And Judge Holmes calls attention to the following parallel thought in Shakespeare:

As whence the sun 'gins his reflection,

Ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders break.1

And that all-powerful preponderance of the sun in the affairs of the planet, which modern science has established, was realized by the author of the Plays, when he speaks, in the foregoing, of "the almighty sun," "constringing" the air and producing the hurricane. It is no wonder that Richard Grant White exclaims:

The entire range of human knowledge must be laid under contribution to illustrate his writings.

And the natural philosopher is shown in the question of Lear (for Shakespeare's lunatics ask many questions that wise men cannot answer):

Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?3

In his Natural History, we find Bacon occupying himself with kindred thoughts. He discusses the casting-off of the shell of the lobster, crab, cra-fish, the snail, the tortoise, etc., and the making of a new shell:

The cause of the casting of the skin and shell should seem to be the great quantity of matter that is in those creatures that is fit to make skin or shell.^

And again says Lear:

First let me talk with this philosopher:
What is the cause of thunder?"

And Bacon had considered this question also.

He says:

We see that among the Greeks those who first disclosed the natural causes of thunder and storms, to the yet untrained ears of man, were condemned as guilty of impiety towards the gods.

6

Shakespeare says:

And do but see his vice;
'Tis to his virtue a just equinox,

The one as long as the other."

In this we have another observation of a natural phenomenon.. And here is another:

The poet had also studied the causes of malaria.

He says:

All the infections that the sun sucks up

From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
By inch-meal a disease.'

And again:

Infect her beauty,

Yon fen-sucked fogs, drawn by the powerful sun,
To fall and blast her pride.*

And in the following the natural philosopher is clearly ap parent:

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears; the earth's a thief
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement.3

I shall hereafter show, in the chapter on "Identical Comparisons," that both Bacon and Shakespeare compared man to a species of deputy God, a lesser Providence, with a power over nature that approximated in kind, but not in degree, to the creative power of the Almighty. He says in one place:

For in things artificial nature takes orders from man and works under his authority; without man such things would never have been made. But by the help and ministry of man a new force of bodies, another universe, or theater of things, comes into view.

And in Shakespeare we have the following kindred reflections:

And again:

'Tis often seen

Adoption strives with nature; and choice breeds

A native slip to us from foreign seeds.1

And we have a glimpse in the following of the doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum.

The air, which, but for vacancy,

Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra, too,

And made a gap in nature.

And here we find them, again, thinking the same thought, based on the same observation. Bacon says:

As for the inequality of the pressure of the parts, it appeareth manifestly in this, that if you take a body of stone or iron, and another of wood, of the same magnitude and shape, and throw them with equal force, you cannot possibly throw the wood so far as the stone or the iron.3

And we find the same thought in Shakespeare:

The thing that's heavy in itself,

Upon enforcement flies with greatest speed.*

And here is a remarkable parallelism. Shakespeare says:
There lives within the very flame of love

Bacon says:

A kind of wick, or snuff, that will abate it.3

Take an arrow and hold it in flame for the space of ten pulses, and when it cometh forth you shall find those parts of the arrow which were on the outside of the flame more burned, blackened, and turned almost to a coal, whereas that in the midst of the flame will be as if the fire had scarce touched it. This . . . showeth manifestly that flame burneth more violently towards the sides than in the midst." And here is another equally striking. Bacon says:

Besides snow hath in it a secret warmth; as the monk proved out of the text: “Qui dat nivem sicut lanam, gelu sicut cineres spargit." Whereby he did infer that snow did warm like wool, and frost did fret like ashes.

Shakespeare says:

Since frost itself as actively doth burn.

Bacon anticipated the discovery of the power of one mind over another which we call mesmerism; and we find in Shakespeare Ariel saying to the shipwrecked men:

I conclude this chapter with the following citations, each of which shows the profound natural philosopher: