From Natural History To Natural Magic: Francis Bacon's Sylva sylvarum
 
"Of all these five disciplines, Bacon composed and published natural histories. Physics and mechanics were treated in the Latin natural histories, which are (as we shall see) much more than what natural histories are traditionally expected to provide, because they include theoretical considerations and propose veritable transformations of nature. Metaphysics is treated by Bacon in the second book of the Novum organum, where he investigates the simple nature of heat. But what about magic? Does it represent the only science that was not developed by Bacon? This dissertation claims that Bacon constructed and presented his science of magic in Sylva sylvarum, a work published posthumously by his erstwhile assistant, William Rawley. In fact, as we shall document, what Bacon “performs” in several experiments from Sylva is natural magic in the sense defined in his earlier works." pg 13