During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the name of Francis Bacon was closelyassociated with the idea of experimental philosophy or natural science. For the leading members of the early Royal Society, he was the guiding moral and intellectual spirit of the scientific endeavour, or, as Abraham Cowley's Ode would have it, a prophetic Moses who led natural philosophers towards the promised land.'Similarly, within a European context, one writer commented that Bacon was" the greatest man for the interest of Natural Philosophy that ever was"? This association is now almost totally disrupted; practising scientists are less given to public pronouncements about methods and goals than their predecessors and, since the early years ofthis century, professional philosophers of science have treated his work with nearly complete indifference.'The critical period for this shift in the fortunes of Bacon and Baconianism was the nineteenth century. With the expansion of scientific institutions, the beginning of large scale co-ordination of research, and the application of scientific theory to technology, some of Bacon's most novel and visionary speculations were, in some senses, tangibly realized.'On the other hand, in the four decades from 1820, his writings about the proper method of scientific inquiry became, for the first time, the object of serious scholarship. In 1881 it was still possible for one writer to underline Bacon's significance by recording his imprint on language: phrases such as" crucial instance" and" solitary instance" had" become household words in our language, and especially in the vocabulary of scientific men".'But this was said against a backgroundof criticism. At first moderate in tone, this revisionism culminated in the 1850swith the aggressive and often virulent denunciations by David Brewster, the Scottish physicist and Justus von Liebig, the German chemist-two'foreigners' who were not prepared to tolerate the English idolatry which surrounded Bacon's name. Before these indictments came the various assessments of John Playfair, Dugald Stewart, Macvey Napier, John Herschel, William Whewell, TB Macaulay and JS Mill. As a result of this attention, the earlier image of Bacon as the father of experimental science and the legislator of its methodology was largely abandoned. Although still acknowledged as a significant spokesman for the

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