It is not uncommon for undergraduates to criticise their text-books; it was the fashion with clever men, as, for instance, Montaigne, to talk against Aristotle without knowing anything about him; it is not uncommon for men who have worked out a great idea to find traces of it, on precarious grounds, in their boyish thinking.

Still, it is worth noting that Bacon himself believed that his fundamental quarrel with Aristotle had begun with the first efforts of thought, and that this is the one recollection remaining of his early tendency in speculation.

The other is more trustworthy, and exhibits that inventiveness which was characteristic of his mind.

He tells us in the _De Augmentis_ that when he was in France he occupied himself with devising an improved system of cypher-writing--a thing of daily and indispensable use for rival statesmen and rival intriguers.

But the investigation, with its call on the calculating and combining faculties, would also interest him, as an example of the discovery of new powers by the human mind.
In the beginning of 1579 Bacon, at eighteen, was called home by his father's death.