The above possibilities, as they were suggested in the thirteenth century, have already in good part been realized, justifying the prophecies of a man who was before his age, but on the course of its progress. He beheld the drifting of the great seas of humanity, and knew not how far they might roll, but he was conscious that forward they must go. He was the Savonarola of his land and age, the martyr of science, who possessed his soul in patience, uttered his word, and waited, knowing that his despised sentence would one day be esteemed as of the finest gold. Mr. Brande observes, that one of his principal works "breathes sentiments which would do honor to the most refined periods of science, and in which many of the advantages likely to be derived from the mode of investigation insisted upon by his great successor (Chancellor Bacon) are anticipated." This remark might have been still more prospective, for the celebrated French experimentalist, Homberg, availing himself of some hints of chemical combinations suggested by Roger Bacon, at a much later period, made some important discoveries in that science. As soon as printing was perfected on the banks of the Rhine, it was brought to the banks of the Thames, and, in 1474, the first press in England was erected by Caxton in Westminster Abbey. Thus the higher process supervenes upon the inferior which prepared the way, and supersedes the sources of its own origin and support. In the ancient Scriptorium of the Abbey, where all literature had been transcribed, and all science then extant found refuge till more auspicious times, was carried on an art which was the embodiment of anterior thought, and the guaranty of a future culture infinitely intensified and enlarged. As early as 1480, books were printed at St. Albans; and in 1525, there was a translation of Bœthius printed in the monastery of Tavistock, by Thomas Richards, monk of the same monastery. That the intercourse of Caxton with the Abbot of Westminster was on a familiar footing we learn from his own statement, in 1490: "My Lord Abbott of Westminster did shew to me late certain evidences written in old English, for to reduce it to our English now used."