a few months earlier, the same views were upheld as unhesitatingly, if not so systematically. Its author was more ingenious than fortunate. What is most certainly known of his life is its unhappy end. Robert Recorde was an eminent physician as well as an able mathematician. In his medical capacity he is believed to have been attached to the households of Edward VI. and Mary, and he undoubtedly died in a debtor's prison, the year of Elizabeth's accession. He has the merit of having introduced algebra—or, as he termed it, "Cossike Practice"—into England in a book named "The Whetstone of Witte," represented by Scott as constituting the sole literary possession of old Trapbois the miser, and as inspiring, by its very title, the young Lord of Glenvarloch with such a lively aversion that not even the desolation of a night in Alsatia could induce him to seek solace in its pages. The same writer's "Castle of Knowledge" might have proved a more efficacious remedy for ennui. It is an astronomical dialogue, the progress of which is enlivened by some touches of quaint satire. We take from it the following extract, noteworthy as (so far as we know) the first printed reference in the English language to the memorable innovation of the Canon of Frauenburg:
Scholar. Nay, sir, in good faith, I desire not to hear such vain phantasies, so far against common reason, and repugnant to the consent of all the learned multitude of writers, and therefore let it pass for ever, and a day longer.
Master. You are too young to be a good judge in so great a matter: it passeth far your learning, and their's also that are much better learned than you, to improve (disprove) his supposition by good argument, and therefore you were best to condemn nothing that you do not well understand; but another time, as I said, I will so declare his supposition, that you shall not only wonder to hear it, but also peradventure be as earnest then to credit it, as you are now to condemn it.[1]The objurgations of Giordano Bruno, on the occasion of his visit to Oxford in 1583, made, we can infer, but little impression on the hardheaded English Peripatetics of the time, and the Copernican system seems to have receded rather than advanced in credit during the last twenty years of the century. "How prove you," asks Blundevile in his "Exercises" (published in 1594), "that there is but one world?" "By the authority," he unhesitatingly replies, "of Aristotle!" and the inertia of his ignorance is noways shaken by his own admission that
- ↑ "The Castle of Knowledge," p. 165. London, 1556. Quoted also by Professor De Morgan, "Companion to the British Almanac for 1837," p. 36.
