Secondly, Roger Bacon openly alludes to gunpowder in 1267 in his Opus Tertium as already in common use in children’s toy explosives. Therefore Colonel Hime has to date the De secretis in 1248, and to hold that Bacon was at that time “driven to employ cryptic methods by fear of the Inquisition” (p. 334), but that by 1267 “Circumstances had totally changed in the lapse of years; the composition of gunpowder ... had been divulged, and the first use made of the deadly mixture was for the amusement of children” (p. 321). This transition from fear of the inquisition to child’s play might seem in itself a sufficient reductio ad absurdum.
But is there any good reason for dating the De secretis in 1248? Much of it sounds like a brief popular compilation from Bacon’s three works of 1266-7 concocted by some one else later; compare, for instance, the first paragraph of the sixth chapter of the De secretis with Duhem, Un fragment inédit de l’Opus Tertium, 153-4, and Little, Part of the Opus Tertium, 50-51. Charles considered the last five chapters to be of dubious authenticity, and they are not found in the oldest manuscript of the thirteenth century. The dedication of the De secretis to William, bishop of Paris, who died in 1249, occurs first in the late edition of 1618 and has not been found by Little in any manuscript.
Then the inquisition bug-a-boo is negligible. Has any one ever shown that the inquisition punished a practical invention? It was not for having invented the telescope that Galileo was persecuted. Moreover, Galileo’s was an exceptional case, and it can not be shown that in the thirteenth century the church persecuted men of science. Rather, popes and prelates were their patrons. Finally the inquisition seems to have been set up in England on only one occasion during the middle ages.
But even if we admit that Bacon wrote the De secretis as we have it in 1248 and was at that time afraid of the Inquisition, the question remains: why in 1267-8, when mentioning the explosive in those works in which he made such desperate efforts to secure the pope as his patron, and boasted repeatedly of his own superiority to his contemporaries, did he not claim the credit of the invention which he had set forth in cipher twenty years before? The simple answer is: it was not his invention.
One instance must be added to show how Colonel Hime misinterprets the text of the De secretis in his eagerness to smell powder everywhere. He writes (p. 324): “Now, towards the end of Chap. X., Bacon speaks without disguise of charcoal under the name of the wood from which it is made, and mentions the two trees, hazel and willow, which give the best. He significantly adds that when charcoal is added to proper proportions of certain other substances, something noteworthy happens. Since, then, charcoal is one of the subjects of these two chapters, it becomes all the more probable that saltpeter forms another.” In a note Hime adds the Latin of the passage in question: Si vero partes virgulti coryli aut salicis multarum justa rerum serie apte ordinaveris, unionem naturalem servabunt: et hoc non tradas oblivioni, quia valet ad multa.
Let us note first that these last words do not mean, “something noteworthy happens,” but “don’t forget this, because it’s valuable.” Thus the true wording does not in the least suggest an explosion, as Colonel Hime’s translation does. Rather it suggests if anything the phraseology of mystical and magical works generally, like the closing words of Thebit ben Corat’s treatise on Images, Intellige quod exposui tibi, et si queris ordinem invenies effectum ne dubites. (Bodleian MS 463, fol. 77v, Explicit.) Secondly, the words partes virgulti coryli aut salicis probably do not denote charcoal but twigs or rods of hazel or willow, as they do in Bacon’s account of the experiment performed by magicians with a split hazel rod. It occurs both in the Opus Maius (Bridges, II, 219) and Opus Tertium (Little, 49-50; Duhem, 153); I quote the latter. Unde magici accipiunt virgas coruli et salicum, et dividunt eas secundum longitudinem, et faciunt eas distare secundum quantitatem palmae, et addunt carmina sua, et coniungunt partes divise; sed non propter carmina, sed ex naturali proprietate. (Wherefore magicians take rods of hazel and willow, and divide them lengthwise, and hold them the breadth of a palm apart, and add their charms, and the divided parts come together; but not on account of the charms, but from their very natures.) Moreover, we have already heard this matter of the split hazel rod discussed by William of Auvergne, and noted that it was repeated by Albertus Magnus and John of St. Amand, a medieval writer about 1261, as well as by Bacon.
Thirdly, it is probably precisely this hazel-rod experiment to which the writer of the passage quoted by Hime refers. Multarum justa rerum serie ordinaveris seems a hurried equivalent for the more specific directions in the passages in the Opus Maius and Opus Tertium, and this bears out what I have already suggested, that the De secretis may be in part at least a brief popular compilation from Bacon’s other works. Finally, the phrase unionem naturalem servabunt applies better to the bending together in the middle of two halves of a split hazel rod held apart at the ends than it does to a mixture of saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur.
And now what becomes of Colonel Hime’s assertion, “Since therefore charcoal is one of the subjects of these two chapters, it becomes all the more probable that saltpeter forms another?” We may alter it to read thus: since charcoal is not a subject of either of these chapters, it becomes all the more improbable that a method of refining saltpeter is disclosed in them in cipher.
CHAPTER LXII
THE SPECULUM ASTRONOMIAE