vi INQUIRY AND INTERPRETATION 131 



to tell Paris and the doctors that marine fossils were 

 true animal remains, were deposited in a sea in the 

 place where they are now found, and were born of their 

 respective animal parents. This he defied the Aris- 

 totelians to deny." 



Palissy offended the alchemists and astrologers of his 

 time, as well as the priests and philosophers, by his 

 ridicule of cherished opinion regarding natural objects 

 and phenomena ; and he died in prison in consequence 

 of his appeal to observation and experiment for the basis 

 of every speculation. He was an apostle of the inductive 

 method, and demonstrated its application to large 

 audiences in Paris, during the three years which Francis 

 Bacon spent there in his youth ; it has indeed been 

 suggested .by Sir Clifford Allbutt that Bacon first 

 derived his ideas of inductive philosophy from the 

 collections and contentions of Palissy, whose observa- 

 tions and influence are, however, rarely mentioned in 

 the history of scientific thought. 



Dr. William Gilbert (1540-1603), of Colchester, known 

 to most students of magnetism and electricity as the 

 founder of these branches of science, also practised the 

 experimental method of investigation before Francis 

 Bacon wrote about it. He is, indeed, repeatedly men- 

 tioned by Bacon in the Novum Organum, and elsewhere 

 he is praised both for his industry and his method, 

 but censured for endeavouring to build a universal 

 philosophy upon a narrow basis ; and not without 

 reason. Gilbert was largely indebted in his work on 

 magnetism to the observations of Peter Peregrinus made 

 three centuries earlier, and he was so dominated by the 

 notion that magnets possessed some sort of soul or 

 spirit that he should perhaps be considered as a sort of 

 connecting link between medieval superstitions and the 



