They also cultivated in this monastery the study of natural philosophy and astronomy.  There remain of Beda one entire book and some scattered essays on these subjects.  This book, De Rerum Natura, is concise and methodical, and contains no very contemptible abstract of the physics which were taught in the decline of the Roman Empire.  It was somewhat unfortunate that the infancy of English learning was supported by the dotage of the Roman, and that even the spring-head from whence they drew their instructions was itself corrupted.  However, the works of the great masters of the ancient science still remained; but in natural philosophy the worst was the most fashionable.  The Epicurean physics, the most approaching to rational, had long lost all credit by being made the support of an impious theology and a loose morality.  The fine visions of Plato fell into some discredit by the abuse which heretics had made of them; and the writings of Aristotle seem to have been then 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,