It was with Galileo however that scientific research began in Padua, at any rate for professors; and Galileo may be venerated as the first modern naturalist to set the experimental method conceptually, coherently, and thoroughly before himself, including the deductive side of it. In the Harveian Oration of 1892, Dr Bridges reminded us that Galileo conceived of motion and energy as calculable quantities, and drew our attention to those most interesting experiments wherein Galileo applied the pendulum to measure the rate and rhythm of the pulse. Roger Bacon had dwelt upon experiment, but scarcely upon methodical verification thereby. The chemistry of Albert of Cologne was but a return of the curiosity of Geber of Cordova (in the ninth century). Even Francis Bacon saw the method less clearly than Galileo had done; and, as the last of the schoolmen and encyclopedists, he made a place for it rather in literature and philosophy: he ignored, as the scientific Descartes welcomed, the cardinal discoveries of Copernicus and of Harvey[70]. But if Galileo discovered the experimental method as a method, before Galileo the method was in use. Leonardo had laid down the rule of investigation of nature by experiment, and the aphorism that nature never deceives us; unfortunately his manuscripts were not published. In the first half of the fifteenth century Nicholas of Cusa weighed plants at definite stages of their growth in known weights of earth; and he weighed the moisture of the air. His contemporary Leon Battista Alberti of Genoa had done likewise. But above all the scientific forerunners of Galileo and Harvey stands William Gilbert, Fellow of St John’s College, Doctor of Medicine of Cambridge, Censor and President of this College, Physician to Queen Elizabeth, and Founder of the science of Magnetism.