There was never a more purely experimental scientist than Gilbert. His work, De Magnete, is one of the great contributions to experimental science. Anyone who thinks that experiments came only after Lord Bacon's time should read this wonderful work, which is at the foundation of modern electricity. For twenty years, from 1580 to 1600, Gilbert spent all the leisure that he could snatch from his professional duties, in his laboratory. He notes down his experiments--his failures as well as his successes--discusses them very thoroughly, suggests explanations of success and failure, hits upon methods of control, but pursues the solution of the problems he has in hand ever further and further. As a biographer said of him, "we find him toiling in his work-shop at Colchester quite as Faraday toiled, more than two hundred years later, in the low dark rooms of the Royal Institution of Great Britain." Faraday was actuated by no more calm, persevering, inquiring spirit than was Gilbert. To say that any Englishman invented {286} or taught the world the application of the experimental method in science after Gilbert's time is to talk nonsense. Yet it was of this great scientific observer that Lord Bacon, carried away by ill-feeling and jealousy of a contemporary, went so far as to say in his _De Augmentis Scientiarum_, that Gilbert "had attempted to found a general system upon the magnet, and endeavored to build a ship out of materials not sufficient to make the rowing-pins of a boat." When Bacon refused to accept Copernicus's teachings, he did not commit a greater error, nor do a greater wrong to mankind, than when he made little of Gilbert of Colchester's work. Poggendorf called Gilbert the "Galileo of Magnetism" and Priestley hailed him as the "founder of modern electricity." When Gilbert did the work on which these titles are founded, however, he was only following out the methods which had been introduced into England long before, and which had been exemplified so thoroughly all during the life of Friar Bacon, and of Friar Bacon's great teacher, Albertus Magnus. One would expect that at least in science credit would be given properly, and that the false notions introduced by litterateurs and historians of politics should not be allowed to dominate the situation.