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tain Linder had never held naval rank, no action could be contemplated.

Desperately in need, the disappointed man began to dispose of the cherished curios that sailormen collect upon their sea journeys, and finally he decided to offer for sale a document that seemed to him of the highest value. With a pathetic miscalculation he imagined the Pass of Parker to be a substantial asset in the straitened circumstances of his

old age.

Once again he wrote to the Duke, explaining the evil fortune that necessitated his sacrifice of the precious pass.

In suspense he waited for the answer, strong in the hope of realising a sufficient sum to tide over his difficulties.

The unsigned reply to his letter must have come as a bitter blow. It reads as follows:

"To Captain W. LINDER, 14 Southampton Place, Camberwell.

"WALMER CASTLE, October 12th, 1839. "The Duke of Wellington presents his compts. to Captain

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In spite of life's buffetings, the captain lived to extreme age, a lovable but fiery-tempered old sailor.

A last glimpse of him, supplied by proceedings before a justice of the peace, shows him on his eighty-fifth birthday as having returned to his lodging after a right royal dinner given in his honour. Alas! there had been a full-blooded denunciation of the driver of his conveyance, who wished to overcharge his fare. Unsportsmanlike, the many-caped jehu summoned the snowy-haired old mariner for giving him a sound drubbing before a delighted audience of his neighbours.

THE FIRST ENGLISH ENCYCLOPEDIA.

BY W. BRANCH JOHNSON

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On the same night in September 1157 as his illustrious foster-brother, Richard Coeurde-Lion, Alexander Neckham opened his eyes and his career. After a happy childhood spent in the Abbey School-which under its present title of the Grammar School claims to be the oldest in England, he taught while still in his 'teens at the neighbouring town of Dunstable, in a school under the control of the St Albans monastery. But Paris, then the centre of the learned world, was the goal of his ambition; he received there the finishing touches to an already liberal education, and by the time he was three-and-twenty was well known as teacher and disputant. He passed most of his life either travelling in France and Italy in the staffs of prominent churchmen, or

else at Court. Later he became Abbot of Cirencester; but after only a few years' enjoyment of the office died while on a journey, and was buried in Worcester Cathedral, where an effigy traditionally said to be his stands in the cloister.

There is thus little romance in his career for popular imagination to seize upon; even the solitary story that has attached itself to his name is sufficiently dry in its humour to be unacceptable to the many of us who like our tales full-blooded. The Abbey at St Albans was under Benedictine rule, and it was to the Benedictines that Neckham first applied when, as befitted a man of learning, he desired to become a monk. But the Abbot was pleased to make an indifferent pun upon his name by replying, Si bonus est, venias; si nequam nequequam" ("If you are a good man you may come; if wicked-Neckham - by means "). The applicant's pride was hurt by so flippant a reception, and he joined the Augustinians instead; but the joke clung to him for the rest of his life, and is even, in the shape of a mis-spelling, engraved for the amusement of posterity upon his tomb.

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Rather is it as a writer and a cleric that Neckham's story

were content to take from her all the least reputable of her intellectual legacies and to ignore those which might really have benefited them. Their action had points of similarity with the suppositious one of some half-civilised Indian tribe at the downfall of the British Empire adopting and magnifying into a cardinal belief our current foible of, say, refusing to light three cigarettes from one match. The medical school of Salerno, in Italy, stood out

must be told. As the former he was versatile and voluminous; as the latter one of the outstanding men of his time. He could compose very elegant Latin verse, and had some knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic. He was a keen grammarian, and indulged at considerable length in comparative philology as then understood. Roman law and the classical authors were alike familiar to him, and he was widely read in the works of the Church Fathers and contemporary as addicted to fewer superstistandard authors. He exhibited a keen interest in natural science, making use in his writings of Pliny, Ptolemy, Euclid, and others among the great scientists of antiquity; and it is upon his scientific ideas as developed in his encyclopedia that this paper concentrates.

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tions than most others, and certain applied sciences such as glass and parchment-making were raising themselves throughout the twelfth century from the rut of semi-magical practice which had hitherto impeded their progress; but the general theory that the universe resolved itself into four elements

earth and air, fire and water, and that all things belonged especially to one or other of those elements, was still accepted as axiomatic, and formed the foundation of medieval as it had done of Roman and some Greek learning.

The more speculative side of Roman science had been seized upon with avidity by Arabic nations, who could not resist adding to it just that touch of extravagant fancy which turned it from comprehensible if untenable theory into the wildest of jargons. Astrology had been no monopoly either of the East or of Rome; the combination of Roman astrology with that of

Mohammedan peoples invaded the Western world like an epidemic to which Christendom, struggling to evolve a spiritual explanation for the physical facts it scarcely at all understood, fell ready victim. Over all intellectual Europe astrology spread its belief in the influence of the stars, in omens and horoscopes and magical numbers, and the rest of the hocus-pocus; and because men had not yet divined the need for specialisation, regarding the universe as a secret but loosely guarded, astrology and superstition held undisputed sway for the greater part of eight centuries. Then one begins to sense vaguely a coming dawn; a spirit of experiment arose, a spirit which refused to accept any and every theory put forward by authority as demonstrated fact; even the astrologers and magi

were influenced by it. It was the dawn,. in short, of the modern spirit of scientific scepticism; and among its earliest exponents was Alexander Neckham.

As an historical document, then, his encyclopedia, De Rerum Naturis,' is important; it is also a book interesting to browse in, be the mind of the reader not too critical or impatient. We do not desire the writers of the Encyclopedia Britannica' to be chatty; it is just his chattiness that preserves Neckham as a human being. For he does not aim at a modern accuracy, succinctness, and impartiality;

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Concerning the Natures of Things' is written, as he explains in his preface, as a vehicle for moral instruction; and as such it can stray as far and as often as its author wishes from the straight and narrow path of dry-as-dust informativeness.

Still, it does not lack in information; we find what are stated to be the first references by an English writer to the game of chess and to silkworms, and also to glass mirrors, which, though they may possibly have been known in classical times, had since been entirely superseded by mirrors of burnished metal. And in it, too, we find the earliest reference to the mariner's compass, an instrument then probably coming into use in Western Europe.

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iners their course when the pole star is hidden.1

He gives us also the earliest reference to a medieval belief in a man in the moon : the popular notion, he says, is that the man was a rustic condemned to spend the rest of his life there as punishment for stealing thorns. Another "vulgar belief is that the moon causes the tides; but this to Neckham himself is a vexata questio which he does not attempt to resolve! While still discussing the moon, he suggests with tolerable astronomical probability the nature of its surface markings; but he is moved to add piously that whatever may be their true cause, they show that even the heavenly bodies are stained by the sin of man, and not until the planets and the stars are clean shall Holy Church stand altogether spotless before the Lamb.

Among terrestrial phenomena he attributes earthquakes to violent winds and tempests in the caverns below the surface of the world; and we may note in passing an interesting use to which coal seems to have been put in those days. Coal, it was thought, would remain unchanged for ever; and he tells us that it was usual to mark boundaries by a cairn with a coal centre,

since ages afterwards the coal would still be uncorrupted and thus indicate the boundary line beyond all doubt.

Generally he shows himself well versed in physics and astronomy according to the notions of his time. But in biology he "is not ashamed to confess " that there are species of which he knows nothing-shades of the 13,450 kinds of mammals alone which the modern scientist distinguishes! Yet he has a number of stories of which animals are the heroes. He recounts, for example, that of the dog who helped his seafaring master to reef the sails while crossing the Channel. Another story tells of the sea-bird whose cry announced to the sheep in a tidal meadow that the water was rising and higher pasture must be sought. One day, however, its beak became imprisoned in an oyster-shell, and the sheep were all drowned for lack of warning. He tells us further that the Arctic goose, or barnacle bird, which sometimes visits this country in severe winters, is generated from fir-wood soaked in salt water. The wren while it is being roasted is credited with the power of turning itself on the spit. According to Neckham, the hawk keeps itself

1 Within the next few years we find several other references. The analogy of compass and pole star forms the basis of a love poem written about 1205. In 1218 the historian Jaques de Vitri described "an iron needle" which, "after having been in contact with the loadstone, turns itself always towards the northern star." And a little later the compass is again mentioned by Brunetto Latini, the celebrated preceptor of Dante.

2 Cf. Plutarch "Facie in Orbe Lunæ,"

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