ct, because it emphasizes the
thoroughness of educational methods, in spite of the supposed
difficulties that would lie in the way of an exclusively clerical
teaching staff.

In chemistry the advances made during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth centuries were even more noteworthy than those in any other
department of science. Albertus Magnus, who taught at Paris, wrote no
less than sixteen treatises on chemical subjects, and, notwithstanding
the fact that he was a theologian as well as a scientist and that his
printed works filled sixteen folio volumes, he somehow found the time
to make many observations for himself and performed numberless
experiments in order to clear up doubts. The larger histories of
chemistry accord him his proper place and hail him as a great founder
in chemistry and a pioneer in original investigation.

Even St. Thomas of Aquin, much as he was occupied with theology and
philosophy, found some time to devote to chemical questions. After
{53} all, this is only what might have been expected of the favorite
pupil of Albertus Magnus. Three treatises on chemical subjects from
Aquinas's pen have been preserved for us, and it is to him that we are
said to owe the origin of the word amalgam, which he first used in
describing various chemical methods of metallic combination with
mercury that were discovered in the search for the genuine
transmutation of metals.

Albertus Magnus's other great scientific pupil, Roger Bacon, the
English Franciscan friar, followed more closely in the physical
scientific ways of his great master. Altogether he wrote some eighteen
treatises on chemical subjects. For a long time it was considered that
he was the inventor of gunpowder, though this is now known to have
been introduced into Europe by the Arabs. Roger Bacon studied
gunpowder and various other explosive combinations in considerable
detail, and it is for this reason that he obtained the undeserved
reputation of being an original discoverer in this line. How well he
realized how much might be accomplished by means of the energy stored
up in explosives can perhaps be best appreciated from the fact that he
suggested that boats would go along the rivers and across the seas
without either sails or oars and that carriages would go along the
streets without horse or man power. He considered that man would
eventually invent a method of harnessing these explosive mixtures and
of utilizing their energies for his pu