192 CHILDHOOD OF SCIENCE. 



ledge of the day. He dared to appeal from the authority of the 

 schools, from the dicta of Plato and Aristotle, to the guidance 

 of nature and of reason. For this and his denunciation of their 

 immorality, he drew upon himself the hostility of the monks 

 and clergy. On an accusation of studying and practicing magic 

 he was summoned before a^high Council of the church, his writ- 

 ings were condemned, and he was sentenced to ten years confine- 

 ment in his cell. 



Roger Bacon was the first to declare that observation and 

 experiment must be at the foundation of all science, that from 

 facts we must reason up to principles, a doctrine which was dia- 

 metrically opposed to all the reasonings and practice of scholastic 

 philosophy. And it was not until four hundred years later that 

 these canons of inductive science were successfully established 

 by his more fortunate and illustrious name-sake, Francis Bacon. 

 But had the times been ripe for the truth, it is more than prob- 

 able that the friar would have superceded the chancellor. 



Two centuries later in a Benedictine cell the child-worker in 

 chemistry, Basil Valentine, was experimenting in search of that 

 fifth element which was to decompose and transmute all the 

 metals into gold. But while he toiled his life out over this great 

 delusion he seems to have discovered some of the most import- 

 ant medicines and chemicals of the early pharmacy. His chief 

 exultation however was in what he called " the triumphal car of 

 antimony" anti-moines the anti-monk medicine. Tartar 

 emetic is one of the preparations; and it was said that the old 

 Doctor once experimented on a convent of monks, and that he 

 left not a shaven crown of them all. No wonder they thought 

 that antimony did not exactly agree with monks. 



Early in the sixteenth century Bombastes Paracelsus, the last 

 of the alchemists, was called to a professorship of chemistry in 

 the University of Bale a strange erratic man, whose genius 

 like a meteor flashed across the morning sky a man of extremes, 

 on the one hand so learned and eloquent that he carried his aud- 

 iences whither he would, on the other so vain and boastful that 

 the word "bombast" has been derived from one of his high 

 sounding names. His success as a physician bordered on magic, 



