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 faisais de nos belles ceremonies, et de la grauité de nos Prelats en leurs habits Pontificaux, et autres choses que je laisse pour dire, que l'Ethiopien est ioyoux et gaillard, ne ressemblant en rien à la saleté du Tartare, ny à l'affreux regard du miserable Arabe, mais ils sont fins et cauteleux, et ne se fient en personne, soupçonneux à merueilles, et fort devotieux, ils ne sont du tont noirs comme l'on croit, i'entens parler de ceux qui ne sont pas sous la ligne Eqninoxiale, ny trop proches d'icelle, car ceux qui sont dessons sont les Mores que nous voyons.

It will be observed that the author speaks of his conversation with an Ethiopian bishop, about that bishop's sovereign. Something must have passed between the two which satisfied the writer that the bishop acknowledged his own sovereign under some title answering to Prester John.

This tract of Fienus against the motion of the earth is a reprint of one published in 1619. I have given an account of it as a good summary of arguments of the time, in the Companion to the Almanac for 1836.

This is a celebrated work on the approximative quadrature, which, having the suspicious word cyclometricus, must be noticed here for distinction.

1620. In this year, Francis Bacon published his 'Novum Organum,' which was long held in England—but not until the last century—to be the work which taught Newton and all his successors how to philosophise. That Newton never mentions Bacon, nor alludes in any way to his works, passed for nothing. Here and there a parodoxer ventured not to find all this teaching in Bacon, but he was pronounced blind. In our day it begins to be seen that, great as Bacon was, and great as his book really is, he is not the philosophical father of modern discovery.

But old prepossession will find reason for anything. A learned friend of mine wrote to me that he had discovered proof that Newton owned Bacon for his master: the proof was that Newton, in some of his earlier writings, used the phrase experimentum crucis, which is Bacon's. Newton may have read some of Bacon, though no proof of it appears. I have a dim idea that I once saw the two words attributed to the alchemists: if so there is