ONE:"It isn't a puncture at all," Balmayne snarled, "at least not an accidental one. Some mischievous fiend must have passed down the lane just now and done this for pure wickedness. There are two long slashes in the tyres."Bacon begins by demanding that throughout the whole range of experience new facts should be collected on the largest scale, in order to supply materials for scientific generalisation. There can be no doubt that he is here guided by the example of Aristotle, and of Aristotle alone. Such a storehouse of materials is still extant in the History of Animals, which evidently suggested the use of the word History in this sense to Bacon, and which, by the way, is immensely superior to anything that he ever attempted in374 the same line. The facts on which Aristotles Politics is based were contained in another vast descriptive work of the same kind, now unhappily lost. Even the Stagirites more systematic treatises comprise a multitude of observations, catalogued according to a certain order, but not reduced to scientific principles. What Bacon did was to carry out, or to bid others carry out, the plan so suggested in every department of enquiry. But if we ask by what method he was guided in his survey of the whole field to be explored, how he came by a complete enumeration of the sciences, arranged according to their logical order,the answer is still that he borrowed it from the Peripatetic encyclopaedia.
TWO:Then, pushing off in the rubber boat, he sat still, his dry clothes in a compact bundle in the boat thwarts, while Jeff let the wind and tide-run carry his amphibian out of the channel to where he could get sea space for a start, to get the amphibian pontoons on the step from which, with his silent cargo of human tragedy, Jeff lifted into air and went out of sight, southbound.
