The practical methods of modern inquiry into the meaning of the world, the incessant discovery of new resources in nature for the comfort and luxury of living, have stimulated and enlarged the human mind; and in the new interests thus created men have found a healthful diversion alike from the engrossments of animalism and the morbid fancies of superstition. But in the time we are studying there was no real scientific thought that was not instantly suppressed by the authorities of the church as the suggestion of heretics or of the Saracens. Roger Bacon, who flourished so late as the close of the crusades, paid with fourteen years’ imprisonment for his temerity in proposing the more rational methods of viewing the world, which his great namesake, Francis Bacon, three hundred and fifty years later, more completely formulated for general acceptance. The industrial arts had been lost or had come to be entirely neglected after the barbaric conquest which swept away the Roman civilization, and during the centuries since there had been scarcely any attempt to revive them. The very faculty of invention seems to have become paralyzed by disuse. It was not until 1148 that Roger of Sicily established a silk factory at Palermo, which, Hallam says, “gave the earliest impulse to the industry of Italy.” Such times were necessarily marked by the narrow limitation and degradation of common life. The vast majority of people lived in the country, in complete isolation from their fellows, seeking sustenance in most primitive ways from the breast of mother nature; or they were huddled together in rude hamlets under the walls of the castles, whose lords enslaved while they protected them; for such was the chaotic condition of society that every one was compelled to seek safety with service under some possessor of a stronghold. Cities there were, crowded with dense masses of humanity, the breeding-places of all sorts of vice and social disorder. Towns owe their existence to some community of interest, such as similar industrial pursuits or convenience for trade; these, of course, had scarcely begun to spring up.