De Maistre, in his review of Bacon's Novum Organum, points out that this work is replete with prejudices; that Bacon makes glaring blunders in astronomy, in logic, in metaphysics, in physics, in natural history, and fills the pages of his work with childish observations, trifling experiments, and ridiculous explanations. Our own Professor Draper, in his Intellectual Development of Europe, has been even more severe, and has especially pointed out that Bacon never received the Copernican System, but "with the audacity of ignorance he presumed to criticise what he did not understand, and with a superb conceit disparaged the great Copernicus."--"The more closely we examine the writings of Lord Bacon," he says farther on, "the more unworthy does he seem to have been of the great reputation which has been awarded to him. . . The popular delusion, to which he owes so much, originated at a time when the history of science was unknown. This boasted founder of a new philosophy could not comprehend and would not accept the greatest of all scientific discoveries when it was plainly set before his eyes." As a student of the history of medicine, it has always been especially irritating to me to hear Francis Bacon's name heralded as the Father of Experimental Science. Literally hundreds of physicians had applied the experimental method in its perfect form to many problems in medicine and surgery during at least three centuries or more before Bacon's time. They did not need to have the principles of it set forth for them by this {285} publicist, who knew how to write about scientific method, but did not know how to apply it, so far as we know anything about him; and who was utterly unable to see the great discoveries that had been made by the experimental method in the century before his time, and refused to accept such great advances in science as were made by Copernicus and others. Some two score of years before Bacon wrote, in England itself, the great Gilbert of Colchester, who was elected the president of the Royal College of Physicians for the year 1600, and who was physician-in-ordinary to Queen Elizabeth, had applied the experimental method to such good purpose that he well deserves the title that has been conferred upon him of Father of Electricity.