in particular, were considered as at best of dubious orthodoxy. The reasoning of Bacon is generally directly dependent upon his premises, which, though often wrong, seldom lead him to the prevailing extreme of absurdity. Even his astrology and alchemy, those two great blots upon his character, as they are usually called, are, when considered by the side of a later age, harmless modifications, irrational only because unproved, and neither impossible nor unworthy of the investigation of a philosopher, in the absence of preceding experiments. His astrology is _physical_. "With regard to human affairs, true mathematicians do not presume to make certain, but consider how the body is altered by the heavens, and the body being altered, the mind is excited to public and private acts, free will existing all the same." An age which is divided upon the question of the effect of the moon upon lunatics, and of which the philosophers have collected no facts decisive against many alleged effects of the same planet upon plants, can ask no more of a philosopher of the thirteenth century than that he should not be too positive. The fame of Leibnitz has not suffered from the _pre-established harmony_ one half as much as that of Bacon from his astrology and alchemy, which were believed in to a much greater extent by many of the learned of his time, and the united effect of which would seem to us sense and logic, compared with the metaphysical folly, all his own, of the eminent philosopher just cited. This planetary influence appears to have been firmly believed in by Bacon, and in particular the effect of the constellations on the several parts of the human body. Perhaps he was rather prejudiced in favour of a doctrine which was condemned by the same men who thought mathematics and philosophy savoured of heresy. And it must be remembered that the pretended science was almost universally allowed existence, even by those who considered its use unlawful; nor can we infer that the church disbelieved it, because that body discouraged it, any more than that it rejected infernal spirits, because it anathematized magic.