so - 11E BOOKS OF THE WEEK.
[tinder this heading ne notice such Books of UN week as hose net ie.a reserved for review in other forms.] Roger Bacon. By Sir J. E. Sandys. (Humphrey Milford. Is. net.)—Next Wednesday it is proposed to celebrate at Oxford the seventh centenary of the birth of Roger Bacon. In view of this event, the Cambridge Public Orator has pub- lished a sketch of that philosopher's life, with some notice of his principal works. It is disappointing, for those who believe in centenaries, to learn that the very year of Bacon's birth is a matter of inference—we may even say of guesswork—based on the assumption that he began to study science and languages at the age of thirteen. In the forty years of learning which enabled him to prepare the Opus Majus and its subsidiary treatises for the special instruction of Pope Clement IV., he took the whole field of extant knowledge for his province. We are grateful to Sir John Sandys for his brief but lucid summary of Bacon's encyclopaedic labours, in which he seta forth the state of human learning in the thirteenth century.
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