270 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



in Picavet's charming essay on La place de Roger Bacon parmi 

 les philosophes du XIII e Steele. The book attempts to give an 

 account of Roger Bacon's manifold activities by people who are 

 able to judge and to criticise the various departments of his 

 work. As far as it goes, it is well done, but it would take 

 several such volumes to touch the whole gamut of Bacon's 

 work. 



Carlyle, who was rarely generous to science and would 

 know nothing of it, said that in this thirteenth century Roger 

 Bacon and Albertus Magnus were " cheering appearances " ; he 

 quaintly and truly suggests that they were not blind to Nature's 

 greatness, but had no poetic reverence of her, so that they 

 ventured fearlessly into her recesses and extorted from her 

 many a secret. There is no doubt that Roger Bacon's unfolding 

 of physical science was the first of that long series of victories 

 which will make man more and more Nature's king, more and 

 more " master of things." Bacon is the prophet and one of the 

 patriarchs of modern science : he is of the race of Galileo and 

 of Newton, and Science owes a much larger debt to this poor 

 brother of the Order of St. Francis than most of its votaries 

 dream of. It seems not a little ironical that a Franciscan monk 

 should have given the most powerful impulse to natural science 

 which it has ever received. 



" Friar Roger Bacon of the English nation and the county of 

 Dorset," as John Rous called him, is said to have been born in 

 1214, probably at Ilchester, near the county of Dorset. This 

 was an era of the happiest augury for such a spirit as his. The 

 Magna Charta, which was the foundation of our national freedom, 

 was signed before he was a year old, and his work laid the 

 foundation of our intellectual freedom. The breath of such a 

 time could not fail to penetrate even college and cloister walls. 

 The main events of his life are few. He studied at Oxford, lived 

 there, and later, before 1245, went to Paris, where he saw 

 Alexander of Hales (the irrefragable doctor) and heard William 

 of Auvergne and John de Garlandia. He joined the Franciscan 

 Order, but where, or in what year, is not known. In 1266 Pope 

 Clement IV., who had become interested in Bacon's earlier work 

 whilst Archbishop of Narbonne, requested him to send copies of 

 his works to Rome. Bacon felt that his great opportunity had 

 come, and eventually sent to the Pope the work which appeared 

 later as the Opus Majus. He appears to have returned to 



