NOVUM ORGANUM 93 



allow him to employ his industry in gathering many of the 

 fruits of our history and tables in this way, and applying 

 them to effects, receiving them as interest till he can obtain 

 the principal. For our own part, having a greater object in 

 view, we condemn all hasty and premature rest in such pur- 

 suits as we would Atalanta s apple (to use a common allu 

 sion of ours) ; for we are not childishly ambitious of golden 

 fruit, but use all our efforts to make the course of art out 

 strip nature, and we hasten not to reap moss or the green 

 blade, but wait for a ripe harvest. 



CXYI1I. There will be some, without doubt, who, on a 

 perusal of our history and tables of invention, will meet with 

 some uncertainty, or perhaps fallacy, in the experiments 

 themselves, and will thence perhaps imagine that our dis 

 coveries are built on false foundations and principles. There 

 is, however, really nothing in this, since it must needs hap 

 pen in beginnings. 63 For it is the same as if in writing or 

 printing one or two letters were wrongly turned or mis 

 placed, which is no great inconvenience to the reader, who 

 can easily by his own eye correct the error; let men in the 

 same way conclude, that many experiments in natural his 

 tory may be erroneously believed and admitted, which are 

 easily expunged a^d rejected afterward, by the discovery of 

 causes and axioms. It is, however, true, that if these errors 

 in natural history and experiments become great, frequent, 

 and continued, they cannot be corrected and amended by 



63 Bacon s apology is sound, and completely answers those German and 

 French critics, who have refused him a niche in the philosophical pantheon. 

 One German commentator, too modest to reveal his name, accuses Bacon of 

 ignorance of the calculus, though, in his day, Wallis had not yet stumbled upon 

 the laws of continuous fractions ; while Count de Maistre, in a coarse attack 

 upon his genius, expresses his astonishment at finding Bacon unacquainted 

 with discoveries which were not heard of till a century after his death. Ed. 



