of sulphur, and makes some very sagacious observations on the subject of germination. . . . The extraordinary erudition and originality of this treatise (his tenth book) has drawn from M. Meyer the following comment: 'No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared to him, unless Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted; and after him none has painted nature in such living colors or studied it so profoundly until the time of Conrad Gesner and Caesalpino.' All honor, then, to the man who made such astonishing progress in the science of nature as to find no one, I will not say to surpass, but even to equal him for the space of three centuries."
Pagel in Puschmann's History of Medicine gives a list [{320}] of the books written by Albert which are concerned with the physical sciences. These were: Physica, Books VIII., that is, eight treatises on Natural Science, consisting of commentaries on Aristotle's Physics and on the underlying principles of natural philosophy, and of energy and movement; four treatises concerning the Heavens and the Earth, which contain the general principles of the movement of the heavenly bodies. Besides there is a treatise On the Nature of Places, consisting of a description of climates and natural conditions. This volume contains, according to Pagel, numerous suggestions with regard to ethnography and physiology. There is a treatise on the causes of the properties of the elements, which takes up the specific peculiarities of the elements, according to their physical and geographical relations. To which must be added two treatises on generation and corruption; six books on meteors; five books on minerals; three books on the soul, in which is considered the vital principle; a treatise on nutrition and nutritives; a treatise on the senses; another on the memory and the imagination; two books on the intellect; a treatise on sleep and waking; a treatise on youth and old age; a treatise on breath and respiration; a treatise on the motion of animals, in two books, which concerns the voluntary and involuntary movements of animals; a treatise on life and death; a treatise in six books on vegetables and plants; a treatise on breathing things. His treatise on minerals contains, according to Pagel, besides an extensive presentation of the ordinary peculiarities of minerals, a description of ninety-five different kinds of precious stones, among them the pearl, of seven metals, of salt, vitriol, alum, arsenic, marcasite, nitre, tutia, and amber. Albert's [{321}] volumes on the vegetables and plants were reproduced under the editorship of Meyer, the historian of botany in Germany, and published in Berlin (1867). All Albert's books are available in modern editions.
In a word, there was scarcely a subject in natural science which Albert did not treat, in what would now be considered a formal serious volume, and no department of science that he did not illuminate in some way, not only by the collection of information that had previously been in existence, but also by his own observations, and especially by his interpretations of the significance of the various phenomena that had been observed. His work is especially noteworthy for its lack of dependence on authority and the straightforward way in which the great pioneer of modern science made his observations.
Some of Albert's contemporaries, and especially his pupils, were almost as distinguished as he was himself in the physical sciences.
In a previous chapter we spoke particularly of Roger Bacon's attitude toward the physical sciences, above all in what concerns the experimental method. He was typically modern in the standpoint that he assumed, as the only one by which knowledge of the things of nature can be obtained. It will be interesting now to see the number of things which Friar Bacon succeeded in discovering by the application of the principle of testing everything by personal observation, of not accepting things on second-hand authorities, and of not being afraid to say, "I do not know," in trying to learn for himself. His discoveries will seem almost incredible to a modern student of science and of education who has known nothing before of the progress of science made [{322}] by this wonderful man, or who has known only vaguely that Friar Bacon was a great original thinker in science, in spite of the fact that his life-history is bounded by the thirteenth century. I may say that the material of what I have to say of him, and also of his great contemporaries, Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas, is taken almost literally from the chapter of my book, The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, on What They Studied at the Universities.