The utter lack of scientific thought and scientific method is illustrated most vividly in the works of the greatest men of that period--such men as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, and the hosts of other scholastics of lesser rank.

Yet the mental awakening implied in their efforts was sure to extend to other fields, and in point of fact there was at least one contemporary of these great scholastics whose mind was intended towards scientific subjects, and who produced writings strangely at variance in tone and in content with the others.

This anachronistic thinker was the English monk, Roger Bacon.
ROGER BACON Bacon was born in 1214 and died in 1292.

By some it is held that he was not appreciated in his own time because he was really a modern scientist living in an age two centuries before modern science or methods of modern scientific thinking were known.

Such an estimate, however, is a manifest exaggeration of the facts, although there is probably a grain of truth in it withal.