That Bacon was no admirer of Gilbert's physical and cosmical theories the following passages will show. In the "Novum Organum" the Chancellor wrote: "His philosophy is an instance of extravagant speculation founded on insufficient data"; again, "As the alchemists made a philosophy out of a few experiments of the furnace, Gilbert, our countryman, hath made a philosophy out of the lodestone" ("The Advancement of Learning"); lastly, "Gilbert hath attempted a general system on the magnet, endeavoring to build a ship out of materials not sufficient to make the rowing-pins of a boat" ("De Augmentis Scientiarum"). One is tempted to ask how this strange disregard which Bacon entertained for the scientific views of the greatest natural philosopher of his age and country came to exist? Was it due to a feeling of jealousy that could not brook a rival in the domain of the higher philosophy, or was it because Bacon, the anti-Copernican, wanted to write down Gilbert, the defender of the heliocentric theory, in the British Isles? When reading Bacon's depreciatory remarks we have to remember that his mathematical and physical outfit was very limited even for the age in which he lived; from which it is safe to infer that he was but little qualified to pass judgment on the value of the electric and magnetic work accomplished in the workshops at Colchester or on the theories to which they gave rise. Bacon deserves praise for denouncing the prevalent system of natural philosophy which was mainly authoritative, speculative and syllogistic instead of experimental, deductive and inductive, but he was inconsistent and forgetful of his own principles when he belittled the greatest living enemy of mere book-learning, and the most earnest advocate, by word and example, of the laboratory methods for the advancement of learning. To avoid misapprehension, it should be here stated that Bacon was not always censorious in his treatment of his illustrious fellow-citizen, for in several places he writes approvingly of the electric and magnetic experiments contained in _De Magnete_, which he calls in his _Advancement of Learning_, "a painfull (_i.e._, painstaking) experimentall booke." In other places he draws so freely on Gilbert without acknowledgment as to come dangerously near the suspicion of plagiarism. Gilbert died, probably of the plague, in the sixtieth year of his age, on December 10th, 1603, and was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Colchester, where a mural tablet records in Latin the chief facts of his life.