TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION A. 309 
these in ttn, and t6 indicate a few of the evehts filling the intervals between 
them ; but my outline can be of only the most.ssummary character, for the scientific 
history is a history of three hundred years, and, it searching enough, it could 
include the tale of nearly all mathematical and astronomical and physical science: 
It is exactly three hundred years since Bacon published ‘The Advancement 
of Learning.’ His discourse, alike in matter, in thought, in outlook, was in 
advance of its time, and it exercised no great influence for the years that immedi- 
ately followed its appearance; yet that appearance is one of the chief events in 
the origins of modern natural science. Taking all knowledge to be his province, 
he surveys the whole of learning: he deals with the discredits that then could 
attach to it; he expounds both the dignity and the influence of its pursuit; and 
he analyses all learning, whether of things divine or of things human, into its 
ordered branches. He points out deficiencies and gaps; not a few of his recom- 
mendations of studies, at his day remaining untouched, have since become great 
branches of human thought and human inquiry. But what concerns us most 
here is his attitude towards natural philosophy, all the more remarkable because 
of the state of knowledge of that subject in his day, particularly in England. It 
is true that Gilbert had published his discovery of terrestrial magnetism some 
five years earlier, a discovery followed only too soon by his death; but that was 
the single considerable English achievement in modern science down to Bacon’s 
day. 
In order to estimate the significance of Bacon’s range of thought let me recite 
a few facts, as an indication of the extreme tenuity of progressive science in 
that year (1605). They belong to subsequent years, and may serve to show how 
restricted were the attainments of the period, and how limited were the means 
of advance. he telescope and the microscope had not yet been invented. The 
simple laws of planetary motion were not formulated, for Kepler had them only 
in the making. Logarithms were yet to be discovered by Napier, and to be 
calculated by Briggs. Descartes was a boy of nine and Fermat a boy of only 
four, so that analytical geometry, the middle-life discovery of both of them, was 
not yet even a dream for either of them. The Italian mathematicians, of whom 
Cavalieri is the least forgotten, were developing Greek methods of quadrature by 
a transformed principle of indivisibles; but the infinitesimal calculus was not 
really in sight, for Newton and Leibnitz were yet unborn. Years were to elapse 
before, by the ecclesiastical tyranny over thought, Galileo was forced to make a 
verbal disavowal of his adhesion to the Copernican system of astronomy, of which 
he was still to be the protagonist in propounding any reasoned proof. Some 
mathematics could be had, cumbrous arithmetic and algebra, some geometry 
lumbering after Euclid, and a little trigonometry ; but these were mainly the 
mathematics of the Renaissance, no very great advance upon the translated work 
of the Greeks and the transmitted work of the Arabs. Even our old friend the 
binomial theorem, which now is supposed to be the possession of nearly every 
able schoolboy, remained unknown to professional mathematicians for more than 
half a century yet to come. 
Nor is it merely on the negative side that the times seemed unpropitious for 
a new departure; the spirit of the age in the positive activities of thought and 
deed was not more sympathetic. Those were the days when the applications of 
astronomy had become astrology. Men sought for the elixir of life and pondered 
over the transmutation of baser metals into gold. Shakespeare not long before 
had produced his play ‘ As You Like It, where the strange natural history of the 
toad which, 
‘Ugly and venomous, 
Bears yet a precious jewel in his head,’ 
is made a metaphor to illustrate the sweetening uses of adversity. The stiffened 
Elizabethan laws against witchcraft were to be sternly administered for many 
a year to come. It was an age that was pulsating with life and illuminated by 
fancy, but the life was the life of strong action and the fancy was the fancy of 
ideal imagination ; men did not lend themselves to sustained and abstract thought 
