piety.  As head of the order in Germany and Bishop of Regensburg, he had wide ecclesiastical influence; and in death he left a memory equalled only by one or two of his century, and excelled only by his great pupil, Thomas Aquinas.  There are many Alberts in history—­the Good, the Just, the Faithful—­but there is only one we call “Magnus” and he richly deserved the name.  What is his record?  Why do we hold his name in reverence today?

Albertus Magnus was an encyclopaedic student and author, who took all knowledge for his province.  His great work and his great ambition was to interpret Aristotle to his generation.  Before his day, the Stagirite was known only in part, but he put within the reach of his contemporaries the whole science of Aristotle, and imbibed no small part of his spirit.  He recognized the importance of the study of nature, even of testing it by way of experiment, and in the long years that had elapsed since Theophrastus no one else, except Dioscorides, had made so thorough a study of botany.  His paraphrases of the natural history books of Aristotle were immensely popular, and served as a basis for all subsequent studies.  Some of his medical works had an extraordinary vogue, particularly the “De Secretis Mulierum” and the “De Virtutibus Herbarum,” but there is some doubt as to the authorship of the first named, although Jammy and Borgnet include it in the collected editions of his works.  So fabulous was his learning that he was suspected of magic and comes in Naude’s list of the wise men who have unjustly been reputed magicians.  Ferguson tells(22) that “there is in actual circulation at the present time a chapbook . . . containing charms, receipts, sympathetical and magicalcures for man and animals, . . . which passes under the name of Albertus.”  But perhaps the greatest claim of Albertus to immortality is that he was the teacher and inspirer of Thomas Aquinas, the man who undertook the colossal task of fusing Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, and with such success that the “angelic doctor” remains today the supreme human authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

     (22) Bibliotheca Chemica, 1906, Vol.  I, p. 15.

A man of much greater interest to us from the medical point of view is Roger Bacon and for two reasons.  More than any other mediaeval mind he saw the need of the study of nature by a new method.  The man who could write such a sentence as this:  “Experimental science has three great prerogatives over other sciences; it verifies conclusions by direct experiment; it discovers truth which they never otherwise would reach; it investigates the course of nature and opens to us a knowledge of the past and of the future,” is mentally of our day and generation.  Bacon was born out of due time, and his contemporaries had little sympathy with his philosophy, and still less with his mechanical schemes and inventions.  From the days of the Greeks, no one had had so keen an appreciation of