Charles Webster has noted that, unlike Descartes, Bacon wrote nothing that could be translated into textbook form; but Bacon's contribution was not really the kind of thing that could have been encapsulated in such a form. Even his account of inductive procedures is so geared to the particular problems faced in pursuing the matter theory of his time that, although some insights are undeniably generalisable, unlike the theories of method of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy of science the attractiveness of his account lies primarily in the attention to detailed problems facing the isolation of particular properties of matter, a detail which was gradually superseded as the discipline became transformed and its role in physical inquiry rethought. Bacon's main contribution is not one to be described as lasting so much as irreversible. He inaugurated the transformation of philosophy into science, and philosophers into scientists, for even though the ideas of ‘science’ and ‘scientists’ in the modern sense are only really established in the nineteenth century, their genealogy goes back to Bacon's attempt to effect a fundamental reform of philosophy from a contemplative discipline exemplified in the individual persona of the moral philosopher, to a communal, if ultimately centrally directed, enterprise exemplified in the persona of the experimental natural philosopher. In turn, observation and experiment are lifted out of the purview of the arcane and the esoteric, and planted firmly in the public realm.