THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN FEANCE. 



93 



picture of this latest stage of culture lived in the pro- i. ^ 



J- <=> ^ Foreseen oy 



phetic but essentially unscientific mind of Lord Bacon. Lwd Bacon. 

 But he did not sutficiently allow for the amount of patient 

 scientific toil that was needed, nor for the time which the 

 preparation of the instruments of research would require, 

 nor for the necessity of destroying existing superstition 

 and accumulated errors. All that has since been done by 

 Newton and the great Continental mathematicians in the 

 former, and by Bayle and Voltaire in the latter sense, 

 Bacon had hoped to achieve at once by the new philo- 

 sophy of fruit and progress. Such expectations were 

 inevitably doomed to disappointment, though posterity 

 has made amends by all but universally referring to him 

 as the pioneer of modern thought, as the herald of a 

 new era of human civilisation.^ 



making artificially the fertilising 

 compounds required in common 

 agriculture which followed on the 

 publication of Liebig's famous work 

 on ' Chemistry in its applications 

 to Agriculture and Physiology ' in 

 1840 (see Hofmann's Faraday 

 Lecture of 1875, 'The Lifework of 

 Liebig,' p. 15, &c.) Liebig also 

 discovered and described in 1832 

 the properties of chloroform and 

 chloral, fifteen years before Simpson 

 introduced the first as an ansesthetic 

 and twenty years before Oscar 

 Liebreich discovered the physiolog- 

 ical action of chloral (ibid., p. 101, 

 &c.) Sir Lowthian Bell calculated, 

 many years before the invention 

 of the so-called basic process of 

 making steel, the fertilising value 

 of the phosphorus which was con- 

 tained in the ironstone of Cleve- 

 land, and which then made it use- 

 less for the manufacture of high- 

 class iron and steel. The great 

 revolution in the theorv of the 



steam-engine embodied in the work 

 of Macquorn Rankine is to be traced 

 back to the patient measurements 

 by Joule of the mechanical equiva- 

 lent of heat. 



^ A great controversy arose on 

 this subject through the publica- 

 tion of Liebig's pamphlet in 1862, 

 entitled, ' Francis Bacon von Veru- 

 ]am und die Methode der Natur- 

 forschung.' It was directed mostly 

 against the exaggerated view taken 

 by Macaulay in his celebrated essay. 

 The fact is that Bacon, like Vol- 

 taire after him, was much more 

 of an essayist and a man of the 

 world than a patient labourer in 

 any special field of research ; he 

 was more of a philosopher in a 

 worldly sense (what the Germans 

 call "ein Weltweiser") than a pro- 

 found thinker. He misunderstood 

 manj' of the great discoveries of his 

 age, though he prophetically fore- 

 saw the great change in the spirit 

 of inquiry. He did not appreciate 



