In his book on Botany he treats of the organic structure and physiology
of plants so accurately as to draw from Meyer, a botanist of the
nineteenth century, this appreciative tribute. "No botanist who lived
before Albert can be compared to him unless Theophrastus, with whom he
was not acquainted: and after him none has painted nature with such
living colors or studied it so profoundly until the time of Conrad
Gesner and Cesalpino"--a high compliment indeed for Albertus for
leadership in science for three centuries. To quote Von Humboldt again,
"I have found in the book of Albertus Magnus, De Natura Locorum,
considerations on the dependence of temperature concurrently on latitude
and elevation and on the effect of different angles of incidence of the
sun's rays in heating the ground, which have excited my surprise."

Albertus Magnus gains renown also from his distinguished pupil Roger
Bacon who, some think, should have the honor of being regarded as the
father of inductive science--an honor posterity has conferred upon
another of the same family name who lived 300 years later. We, who wear
eye-glasses would be willing, I think, to vote the honor to the elder
Bacon, because if we do not owe to him the discovery of lenses, we are
his debtors for his clarification of the principles of lenses and for
his successful efforts in establishing them on a mathematical basis. In
any event, he was a pioneer in inductive science.

Before gunpowder is known to have been discovered in the West, the friar
Roger Bacon must have made some interesting experiments along the line
of explosives, else he could not have made the following remarkable
statement as to the property of gunpowder: "One may cause to burst from
bronze, thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A
small quantity of prepared matter causes a terrible explosion