e mistresses, of philosophy. He meant that they should
play a subordinate and subsequent part in the dressing of the vast mass of
facts by which discovery was to be rendered equally accessible to Newton
and to us. Bacon himself was very ignorant of all that had been done by
mathematics; and, strange to say, he especially objected to astronomy being
handed over to the mathematicians. Leverrier and Adams, calculating an
unknown planet into visible existence by enormous heaps of algebra, furnish
the last comment of note on this specimen of the goodness of Bacon's views.
The following account of his knowledge of what had been done in his own day
or before it, is Mr. Spedding's collection of casual remarks in Mr. Ellis's
several prefaces:

"Though he paid great attention to astronomy, discussed carefully the
methods in which it ought to be studied, constructed for the satisfaction
of his own mind an elaborate theory of the heavens, and listened eagerly
for the news from the stars brought by Galileo's telescope, he appears to
have been utterly ignorant of the discoveries which had just been made by
Kepler's calculations. Though he complained in 1623 of the want of
compendious methods for facilitating arithmetical computations, especially
with regard to the doctrine of Series, and fully recognized the importance
of them as an aid to physical inquiries--he does not say a word about
Napier's Logarithms, which had been published only nine years before and
reprinted more than once in the {83} interval. He complained that no
considerable advance had made in geometry beyond Euclid, without taking any
notice of what had been done by Archimedes and Apollonius. He saw the
importance of determining accurately the specific gravity of different
substances, and himself attempted to form a table of them by a rude process
of his own, without knowing of the more scientific though still imperfect
methods previously employed by Archimedes, Ghetaldus,[123] and Porta. He
speaks of the [Greek: heureka] of Archimedes in a manner which implies that
he did not clearly apprehend either the nature of the problem to be solved
or the principles upon which the solution depended. In reviewing the
progress of mechanics, he makes no mention of Archimedes himself, or of
Stevinus,[124] Galileo, Guldinus,[125] or Ghetaldus. He makes no allusion
to the theory of equilibrium. He observes that a ball of one pound weight
will fall nearly as fast through the air as a