The shining light of the Thirteenth Century was Roger Bacon. His _Opus Majus_ is “at once the Encyclopædia and the Novum Organum of the Thirteenth Century.” In this, besides other branches of scientific research, he devotes a rapid examination to questions of Climate, Hydrography, Geography, and Astrology. Scientific research, however, was out of date, and from the educated world Roger Bacon received small recognition. His writings earned only a prison from his own Order, and he died, in his own words, “unheard, forgotten, buried.” The Revival of Learning, commonly known as the Period of the Renaissance, naturally entailed renewed interest in the sciences as well as the arts. Green gives a comprehensive view of it: “The last royalist had only just laid down his arms when the little company who were at a later time to be known as the Royal Society gathered round Wilkins at Oxford. It is in this group of scientific observers that we catch the secret of the coming generation. From the vexed problems, political and religious, with which it had so long wrestled in vain, England turned at last to the physical world around it, to the observation of its phenomena, to the discovery of the laws which govern them. The pursuit of physical science became a passion; and its method of research, by observation, comparison, and experiment, transformed the older methods of inquiry in matters without its pale. In religion, in politics, in the study of man and of nature, not faith but reason, not tradition but inquiry, were to be the watchwords of the coming time. The dead-weight of the past was suddenly rolled away, and the new England heard at last and understood the call of Francis Bacon.