he thoughts."

[Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF BACON'S ESSAYS, 1597.]

The following sentence from the essay _Of Studies_ will show some of
the characteristics of his way of presenting thought:--

"Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing
an exact man: and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need
have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present
wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to
know that he doth not."

We may notice here (1) clearness, (2) conciseness, (3) breadth of
thought and observation.

A shrewd Scotchman says: "It may be said that to men wishing to rise
in the world by politic management of their fellowmen, Bacon's
_Essays_ are the best handbook hitherto published." In justification
of this criticism, we need only quote from the essay _Of
Negotiating_:--

"It is generally better to deal by speech than by letter... Letters
are good, when a man would draw an answer by letter back again, or
when it may serve, for a man's justification, afterwards to produce
his own letter, or where it may he danger to be interrupted or heard
by pieces. To deal in person is good, when a man's face breedeth
regard, as commonly with inferiors, or in tender cases, where a
man's eye upon the countenance of him with whom he speaketh may give
him a direction how far to go, and generally, where a man will
reserve to himself liberty either to disavow or to expound."

Scientific and Miscellaneous Works.--_The Advancement of Learning_
is another of Bacon's great works. The title aptly expresses the
purpose of the took. He insists on the necessity of close observation
of nature and of making experiments with various forms of matter. He
decries the habit of spinning things out of one's inner consciousness,
without patiently studying the outside world to see whether the facts
justify the conclusions. In other words, he insists on induction.
Bacon was not the father of the inductive principle, as is sometimes
wrongly stated; for prehistoric man was compelled to make inductions
before he could advance one step from barbarism. The trouble was that
this method was not rigorously applied. It was currently believed that
our valuable garden toad is venomous and that frogs are bred from
slime. For his knowledge of bees, Lyly consulted classical authors in
preference to watching the insects. Bacon's writings exerted a
powerful influence in the