Materials, transcription, and other expenses for such a work as he projected would cost at least, L60, and the Pope sent not a penny.

Bacon begged help from his family, but they were ruined like himself.

No one would lend to a mendicant friar, and when his friends raised the money he needed it was by pawning their goods in the hope of repayment from Clement.

Nor was this all; the work itself, abstruse and scientific as was its subject, had to be treated in a clear and popular form to gain the Papal ear.

But difficulties which would have crushed another man only roused Roger Bacon to an almost superhuman energy.