Almost more
than to have added to the precious heritage of knowledge for mankind
is it a boon for a scientific observer to have awakened the spirit of
observation in others and to be the founder of a new school of
thought. This Basil Valentine undoubtedly did.

Besides, his work furnishes evidence that the investigating spirit was
abroad just when it is usually supposed not to have been, for the
Thuringian monk surely did not do all his investigating alone, but
must have received as well as given many a suggestion to his
contemporaries.

In the history of education there are two commonplaces that are
appealed to oftener than any other as the sources of material with
regard to the influence of the Catholic Church on education during the
centuries preceding the Reformation. These are the supposed idleness
of the monks, and the foolish belief in the transmutation of metals
and the search for the philosopher's stone which dominated the minds
of so many of the educated men of the time. It is in Germany
especially that these two features of the pre-Reformation period are
supposed to be best illustrated. In recent years, however, there has
come quite a revolution in the feelings even of those outside of the
Church with regard to the proper appreciation of the work of the
monastic scholars of these earlier centuries. Even though some of them
did dream golden dreams over their alembics, the love of knowledge
meant {50} more to them, as to the serious students of any age, than
anything that might be made by it. As for their scientific beliefs, if
there can be a conversion of one element into another, as seems true
of radium, then the possibility of the transmutation of metals is not
so absurd as, for a century or more, it has seemed; and it is not
impossible that at some time even gold may be manufactured out of
other metallic materials.

Of course, a still worthier change of mind has come over the attitude
of educators because of the growing sense of appreciation for the
wonderful work of the monks of the Middle Ages, and even of those
centuries that are supposed to show least of the influence of these
groups of men who, forgetting material progress, devoted themselves to
the preservation and the cultivation of the things of the spirit. The
impression that would consider the pre-Reformation monks in Germany as
unworthy of their high calling in the great mass is almost entirely
without foundation. Obscure though the lives of