Previously Unpublished Works of Roger Bacon, Fascicle 11: Questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics and On Plants

written and corrected. These additions are evidently the work of someone who felt he had the right to make them; they are indisputably Baconian Belonging to the style or thought of Roger Bacon..

The second treatise in this volume original: "fascicule," a term for a single installment of a published work. is the Questions on Plants original: "Questiones de Plantis.", representing a course of lectures given during the five weeks allotted to this pseudo-Aristotelian A work once attributed to Aristotle but now known to be by a different author. book in the Arts course of the University of Paris. These lectures are not a commentary on the book, nor are they a botanical treatise; they are not to be compared with the On Vegetables original: "De Vegetabilibus." of Albert Albertus Magnus., but rather with his treatment of similar subjects in the second part of the Summary of Created Beings original: "Summa de Creaturis.", such as what we mean by Life, how food becomes changed into the substance of the body fed, what is implied in sex, what happens to the essence of a graft which becomes part of a tree, and so on. We may connect in time these Questions with the incident of the Spanish student who corrected Bacon on the meaning of the word ‘henbane’ original: "belenum," the Latinized form of a Celtic word for henbane. Bacon was embarrassed to be corrected on a botanical term by a student., an incident which impressed him so much that he refers to it three times in his later works (The Great Work original: "Opus Majus." I, p. 67, The Third Work original: "Opus Tertium," p. 91, Compendium of the Study of Philosophy original: "Compend. Stud.," p. 468), and was probably one of the grounds for a suspicion of translations which was to grow on further acquaintance with them.

These Questions reveal the interesting fact that towards the middle of the thirteenth century two versions of the On Plants original: "De Plantis." were current, and that the version used by Bacon seems to be lost. Dr. Wingate, at my suggestion, has made an extensive search through European libraries and has found no trace of it. In her valuable study The Medieval Latin Versions of the Aristotelian Scientific Corpus (Courier Press, 1931), where this subject is discussed at length, she shows that the text used by Bacon was almost certainly the original from which the medieval Greek version of Planudes Maximus Planudes (c. 1260–1305), a Byzantine Greek monk and scholar. was made. At the same time we observe that the prologue of Alfred Alfred of Sarashel, an English scholar who translated many scientific works from Arabic into Latin., which is attached to the other translation original: "alia translatio," the version commonly used in universities at the time.—the current text—is treated by Bacon as if it were part of his version.

Some idea of an agricultural activity of which we have only rare glimpses is given by Bacon’s casual remark that "often an apple is grafted onto vegetables, or a pear onto a thorn-bush" original: "sepe in oleribus inseritur pomus, vel in spina pirus" (p. 250), a remark