The Life & Work of Roger Bacon

lecturer was Grosseteste; but we may well believe it. It may be supposed that the influence of Adelard of Bath, the first translator of Euclid had left its traces. Twenty years before the close of the twelfth century, we hear of two Englishmen, Alexander Neckham and Alfred of Sershall, lecturing in Paris on the Physics of Aristotle, which had been recently introduced from the school of translators from Arabic directed by Archbishop Raymond of Toledo.

But the University of Paris, situated nearer to the center of the spiritual forces that swayed medieval society, had grown up under the dialectical influences of theological controversy. When Bacon went there, perhaps around 1240, he found what is called, rather vaguely and inaccurately, the scholastic philosophy in the fullness of its growth, with the expanded scope given to it by the recent permission to study the Physics, Meta-

The writer referred to is Adelard of Bath, who lived in the early part of the twelfth century. He fills an important place in the history of medieval science. He was the first translator of Euclid into Latin; not, however, from Greek, but from Arabic. A more complete translation was made in the following century by Campanus. (See Weissenborn, Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Mathematik, Third Issue, Leipsic, 1880, pp. 141–166.) Adelard studied in the schools of Tours and Laon, and subsequently traveled in Greece and Asia Minor. In Bacon's mathematical treatise, as yet unpublished, he is frequently mentioned, always under the name Alardus. (See Sloane MSS. 2156, ff. 74–97.)—Op. Maj., vol. i, p. 6 n.