ROGER BACON. l6l 



to pay the scribes for transcribing his works? Further 

 than this, how was such a task to be done in the monas- 

 tery, where he met hostility at every hand? The Pope 

 sent him no money, nor even dared to interfere in his be- 

 half with the ruling powers of his order. 



Nevertheless, he undertook the task single-handed, and 

 in eighteen months, by dint of labor which, in the face of 

 the difficulties encountered, seems almost superhuman, he 

 had composed and written out and dispatched his Opus 

 Majus, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium. Almost imme- 

 diately after receiving these, the pope died. For ten years 

 thereafter Bacon was allowed to prosecute his studies in 

 peace. Then, in 1278, in his 64th year, a council of Fran- 

 ciscans condemned his works, and he was sentenced to 

 solitary confinement in his cell, and it is generally believed 

 that he died while thus immured. 



Such, in brief, was the career of the first great apostle 

 of experimental science who, in an age thp 'iole temper 

 of which was against scientific and philosophical studies, 

 conceived of the essential connection between all sciences 

 and their dependence upon the fixed and universal laws of 

 nature; who brought grammar, philology, geography, 

 chronology, arithmetic and music into scientific form ; 

 who laid the foundations of optics ; who discovered the 

 explosive force of gunpowder, and probably invented the 

 telescope; and whose " Greater Work " was at once "the 

 Encyclopaedia and the Novum Organum of the i3th 

 century." 



Through the treatise of Glanvil the attention of Bacon 

 seems to have been directed to the magnet, which he calls 

 the u miracle of nature." He says that the iron which is 

 touched by the lodestone follows the part of the latter 

 which excites it, and flies from the other part ; and that it 

 turns to the part of the heavens to which the part of the 

 magnet wherewith it was rubbed conforms. He says that 

 it is not the Pole star which influences the magnet, for, if 

 such were the case, the iron would always be attracted 

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