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."

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.'

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."

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."

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." Bacon says:

And here is another equally striking.

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:

If you could hurt,

Your swords are now too massy for your strengths,
And will not be uplifted."

All's Well that Ends Well, i, 3.
Antony and Cleopatra, ii, 2.
Natural History, $791.

A 2d Henry IV., i, 1.
Hamlet, iv, 7.
Natural History, $32.

Natural History, §788.

8 Hamlet, iii, 4.

• Tempest, iii, 3.

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