PREPVACE. xi
operations with which moral or political science is con- cerned. This science is the mistress of every depart- ment of philosophy. It employs and controls them for the advantage of states and kingdoms. It directs the choice of men who are to study in sciences and arts for the common good. I[t orders all members of the state or kingdom so that none shall remain without his proper work,’
The seventh part of the Ofus AZazjus is for the first time printed in this edition. Unfortunately it is not complete. It consisted, as we learn from the fourteenth chapter of the Opus Zertiunz, of six divisions; and the only two MSS. of it as yet discovered, those of Dublin and Oxford (the first of which, as will be shown after- wards, is copied from the second), stop short before the conclusion of the fourth. We gather, however, that the missing portions are not of primary importance,
Another alteration of considerable importance has heen made in the present edition. Professor Emile Charles, in his very important monograph on Roger Bacon (Bordeaux, 1861), pointed out that the treatise De Multipticatione Specierum, which in Jebb’s edition of the Opus Afajus is placed between the fifth and sixth sections of the work, does not in reality belong to it. And indeed the second sentence of the treatise makes this evident. ‘ Recolendum est, Bacon observes, ‘quod in tertia parte hujus operis tactum est quod essentia, substantia, natura, potestas, potentia, virtus, vis, significant eandem rem.’ No such passage is to be found in any part of the Opus AZazus, least of all in the third part, which deals with Comparative Philology. Here again the Opus Zertiune comes to our aid. Several references will be found there te a distinct treatise sent to Pope Clement IV simultancously with the Ofzs
