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the town in those cleanly times) ran between his horse's legs, and made him stumble; on which Philip, falling forward, received so much injury that he died the next morning, on the third day of October, in the year of Grace 1131. His grieved and irritated father forthwith issued a proclamation that in future no swine should be allowed to run about in the streets of cities and towns, and to this order the people were fain to submit; but the monks of the order of St. Anthony entered an energetic and successful protest, stating to his Majesty that it was contrary to the respect and reverence due to their patron saint (who may certainly be called the patron saint of pigs) to prevent the swine of their houses, which were the swine of St. Anthony, from enjoying the liberty of going where they (the swine) thought fit.

The subject of the remonstrance, and the rights of the saint and pigs, were solemnly deliberated in council, where it was finally decided to grant the monks of that order an exclusive privilege to be nasty, and to allow their swine to wallow in the streets without molestation, provided only that they had bells tied round their necks. -Histoire de la Ville de Paris, par Sauval.

In old pictures Saint Anthony is almost invariably painted with a sow at his feet.

An old English adage says, " Every man to his taste, as the Welshman said when he kissed his cow." The Italians say, "There is no accounting for taste; St. Anthony loved a sow." This arose out of a queer story in the legendary life of that saint.

XXVII. ETIQUETTE ON THE SCAFFOLD.

On the 9th of March 1648, in pursuance of a sentence passed by Cromwell and the Commonwealth, the Royalist leaders, the Duke of Hamilton, the Earl of Holland, and the Lord Capel, were executed in front of Westminster-Hall. They were brought to the block

and beheaded one at a time, each of them addressing the people; and the Lord Capel being the last of the three, of whom he was undoubtedly the most honourable and the best.

"As soon as his lordship had ascended the scaffold, he looked very vigorously about, and asked whether the other lords had spoken to the people with their hats on?' and being told that they were bare,' he gave his hat to his servant, and then with a clear and strong voice he spoke."-Clarendon Hist. Reb.

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XXVIII. MISCELLANEOUS POINTS * IN THE HISTORY OF THE SCIENCES.

We are

I.-Persecution for matters of opinion. accustomed to believe, that the spirit of persecution which prevailed during the "dark" ages was a consequence of ignorance, which was confined only to the ignorant; and that men of information, even in those days, were guiltless of desiring to enforce their opinions literally. We imagine, for example, that the wrongs of Galileo would arouse the indignation of all contemporary men of learning at least. What we here do, is to give instances to the contrary by producing the printed opinions of two men of education, one a Frenchman, the other an Italian, both written within the half century preceding the forced recantation of Galileo.

Vieta, the first who so materially extended algebra as to entitle Europe to claim the honour of having introduced new principles into the science received from Asia, was a man remarkable for every kind of knowledge. He was,

* In preserving such circumstances as we have thought remarkable, we have attended to no rule but this: never to say of any work more than we have actually seen in the work itself. Of all the things which can lead to inaccuracy, that of citing citations is the most dangerous; and we shall take care, if obliged to do so, to name the citer as well as the author.

VOL. I.

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by the confession of an opponent, as well as from what is otherwise known of him, statesman, diplomatist, lawyer, theologian, mathematician, orator, and poet. (Born in 1540, died in 1603). He lived during the reformation of the calendar, which was completed by Pope Gregory the Thirteenth in 1582; the plan of Lilius, then dead, having been committed to the execution of the Jesuit Clavius, celebrated as the commentator upon so many of the Greek geometers: This subject then exercised much of the attention of the learned, not only because the correct time of keeping Easter was a point of faith, but because it had divided the Eastern and Western churches for centuries, and had been written upon, and considered a principal application of astronomy, by many authors on that science; Roger Bacon, for instance. Among others, Vieta wrote in opposition to the scheme patronised by Clavius, who answered very mildly, and referred all his critics to his forthcoming work. Vieta became furious, and published, in 1602, his " Adversus Christ. Claviuin Expostulatio;" in which he says that Clavius, "in his contempt of religion, would rather fall into crime, and overturn all things by any hazard, rather than appear ignorant of the matter;" "that he was a false mathematician and theologian, if indeed he had any title to either appellation;" that the protestants, if he did not take warning, would get the true calendar from their own reason, and not from the papal authority; "that Augustus Cæsar, one Pontifex maximus, had altered the calendar arranged by Julius Cæsar, another Pontifex maximus," which, curiously enough, he cites as a precedent for his own Pontifex. He calls upon the society of Jesuits to take up the matter, and ends by assuring them that all religious men look for nothing less at their hands than that all who obstruct a work of so much benefit to the Christian republic (as his own reformation of the calendar, of course,) should be "driven out as exiles from the happy congregation of the pious." So much for the toleration of Vieta: it only remains to add, that he was wrong in most of his notions on the subject. In the mean while, (in 1603,) an advocate for Clavius rose up in the person

of Theodosius Rubeus, who appears to have been a personal friend of the Pope, and who published his answer, under the usual permission of his superiors; which circumstances, with the style of the passage we shall cite, incline us to suspect that the arm of power was ready to be raised by the church in case the gentle hint was not taken by Vieta. This Rubeus says, in his dedication, by permission, "Since, most holy father, this matter, of which the cognisance belongs to you, has been agitated, I have thought proper, under your most sacred name, to give this my admonition publicly, to the end that every handle of provocation may be taken away from Vieta, and an end put to this controversy by your authority." Such language never could have been addressed to a Pope by a priest, permissu superiorum," unless the sentiment contained had been avowed by the party addressed. Vieta, however, died that same year, and thus perhaps escaped what we would rather had fallen upon him than upon the liberal and charitable Galileo. We imagine the illustrious Frenchman (for illustrious he was in many ways) would have been somewhat astonished had he been told that a future age would say his paschal lucubrations proved nothing except that it is not wise for a man of note to write in anger anything which is likely to last a couple of centuries.

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II.-On the method of finding Easter above mentioned. We owe the confusion attending moveable feasts, to the idea already alluded to, that the proper time of holding Easter was a matter of religious importance. But we may easily show that, in that case, a perfect performance of religious duties is unattainable, without a geometrically accurate knowledge of the sun, moon, and planets. Supposing it granted, that Easter Sunday ought to be the Sunday following the full moon which follows the 21st of March, and that if that full moon happen on a Sunday, the next is Easter Sunday: the following case might happen. Astronomical prediction might place the time of full moon at half a second after twelve o'clock on Saturday night or Sunday morning, in which case Easter Sunday should be the next Sunday. But even at this period,

we cannot be sure of being right on such a point within about a second, so that it might happen that the true full moon would be half a second before twelve o'clock, in which case Easter Sunday would begin in one half second more. But if we were arguing with a divine of the sixteenth century, we should state the case as follows, which would be quite in keeping with the style of thinking of that period. Suppose the full moon to happen exactly at the moment at which the centre of the sun was opposite to the visible meridian which (before the invention of clocks) must have been the admitted time of midnight. The full moon in that case happens neither on Saturday nor Sunday. Which then is Easter Sunday; the one which begins with full moon, or the next? A catholic would have referred to the church, but it is not likely that all the college of cardinals would have been of one mind; and protestants (many of whom had a more than ceremonial veneration for correct Easter) would have been sadly puzzled.

The rule given for finding Easter takes the average moon and sun, or two imaginary bodies which move uniformly at the average rate of the real ones. But the real places of the sun and moon are found by making various corrections of these average places,* which, as to the moon, might make more than a quarter of an hour of difference. And it is very likely that various Easters in different years are wrongly calculated on this account. Such an occurrence would not now give much concern perhaps to a single individual on the face of the globe; nevertheless, many might like, as a matter of curiosity, to know how to find Easter-day for themselves: we shall therefore give the following application of arithmetic to hot crossed buns, extracted from† Delambre's Hist. d'Ast. Mod.

* See the paper on the Moon's Orbit, in the Companion to the Almanac for 1834.

The form in which this rule is given, is extracted from Sir Harris Nicolas's useful Chronology of History, (in Lardner's Cyclopædia,) by permission. We have compared it with Delambre.

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