the only ones
much regarded, even in natural philosophy, in which branch of science
alone they are unworthy of him. Beda entirely follows his system. The
appearances of Nature are explained by matter and form, and by the four
vulgar elements, acted upon by the four supposed qualities of hot, dry,
moist, and cold. His astronomy is on the common system of the ancients,
sufficient for the few purposes to which they applied it, but otherwise
imperfect and grossly erroneous. He makes the moon larger than the
earth; though a reflection on the nature of eclipses, which he
understood, might have satisfied him of the contrary. But he had so much
to copy that he had little time to examine. These speculations, however
erroneous, were still useful; for, though men err in assigning the
causes of natural operations, the works of Nature are by this means
brought under their consideration, which cannot be done without
enlarging the mind. The science may be false or frivolous; the
improvement will be real. It may here be remarked, that soon afterwards
the monks began to apply themselves to astronomy and chronology, from
the disputes, which were carried on with so much heat and so little
effect, concerning the proper time of celebrating Easter; and the
English owed the cultivation of these noble sciences to one of the most
trivial controversies of ecclesiastic discipline.

Beda did not confine his attention to those superior sciences. He
treated of music, and of rhetoric, of grammar, and the art of
versification, and of arithmetic, both by letters and on the fingers;
and his work on this last subject is the only one in which that piece
of antique curiosity has been preserved to us. All these are short
pieces; some of them are in the catechetical method, and seem designed
for the immediate use of the pupils in his monastery, in order to
furnish them with some leading ideas in the rudiments of these arts,
then newly introduced into his country. He likewise made, and probably
for the same purpose, a very ample and valuable collection of short
philosophical, political, and moral maxims, from Aristotle, Plato,
Seneca, and other sages of heathen antiquity. He made a separate book of
shining commonplaces and remarkable passages extracted from the works of
Cicero, of whom he was a great admirer, though he seems to have been not
an happy or diligent imitator in his style. From a view of these pieces
we may form an idea of what stock in the scien