[Footnote A:  The tendency of scientific thought had been, for a considerable period before the time of Bacon, turned in the direction which he, perhaps, did more than any other single investigator to follow out and confirm.  Leonardo da Vinci, the completest and most comprehensive genius of Modern Italy, had anticipated, by more than a century, several of the prominent features of the Baconian system.  Too little of Leonardo’s scientific writings has been published to furnish material for a satisfactory determination of their importance in promoting the advance of knowledge,—­but the coincidence of thought, in some passages of his writings, with that in some of Bacon’s weighty sentences, is remarkable.  “I shall treat of this subject,” he says, in a passage published by Venturi, “but I shall first set forth certain experiments; it being my principle to cite experience first, and then to demonstrate why bodies are constrained to act in such or such a manner.  This is the method to be observed in investigating phenomena of Nature.  It is true that Nature begins with the reason and ends with experience; but no matter; the opposite way is to be taken.  We must, as I have said, begin with experience, and by means of this discover the reason.”

Compare with this the two following passages from the “Novum Organum,”—­the first being taken from the Ninety-ninth Axiom of the First Book.  “Then only will there be good ground of hope for the further advance of knowledge, when there shall be received and gathered together into natural history a variety of experiments, which are of no use in themselves, but to discover causes and axioms.”—­The next passage is the Twenty-sixth Axiom of the same Book;—­“The conclusions of human reason, as ordinarily applied in matter of nature, I call, for the sake of distinction, Anticipations of Nature (as a thing rash or premature).  That reason which is elicited from facts by a just and methodical process I call Interpretation of Nature.”

The first and famous axiom of the “Novum Organum” contains the phrase which Bacon constantly repeats,—­“man being the interpreter of Nature.”  Leonardo uses the same expression,—­“li omini inventori e interpreti tra la natura e gli omini.”  In another admirable passage of rebuke of the boastful and empty followers of old teachers, Leonardo says:  “Though I might not cite authors as well as they, I shall cite a much greater and worthier thing, in citing experience, the teacher of their teachers” (Maestra di loro maestri).  “And as for the overmuch credit,” says Bacon, “that hath been given unto authors in sciences, in making them dictators that their words should stand, and not counsellors to give advice, the damage is infinite that sciences have received thereby.”

Similar parallelisms of thought are to be found in some of Galileo’s sentences, when brought into comparison with Lord Bacon.]

[Footnote B:  Article on Whately’s Edition of Bacon’s Essays.  September, 1856.]