he same family name who lived 300 years later. We, who wear
eye-glasses would be willing, I think, to vote the honor to the elder
Bacon, because if we do not owe to him the discovery of lenses, we are
his debtors for his clarification of the principles of lenses and for
his successful efforts in establishing them on a mathematical basis. In
any event, he was a pioneer in inductive science.

Before gunpowder is known to have been discovered in the West, the friar
Roger Bacon must have made some interesting experiments along the line
of explosives, else he could not have made the following remarkable
statement as to the property of gunpowder: "One may cause to burst from
bronze, thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A
small quantity of prepared matter causes a terrible explosion
accompanied by a brilliant light. One may multiply this phenomenon so
far as to destroy a city or an army." Anticipating the use of even motor
boats and automobiles driven by gasoline, this thirteenth century
scientist wrote: "Art can construct instruments of navigation such that
the largest vessels governed by a single man will traverse rivers and
seas more rapidly than if they were filled with oarsmen. One may also
make carriages which, without the aid of any animal, will run with
remarkable swiftness." This man whose clarity of vision anticipated
those discoveries of the nineteenth century, left three disciples after
him,--John of Paris, William of Mara and Gerard Hay--who followed their
master's methods, especially of testing by observation and by careful
searching of authorities, every proposition that came up for study.

Perhaps the most striking argument in favor of the experimental attitude
of Dante's century is that afforded by certain facts in the history of
medicine of that epoch. Then surgery began to make vast strides. Pagel,
regarded in our time as the best informed writer on the history of
medicine, has this to say of the surgery in Dante's age. "The stream of
literary works on surgery flows richer during this period. While
surgeons are far from being able to emancipate themselves from the
ruling pathological theories, there is no doubt that in one department,
that of manual technics, free observation came to occupy the first place
in the effort for scientific progress. Investigation is less hampered
and concerns itself with practical things and not with artificial
theories. Experimental observation was in this