Vincent discusses animals at even greater length than vegetation, devoting a book each to birds, fish, and snakes; two to quadrupeds; others to animal life and processes in general; and still others to human physiology and psychology. Again we encounter the marvelous virtues, medicinal and otherwise, inherent in parts of animals, and amusing accounts of their ways and instinctive sagacity. The eagle places certain stones in its nest to counteract its own excessive heat in the hatching process; the bird called “goat-milker” steals milk from goats’ udders by night; the cormorant dips its head beneath the wave to collect signs of the weather and flies shoreward clamorously, if it detects a storm approaching; the parrot bites rocks and drinks wine.[1560] Pope Alexander had a cloak made of the wool of salamanders which, whenever it became soiled, was cleansed by casting it into the flames instead of washing it in water. [1561] Vincent borrows his statements of the virtues of animals and their parts to a large extent from Pliny, whose contents we have earlier sufficiently presented. The medicinal virtues of the human body and its different parts are also set forth in much the usual fashion. Vincent’s considerable number of citations from Physiologus are, like Bartholomew’s, difficult to identify with those of any existing Bestiary. Some seem connected with Scriptural Glosses. It is remarkable that while he cites Physiologus a good deal concerning birds and serpents,[1562] in the book on quadrupeds he does not cite Physiologus for the lion, onager, and other such animals as figure prominently in the so-called Physiologus and Bestiaries.
The tree of life and the bodies of the damned.
In the thirty-first book on paradise and the fall of man Vincent quotes Peter Comestor who, unlike Philo Judaeus, believes in the actual existence of both the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He states that the tree of life was so called from its natural effect, which was so to strengthen in perpetual solidity the body of him who ate of it that he would suffer no infirmity, anxiety, or old age.[1563] Thus Vincent encourages belief not only in transmutation of metals but some natural method of maintaining perpetual youth and health. In the Mirror of History he quotes “the sayings of a certain simple and good man,” to whom, among other revelations concerning the end of the world, the information had been vouchsafed that the torments of the damned would largely consist in the removal from their bodies of all the good qualities which now temper the contrariety of the bad, which would thus be left to vex them unopposed and unassuaged.[1564]
Who sinned the more, Adam or Eve?
Vincent ventures on some amusing theological speculation of his own in discussing the interesting question whether Adam or Eve sinned more in eating the apple.[1565] As might be expected of a medieval man and clergyman, he decides against the woman. Eve sinned in four respects and Adam in only two. First she sinned in doubting the divine warning; second, in wishing to steal divinity for herself; third, in eating contrary to the prohibition; fourth, in tempting man to eat. Adam was not seduced into thinking that he could become divine by this method, but was led astray by a certain amiable good-will, fearing to offend his wife if he did not eat the apple which she offered him. Thus Eve’s intention in sinning was the worse and woman has been punished for it the more severely. Yet Adam sinned in two respects, namely, in secret pride and in eating what had been forbidden. Another reason why Eve was the greater sinner was that she sinned against more persons; against God, against herself, and against her neighbor. But in one respect Adam’s sin was the graver; he knew better, while Eve sinned in a certain measure from ignorance and feminine incapacity.
Classification of the sciences.
We may also note Vincent’s classification of the sciences. As he adopted the common Christian division of the world’s history into six ages, as in the Speculum naturale he followed the order of the six days of creation, so in the third Mirror of Doctrine he made six fields of knowledge; literary, moral, mechanical, physical, mathematical, and theological.[1566] This suggests Roger Bacon’s selection of the five most essential subjects leading up to the study of theology, namely, the languages, mathematics, perspective or optics, experimental or applied science, and moral philosophy.
Concluding estimate of the Speculum naturale.
Such is the Speculum maius or more particularly the Speculum naturale, a work impressive by its very voluminousness and multitude of citations of authorities, valuable as a work of reference, a great storehouse of medieval lore, providing somewhat the same retrospect upon previous medieval and Latin science as Pliny’s Natural History afforded for Hellenistic science. We can, however, recover more of its sources than in the case of Pliny; and when we have read them, Vincent’s excerpts from them drop to a secondary place in our esteem. We see how much of his work had been done for him by previous compilers like Bartholomew of England and Thomas of Cantimpré, and how large a portion of his work is a repetition of Pliny himself. Vincent’s volumes suggest the use of scissors and paste a little too manifestly. On the other hand, his work does not include everything that is in previous medieval writers on nature, to say nothing of others that were to come after him, and the assumption made even by specialists in the study of medieval culture, like Rose, Berthelot, and Mâle, that the Speculum naturale alone is an adequate reflection of medieval natural science and that Vincent is sure to mention any previous writer or treatise,—this assumption is far from true. His Mirror is a glass through which we see darkly and not face to face.
[1514] Our two chief accounts of Vincent’s life and works are still the long article by Daunou in HL XVIII (1835), 449-519, and M. l’Abbé J. B. Bourgeat, Études sur Vincent de Beauvais, Paris, 1856. A little more recent is E. Boutaric, Vincent de Beauvais et la Connaissance de l’antiquité classique au XIIIe siècle, in Revue des Questions Historiques, XVII (1875), 5-57.