and thoroughly practise, experimental
philosophy in every principal department of
science and learning.

The influence of a man so honest, so learned,
and so energetic, produced enduring results.
From his day to the present there has been a
constant succession of men whose great love
for Truth has incited them to an earnest,
vigorous, and incessant pursuit after it; and
Friar Bacon, who preceded Lord Bacon by more
than three centuries, seems to have anticipated
the important principles on which his
distinguished namesake founded a new method of
philosophy. We need hardly remind the reader
that the promulgation of Lord Bacon's method
was the signal for that wonderful advance of
experimental philosophy that took place
immediately after his death, when the pursuits of
science and natural history first began to assume
real importance in Europe.

A curious fable is often alluded to in
connexion with Friar Bacon: it is, that he
constructed a brazen head, capable of uttering the
words "Time is." A similar story has indeed
been related of others; but it is supposed by Sir
Thomas Browne, the author of Vulgar Errors,
to have obscure reference to the great work
which Bacon had in hand, which was to warn
his contemporaries that the time had arrived
when the mystical child, "a Philosophical King,"
might be expected; when the advent of the
great era of experimental science was about to
dawn; and when, thus, a brazen or impregnable
wall should be raised round the treasures of
knowledge already accumulated or then being
discovered. Such brazen wall of defence was
the invention of printing, and thus the one
great characteristic of modern times—the
facility of communicating knowledge, and the
consequent multiplication of the power of the
human race—is shadowed out by the very
superstitions that surround the memory of Bacon.

How completely Friar Bacon really did learn
by actual experiment, and discover in this way
some of the most important facts that have
since guided and advanced the human race, we
have not space to explain; but it would be easy,
by a mere quotation of the titles of some of his
essays, to show the hidden treasures that there
exist.

It must not, however, be supposed that because
we, living after a great interval of time, have
forgotten the sources to which we owe our
advantages, they have always been equally
unrecognised. All that was new and useful was seized
upon and adapted by his successors, though
often without acknowledgment, while, owing to
the want of books, the more important of his
works and experiments produced their effects at
the time, without leaving any trace of their
origin. It is quite impossible to overrate the
importance of successfully starting the method
of experiment, and we may be sure that those
who pursued that method during the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries really owed much of
their success to the lesson they had learnt of
our Friar. All his great contemporaries and
those who lived between his time and that of
Lord Bacon, not only Englishmen, but foreigners
of all civilised countries, referred to Roger
Bacon as one of the greatest men of those times.
We are sure, therefore, that his reputation has
not risen from any superstitious regard to
antiquity, but, being solidly founded on his merits as
the true pioneer of experimental philosophy,
ought to be cherished and maintained in all
countries and throughout all ages.

      AMINA AND THE MILL-WHEEL.

WHEN some one asked Byron whether he did
not find the acting of Miss Kelly in The Maid
and the Magpie deeply true to nature, Childe
Harold replied: "I don't know. I was never
innocent of stealing a silver spoon."—But, in
spite of the sharp saying, the story of the girl of
Palaiseau, falsely accused of theft, and saved by
an extraordinary accident, still lives on the
European stage—so, in this country, does the
memory of the cordial and pathetic actress with
whom the drama is associated.

More powerful still to move—more universal
to charm—is the story of the peasant girl who
saved her good fame by walking in her sleep
over the mill-wheel.—Some such exploit, no
doubt, has been really told and believed
somewhere as a thing which once happened; and the
tale has spread from one country to another, even
as the tale of the traveller who fainted dead on
seeing by morning light the broken bridge he
had safely ridden over in the dark—what shall
we say?—as all real stories do. Let the true
origin and locality of the transaction be
suggested as a matter of shrewd investigation and
amicable quarrel to those who make "Notes"
on "Queries" seeing that, now-a-days, the
business of criticism is to prove that everything
must have been something else. The Marseillaise
Hymn, one Herr Hamma assures us, is a
barefaced plagiarism by the Dibdin of France—
Rouget de Lisle—from the "Credo" of a gay
German mass, written for an obscure village
town in a corner of the Lake of Constance—
with which town on the lake, of course, and
with its manuscript mass-music, the Parisian
vagabond man of letters could not fail to be as
familiar as if Meersburg was Moutmartre, or
Montmorency!

Be these things as they may, our anecdote of
the Sleep-walker was dressed up in the form of
a ballet, some thirty-five years ago, by M. Scribe.
As a French ballet, La Somnambule had not
a long success. The Italians admit and prefer
for their ballets incidents which admit of strong
and mute action.—The French are not thus
constructed. There is small space to dance
upon, in the story of the peasant girl, who, by
periling her neck over the old mill-wheel,
cleared herself from her lover's jealous
suspicions.—But there is room in it for passionate
and pathetic gesture; and the incidents are not
crowded so closely together as they are in other
dramatised ballets, such as the Sylph and the
Gipsy, both of which (no offence to the music of