Many times in the history of science the unique, but failed, experiment has been noticed by others learned in the field. The preliminary, apparently spurious, results have been seized upon by a few individualists of this intellectually tolerant fraternity and have been proven either to have been the result of grievous error or to have made a new breach in the parapet of Nature's seemingly hostile defenses against inquisitive minds. F rancis Bacon has been called the father of modern science, not for his own particular scientific studies, but for his demands upon its practitioners to adopt inductive methods. He quit before he was granted a degree and spent the greater part of the rest of his life studying and communicating, and then writing and publishing his views. If he did not invent the scientific method of experimentation, he was the outstanding publicist of that novel and still misunderstood way of working.
History is a fragile and often a perishable form of merchandise.
It is sometimes a political image seen through multiple reflections of darksilvered mirrors placed randomly in the corners of biased or guilty minds, or filtered through fading memories. The process of rewriting history continued discreditably within the Iron Curtain, and frequently without. The events of the remote past, even when first accurately recorded, have often been bent to the ideological or whimsical or sensational or merely dogmatical views of the many hands through which they have passed. Merely by the passage of time some things that probably never occurred have, with common negligent consent, become frozen into marble episodes. Good intentions, founded upon ancient assertions, have jealously built ivory fortresses against new, and therefore suspect, inquiries.