known as the "Scientific Revolution". He said this was due to the first appearance of science being swept away by Renaissance humanism before science had to be re-introduced again in the 17th century. Sarton wrote in the Introduction to the History of Science: Franklin and Pasnau More recently the Australian mathematician and historian of science James Franklin has argued that the idea of a European Renaissance is a myth. He characterizes the myth as the view that around the 15th century: There was a sudden dawning of a new outlook on the world after a thousand years of darkness Ancient learning was rediscovered New ideas about intellectual inquiry and freedom replaced reliance on authority Scientific investigation replaced the sterile disputes of the schools. He claims that the Renaissance was in fact a period when thought declined significantly, bringing to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages, and that the twelfth century was the "real, true, and unqualified renaissance". For example, the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, which the later Italian humanists claimed for themselves, was actually accomplished in the 12th century. Franklin cites many examples of scientific advances in the medieval period that predate or anticipate later 'discoveries'. For example, the first advances in geometrical optics and mechanics were in the 12th century. The first steps in understanding motion, and continuous variation in general, occurred in the 14th century with the work of the scientists of the Merton School, at Oxford in the 1330s and 1340s. (Franklin notes that there is no phrase in ancient Greek or Latin equivalent to "kilometres per hour"). Nicole Oresme, who wrote on theology and money, devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics and invented graphs, was the first to perform calculations involving probability, and the first to compare the workings of the universe to a clock. Franklin emphasises how much of later thought, not only in science, was built on a foundation of revived scholasticism, not Renaissance humanism. But little of importance occurs in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus. Like other historians of this period, Franklin attributes the decline to the plague of 1348–1350, (the black death), which killed a third of the people in Europe. Johan Huizinga's examination of this period, The Waning of the Middle Ages, suggests a tendency towards elaborate theory of signs, which Franklin compares with the