Crescit et accendit[1309] sed aqua modica removetur.
Concerning these properties also Thomas quotes Scripture. He then treats briefly of that purest fire which is above the seven regions of the air. Demons dwell in the air “awaiting with torments the judgment day.”[1310] When they appear to men, they assume bodies from that part of the air which is densest and most mixed with the other three elements. But angels coming as messengers to mankind assume bodies in the region of pure fire extending from the sphere of the moon to the firmament.
Other works incorrectly ascribed to Thomas of Cantimpré.
In the life of Albertus Magnus written by Peter of Prussia toward the end of the fifteenth century[1311] it is stated on the authority of the chronicle of Brother Jacobus de Zuzato, master of theology, that Thomas of Cantimpré translated word for word from Greek into Latin “all the books of Aristotle in rational, natural, and moral philosophy and metaphysics which we now use in the schools,[1312] and this at the instance of Saint Thomas of Aquinas, for in Albert’s time all commonly used the old translation.”[1313] The task of translating Aristotle was scarcely one for which Thomas of Cantimpré was qualified, and his name almost never appears in the extant manuscripts of translations of Aristotle.[1314] Peter of Prussia and his source have probably confused William of Moerbeke with Thomas of Cantimpré, as they both came from Brabant, and their names are juxtaposed in a fourteenth century list of writings by Dominicans, where, however, William is said to have “translated all the books of natural and moral philosophy from Greek into Latin at the instance of brother Thomas.”[1315] Because of Thomas of Cantimpré’s chapters on gynecology, the De secretis mulierum usually ascribed to Albertus Magnus has sometimes been attributed to him, but Ferckel denies this.[1316]
[1254] Only extracts of the De natura rerum have been printed (by J. B. Pitra, Spicilegium Solesmense, III, and in HL and Ferckel as noted below). Some discussion of the MSS and a partial list of them will be found in Appendix I to this chapter. I have chiefly used MSS Royal 12-E-XVII, 13th century; Royal 12-F-VI, 14th century; Egerton 1984, 13th century, fols. 34-145; Arundel 323, 13th century, fols. 1-98; and Arundel 164, 15th century, at the British Museum; and BN 347B and 523A at Paris. As any topic to which a chapter is devoted can be found without much difficulty in these MSS, which are divided into books and chapters and equipped with tables of contents, I shall usually not take the time and space to make specific citations by folio in the ensuing chapter.
Of Thomas’s Bonum universale de apibus I have used the 1516 edition.
Some books and articles on Thomas and his natural science are: Bormans, “Thomas de Cantimpré indiqué comme une des sources où Albert le Grand et surtout Maerlant ont puisé les matériaux de leur écrits sur l’histoire naturelle”; in Bulletins de l’Acad. roy. des Sciences de Belgique, XIX, 132-59, Brussels, 1852.
Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie, Munich, 1872, pp. 211-33.
HL 30 (1888) 365-84, Delisle, “La Nature des Choses, par Thomas de Cantimpré,” supplementing and correcting the earlier account by Daunou in HL 19 (1838) 177-84, where the De natura rerum had been called an anonymous work known only from Vincent of Beauvais’ citation of it.
A. Kaufmann, Thomas von Cantimpré, Cologne, 1899, 137 pp., an unfinished work published posthumously without a projected section on Thomas’s natural science, which the author had scarcely begun.