Note 93 — Chapter V · Progress of the Arts in the Middle Ages.

See Mr. Willis’s admirable Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, chap. ii. Since the publication of my first edition, Mr. Willis has shown that much of the “mason-craft” of the middle ages consisted in the geometrical methods by which the artists wrought out of the blocks the complex forms of their decorative system. To the general indistinctness of speculative notions on mechanical subjects prevalent in the middle ages, there may have been some exceptions, and especially so long as there were readers of Archimedes. Boëthius had translated the mechanical works of Archimedes into Latin, as we learn from the enumeration of his works by his friend Cassiodorus (Variar. lib i. cap. 45), “Mechanicum etiam Archimedem latialem siculis reddidisti.” But Mechanicus was used in those times rather for one skilled in the art of constructing wonderful machines than in the speculative theory of them. The letter from which the quotation is taken is sent by King Theodoric to Boëthius, to urge him to send the king a water-clock.