CHAPTER VIII

FRIAR BACON

Roger Bacon was born at Ilchester, in Somersetshire, in 1214, and died about 1294. If the dedication be authentic, his _Epistola de Secretis Operibus Artis et Naturæ et de Nullitate Magiæ_, the work with which we are chiefly concerned here, was written before 1249.[334]

Bacon attacks Magic in this book on the ground that science and art can exhibit far greater wonders than the alleged wonders of the Black Art, and to prove his point he enumerates, in the first eight chapters, a number of wonders which (he believed) art could produce and magic could not. Everything is sufficiently clear until we reach the ninth, tenth, and eleventh chapters, and they are unintelligible as they stand. Now, it is past belief that a man of commanding genius should have deliberately stooped to write page after page of nonsense. The three chapters, therefore, must have _some_ meaning, hidden from us though it be.[335]

It is unquestionable that Bacon believed he possessed secrets of vast importance. At the close of Chapter VIII. he tells us by way of warning that he may resort (in the following chapters) to certain cryptic methods, “on account of the magnitude of his secrets” (_propter secretorum magnitudinem_); and, fearing that ordinary cryptic methods might be too transparent, he wraps up his secrets in an anagram in