320 THE INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



perhaps doubtful, but the internal evidence of the Philos- 

 ophia Nova (presupposing, as its contents plainly do, a 

 knowledge on the part of the reader not only of the mag- 

 netic but of the electric phenomena recorded in the De 

 Magnete), leaves it, I think, beyond question that it was 

 prepared after the writing, if not after the publication 

 of the last-named work. 



But the exact time of its production is of little moment. 

 The significant fact lies in the possession of the manu- 

 scripts by Bacon during his lifetime. He studied them, 

 he knew their contents. And in those great Monuments 

 wherein he has invoked for his own fame the judgment of 

 the next age, he attacks and condemns over and over 

 again the opinions of a man who could neither speak for 

 himself, being in his grave, nor be spoken for by the only 

 written words wherein he had set them forth, and which, 

 in the cabinet of my L,ord Verulam, were as effectually 

 silenced and entombed. The advocates of Bacon, who can 

 reconcile his consignment of Peacham to the rack with the 

 principles of natural law and the rights of the citizen 

 which he so eloquently defended, may perhaps see in his 

 dealing with the dead Gilbert's manuscripts no evidence 

 of the meanness and baseness, of which others have pro- 

 fessed to find in his character abundant proof. But pos- 

 sibly it may calf for still further partisan ingenuity to 

 discover the consistency of his suppression of this record 

 of conclusions from an inductive research, and his severe 

 strictures upon its author, with his simultaneous blazoning 

 to the world of the value of the inductive method as the 

 only means of discovering physical truth, and "hitherto 

 untried." 



The very persistence of his censure of Gilbert is of 

 itself remarkable. Unlike the arraignment of Aristotle 

 ("pessimus sophista"), or Galen ("canicula et pestis"), 

 or Agrippa ("trivial is scurra"), or Paracelsus ("asinorum 

 adoptiva") in the writings of his youth, which gave place 

 to much more tempered expressions in those of his maturer 



