Introduction

The engraved frontispiece of Francis Bacon's Instauratio Magna (1620) shows two ships, one sailing off the pillars of Hercules at Gibraltar in a boundless ocean, the other, in the foreground, preparing to return from its voyage of exploration freighted with wealth. At a time of western European political and economic expansion, the ships evoke tra vel, commerce and conquest. Yet, as the biblical text inscribed at the bottom makes clear, the engraving also symbolises the adventures and possibilities of the sciences once freed from the bonds of tradition. (‘Multi pertransibunt et augebitur scientia': Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased [Daniel 12: 4].) However, such a great renewal of the sciences was difficult to achieve, as Francis Bacon tells his readers:

[Men] are like fatal pillars of Hercules to the sciences; for they are not stirred by the desire or the hope of going further … This should not be taken to imply that nothing at all has been achieved in so many centuries, with so much effort … but before the ocean could be crossed and the territories of the new world revealed, it was necessary to have a knowledge of the nautical compass as a more reliable and certain guide.