CH. vni. ROGER BACON. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



SCIENCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES (CONTINUED). 



Roger Bacon His ' Opus Majus ' Flavio Gioja invents the Mariner's 

 Compass Use of the Compass in discovering new Lands Colum- 

 bus Vasco de Gama Magellan Invention of Printing Leon- 

 ardo da Vinci. 



WE must now return to Europe, where the nations were 

 struggling out of the Dark Ages ; and though there were 

 many learned men in the monasteries, very few of them 

 paid any attention to science : while those who did, often 

 lost their time in alchemy, trying to make gold ; or in 

 astrology, endeavouring to foretell events by the stars. 



Roger Bacon, 1214. In the year 1214, however, a 

 man was born in England whom every Englishman ought 

 to admire and revere, because in those benighted times he 

 gave up his whole life to the study of the works of 

 nature, and suffered imprisonment in the cause of science. 

 This was Roger Bacon, a great alchemist, who was bora at 

 Ilchester in Somersetshire, educated at Oxford and Paris, 

 and then became a friar of the order of St. Francis. For 

 this reason he is often called Friar Bacon. Bacon's great 

 work, called the * Opus Majus,' is written in such strange 

 language that it is often difficult to find out how much he 

 really knew and how much he only guessed at. We know, 

 however, that he made many good astronomical observa- 

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