No. 7.—Godefroy de Danielz: Universitas, sive de omnibus rebus libri quattuor milia undeviginti (The University; or, the Four Thousand Nineteen Books on Every Subject).
“The tree of knowledge has precisely 4,019 branches,” Godefroy wrote in the preface to his first book. “We begin with the root of all of them, which is the knowledge of God. And first, it is necessary to establish, for the sake of our argument, whether the root of the tree can be properly considered a branch for the purposes of our classification of knowledge. In order to have a properly considered answer to this question, it will be necessary to begin with an understanding of the structure of trees. In the first chapter of the first book, therefore, we shall examine the seed, which is the beginning of the tree and therefore the beginning of our inquiry as well. In the second chapter of the first book, we shall begin our examination of the question of how seeds come to be, and whether the seeds of trees of different kinds are properly subsumed under the heading of seed, or whether more than one εἶδος is indicated by an inexact application of the term seed. In the third chapter of the first book, the seed of the common stone pine of our southern regions is examined. In the fourth chapter of our first book, the seed of the Aleppo pine common in the Levant is considered in its relation to the seed of the stone pine, and shown to be similar but not identical. In the fifth—”
This is as far as the surviving text goes: only the first leaf remains, the rest having been used to line a litter box for Godefroy’s cat Anaxagoras. It is not known how far Godefroy had proceeded with his work, but it is noted that Anaxagoras lived for seventeen years after Godefroy abandoned the project and never ran out of litter.