BRITAIN'S HERITAGE OF SCIENCE 



CHAPTER I 

 THE TEN LANDMARKS OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE 



(Roger Bacon, Gilbert, Napier, Newton, Dalton, Young, 

 Faraday, Joule, William Thomson, Clerk Maxwell) 



ri^HE history of British Science begins with Roger Bacon, 

 JL the Franciscan friar, who, cutting himself adrift 

 from the scholastic philosophy of his time, rejected the 

 traditional appeal to recognized authority, and urged with 

 a powerful voice that a knowledge of Nature can only be 

 attained through experimental research and by logical 

 reasoning. Intellectually he stood high above the level of 

 his contemporaries ; x by his writings he set the true 

 standard of scientific enquiry, and planted the first of the 

 great landmarks along the path of British science. 



" There are two methods," he writes, " in which 

 we acquire knowledge, argument and experiment. Argu- 

 ment allows us to draw conclusions, and may cause us 

 to admit the conclusion ; but it gives no proof, nor does 

 it remove doubt, and cause the mind to rest in the 

 conscious possession of truth, unless the truth is dis- 

 covered by way of experience, e.g., if any man who had 

 never seen fire were to prove by satisfactory argument 

 that fire burns and destroys things, the hearer's mind 

 would not rest satisfied, nor would he avoid fire; until 

 by putting his hand or some combustible thing into 

 it, he proved by actual experiment what the argument 

 laid down; but after the experiment had been made, 

 his mind receives certainty and rests in the possession 

 of truth, which could not be given by argument but 



1 An interesting account of the general character of scientific 

 speculations before Bacon's time has been given by Charles L. Barnes 

 ("Hand!. Lit. and Phil. Soc.," Vol X. 1896). 



