The Odd corners of scholarship, so very often dusty and unrewarding to the researcher, occasionally provide a forgotten knickknack which completes the décor of a period room. Seventeenth-century scholasticism is for most of us a period room, whose pieces such as triposes, disputations, declamations, quadragesimals, clerums, and so on, we find too uncomfortable for our twentieth-century use and perhaps a bit too ugly for our ranch-style academic taste. To brighten the room a bit, even for themselves, the seventeenth-century Cambridge scholastics made use of a harmless piece of bric-a-brac called the prevarication or varier's speech. It is a tragedy that most of these are now lost, for with proper evaluation a history of seventeenth-century thought might almost be written from them alone.

In Vol. 1, p . 73, of his Manuscritos Peruanos en las Bibliotecas Extrangeras (Lima, Peru, 193 5) Rubén Vargas Ugarte takes the following sonnet from MS 373 (Fonds espagnol) of the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale:

Pensando que ocupava fuerça y arte
Amor, o hermosíssima señora,
en no sufrir desorden como agora
que sufre a mi vajeza desearte;
desarmado de aviso osé mirarte,
mas el cruel que nunca se está un ora
luego desde tus ojos donde él mora me
passó el coraçón de parte a parte.
No sé qué premio espera ni qué gloria
por haberme vencido en tal estado,
no sé qué palma sigue tal victoria.
Suene el gran caso digno de memoria,
hecho fuerte de su reyno a un desarmado;
vencio el Amor, vien sonora es su victoria.

Bearing in mind that science is a product of its environment and at the same time an important modifier of that environment, I shall try to draw an over-all picture of science in the Renaissance. This summary barely scratches the surface of the wealth of material for this exuberant era. The mathematical and physical sciences are emphasized and a number of really important men are consciously omitted.

It would be foolish to plunge into our topic without defining, at least in broad outline, what is meant here by the term Renaissance. Certainly, there is a difference between ancient and modern science.