The reputation of Friar Roger Bacon (1214-1294) as a scientist was burnished lately when University of Pennsylvania chemists obtained salts of copper by one of his cryptic formulae (TiME, Dec. 13). But last week Friar
Roger was consigned again to the limbo of medieval credulity. Dean Robert Bell Burke of Pennsylvania, after four years' labor with the key discovered by a colleague, the late Dr. William Romaine Newbold, announced completion of the world's first translation of Friar Roger's 800-page Opus maius, prodigious cryptogram in monkish dog-Latin that men had thought might contain marvelous...
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