ime, and refused to accept such great advances in
science as were made by Copernicus and others. Some two score of years
before Bacon wrote, in England itself, the great Gilbert of
Colchester, who was elected the president of the Royal College of
Physicians for the year 1600, and who was physician-in-ordinary to
Queen Elizabeth, had applied the experimental method to such good
purpose that he well deserves the title that has been conferred upon
him of Father of Electricity.

There was never a more purely experimental scientist than Gilbert. His
work, De Magnete, is one of the great contributions to experimental
science. Anyone who thinks that experiments came only after Lord
Bacon's time should read this wonderful work, which is at the
foundation of modern electricity. For twenty years, from 1580 to 1600,
Gilbert spent all the leisure that he could snatch from his
professional duties, in his laboratory. He notes down his
experiments--his failures as well as his successes--discusses them
very thoroughly, suggests explanations of success and failure, hits
upon methods of control, but pursues the solution of the problems he
has in hand ever further and further. As a biographer said of him, "we
find him toiling in his work-shop at Colchester quite as Faraday
toiled, more than two hundred years later, in the low dark rooms of
the Royal Institution of Great Britain." Faraday was actuated by no
more calm, persevering, inquiring spirit than was Gilbert. To say that
any Englishman invented {286} or taught the world the application of
the experimental method in science after Gilbert's time is to talk
nonsense.

Yet it was of this great scientific observer that Lord Bacon, carried
away by ill-feeling and jealousy of a contemporary, went so far as to
say in his _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, that Gilbert "had attempted to
found a general system upon the magnet, and endeavored to build a ship
out of materials not sufficient to make the rowing-pins of a boat."
When Bacon refused to accept Copernicus's teachings, he did not commit
a greater error, nor do a greater wrong to mankind, than when he made
little of Gilbert of Colchester's work. Poggendorf called Gilbert the
"Galileo of Magnetism" and Priestley hailed him as the "founder of
modern electricity." When Gilbert did the work on which these titles
are founded, however, he was only following out the methods which had
been introduced into England long before, and which had been
exem