at Oxford,[1] of which, however, he makes no use in his text. A third manuscript at Berlin has since been noticed by Birkenmajer.[2] I shall mention a fourth manuscript of the complete treatise and others which contain portions of it, and shall show that Rose's account of Daniel is misleading or erroneous in other respects.
It should perhaps first be noted that before Wright published Daniel's preface Charles Jourdain[3] had spoken of a 'De Philosophia Danielis' as contained in Latin manuscript 6415 of the Bibliothèque Nationale. On turning to the manuscript one fails to find there any treatise by Daniel of Morley, but it seems that Jourdain had somehow received an impression that Adelard of Bath was the author of a treatise entitled 'De Philosophia Danielis', and the manuscript does contain Adelard's 'Questiones Naturales'.
Daniel's work is, however, contained entire in a manuscript of the thirteenth century in the University Library at Cambridge.[4] I have not seen the manuscript itself, but from rotographs of selected pages[5] infer that its text is almost identical with that of Arundel 377 for Daniel's treatise, but somewhat less legible and accurate.
Rose asserted that, on account of Daniel's addiction to Arabian and astrological doctrines, 'his book found no favour in the eyes of the church and was shunned like poison. It has left no traces in subsequent literature; no one has read it and no one cites it.'[6] Such an assertion, made largely on the assumption that only one copy of Daniel's treatise existed, is perhaps sufficiently controverted by the existence of three other manuscripts, of which at least one appears to be twice removed from the original. But, furthermore, in a manuscript of the fourteenth
- ↑ Corpus Christi College MS. 95, thirteenth century, where, according to Sudhoff, the first two of three books ascribed to William of Conches are really the treatise of Daniel. See Holland in Oxford Hist. Soc. Collectanea, ii. 172–3, and Burrows, ibid., 323.
- ↑ Alexander Birkenmajer, 'Eine neue Handschrift des Liber de naturis inferiorum et superiorum des Daniel von Merlai', in Archiv für die Gesch. der Naturwiss. und der Technik, December 1920, pp. 45–51. The manuscript is Berlin, Latin, Quarto 387, 51 fos. Birkenmajer dates it in the twelfth century, but states that it has many slips of copyists and is neither the autograph nor a direct copy from the original. This would seem to indicate a very rapid multiplication and dissemination of Daniel's treatise, which at the earliest was not composed until after 1175.
- ↑ Charles Jourdain, Dissertation sur l'etat de la philosophic naturelle en occident et principalement en France pendant la première moitié du XII siècle, Paris, 1838, p. 101.
- ↑ Cambridge University Library 1935 (Kk. i. 1), thirteenth century, small folio, fos. 98r–105r (not to 115r, as stated in the catalogue, which consequently does not give the right closing words). This, together with the fact that it gives the title as 'De creatione mundi', led me at first to suppose that this was a fragment of the treatise similar to those described subsequently in this paper.
- ↑ Fos. 98r, 98v, 100r, 105r.
- ↑ Rose in Hermes, viii. (1874) 331.
