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SCIENCE 577
probably made about 1000-1050. As in most early herbals, the
text is confined to the name, locality found, and medical uses of
each herb; there are no descriptions for identification, which
was to be done by means of diagrammatic paintings, copied
from the
manuscript source and not from nature. About 500
English names are used in this herbal, showing an extensive
knowledge ofplants, many ofthem native plants which could
not have been known from the Latin sources.
Some time before the Norman Conquest Canute and the Earl
Harold introduced into England astronomers and mathex
maticians from Lotharingia, the scene ofa scientific revival in
the eleventh century, and after the Conquest William con'
tinued the same policy. The schools of Lotharingia had been
the first to benefit from scientific writings translated from
Arabic, especially those dealing with astronomy and the astro/
labe (see PL 125 a). In 1091 Walcher, the Lotharingian abbot
ofMalvem, observed an eclipse of the moon while travelling
in
Italy, and noted the considerably different hour at which
the same eclipse was observed by a brother monk in England.
The following year he was able to fix a second eclipse accurately
by means ofan astrolabe. Some years
later he worked out a set
oflunar tables based on this observation, using, in a first treatise,
the clumsy method ofRoman fractions, but in a second, written
in 1 120, using the Arabic method of degrees, minutes, and
seconds derived from translations made by a converted Spanish
Jew named Petrus Alphonsi, who seems to have spent some
time in England. In the twelfth century, England was to play
a leading part in the revival of science brought about by this
great movement of translating, which, by the third quarter of
the thirteenth century, had all put nearly
the known works of
Greek science and many Arabic commentaries into Latin.
From the end ofclassical times Greek scientific writings had
passed through a number of different languages. In the sixth
and seventh centuries many of these were translated in Syria