The Life & Work of Roger Bacon

at Oxford. This lecture was published in the volume Essays and Addresses.Chapman and Hall, 1907. With the permission of Mrs. Bridges, I have incorporated those portions of this lecture that contain important material not treated as fully in the Introduction. The shorter extracts from the lecture have been placed as additional footnotes, while the longer and more significant passages appear in the Appendix at the end of the book. (All such extracts are marked with the reference E. and A.)

Other footnotes, which clarify various points in the Introduction, have been taken from the three volumes of the Opus Majus. (These are denoted by the reference Op. Maj.) All the additional footnotes, including the editorial ones, have been placed within brackets to distinguish them from Dr. Bridges' original footnotes.

In his Preface to the supplementary volume (1900) of the Opus Majus, Dr. Bridges stated:

Three motives prompted me, in 1893, to undertake a new edition of Roger Bacon's Opus Majus. One was that the sixth centenary of one of the earliest and perhaps the greatest of Oxford thinkers was at hand. A second reason was that this work brings into prominence the connection of Greek science with that of the modern world, through the mediation of the Arabic schools of