If we adopt the statement of Herodotus, who places the Homeric era 400 years back from his time, Homer lived about 900 years before Christ. On adding this number to the sixteen centuries of the Christian era which had elapsed up to Bacon’s time, we get the twenty-five centuries he mentions. The Homeric epoch is the furthest point in antiquity from which Bacon could reckon with any degree of certainty. Hesiod, if he were not contemporary, immediately preceded him.

The allusion is evidently to Roger Bacon and Réné Descartes.—Ed.

From the abuse of the scholastics, who mistook the à priori method, the deductive syllogism, for the entire province of logic.—Ed.

See Aphorism xcv.

The incongruity to which Bacon alludes appears to spring from confounding two things, which are not only distinct, but affect human knowledge in inverse proportion, viz., the experience which terminates with life, with that experience which one century transmits to another.—Ed.