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SCIENCE 583
war. "What craftiness ofthe foe is there', he asked, 'that does not
yield to the precise knowledge ofthose who have tracked down
the elusive subtleties of things hidden in the very bosom of
nature!* His book is mainly a compilation,
but it was made
with some discrimination. He knew something of vacuums
and siphoning, and asserted that the antipodes
were no more
under his feet than he was under theirs. He rejected
certain
popular stories about animals, but accepted others, for example
the story ofthe barnacle goose growing on trees. The story
that
the lynx had such keen sight
that it could see through nine walls
was supposed to have been verified
experimentally by showing
that a lynx, with nine walls between it and a person carrying a
piece of meat, always stopped, when the at
person stopped,
a
point exactly opposite the meat; Neckham accepted the expert
ment but attributed the result rather to the sense of smell. In
keeping with a tradition dating from the fathers and revived
with especial vigour at Chartres, he tried to show how physical
phenomena described in the Bible, in
particularly Genesis,
could be rationally understood in terms of contemporary
physics. Here again he was discriminating, and several times
questioned the literal truth ofbiblical statements. For example,
he said that Adam's body was made of all four elements, not
only ofearth, as stated in Genesis ; and that in making the state'
ment, 'God made two the sun and the
great lights', moon, 'The
historical narrative follows the judgement of the eye and the
popular notion*, for the moon was not one ofthe largest planets.
Neckham's frankly didactic purpose comes out in his assertion
that the Fall had physical effects on nature, causing the spots on
the moon, the wildness ofanimals, insects to become pests and
other animals venomous, and the existence of disease.
Before Neckham died several other scholars began to lecture
on the 'new Aristotle* at Oxford, among them the great
Robert Grosseteste, first chancellor of the young university in
1214 and chiefornament and guide ofits early years. Grosseteste
recognized clearly that, at that stage of the western revival,
natural philosophers
needed not only to think and observe with
independence,
but also to continue the work ofrecovering the