The career of Columbus Author:Charles Isaac Elton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. "In his drowsy Paradise The day's adventures for the day suffice ; Its constant tribute of perceptions strange, With sleep and stir in healthy in... more »terchange, Suffice, and leave him for the next at ease Like the great palmer-worm that strips the trees, Eats the life out of every luscious plant, And when September finds them sere or scant, Puts forth two wondrous winglets, alters quite, And hies him after unforeseen delight." There is no reason for doubting the biographer's statement that Columbus was sent to school at Pavia. The great University was then a,t the height of its fame. Its chief renown was in the school of law, where the jurists kept alive the learning of Bartolo and Baldo. It was celebrated, moreover, for the attention paid to discipline and morals, the careful teaching of theology, and the painful study of the philosophy of that day. Pavia has always been celebrated in the faculty of medicine. Natural science was studied, as far as the restrictions on knowledge would admit, in the departments of botany and anatomy, of the knowledge of the earth and of the celestial sphere. We must remember that the real " order of the universe " was only just beginning to be known. It was still a heresy, and a folly besides, to believe in the Antipodes, with the rain shooting upwards and men walking headdownward. It was a dangerous error to think of a diurnal movement of all things : " The Sun flies forward to his brother Sun, The dark Earth follows wheeled in her ellipse." But the age was already excited with the great African discoveries and looking eagerly for fresh wonders of science. The importance of cosmography, of geometry, and especially of nautical astronomy, was recognised on all sides. The professors at Pavia included the new subjects in their cou...« less