Latin term, which could refer variously to the structure of language, to its description, and to the science underlying such descriptions: i.e., linguistics. Other works Bacon states that his Lesser Work () and Third Work () were originally intended as summaries of the in case it was lost in transit. Easton's review of the texts suggests that they became separate works over the course of the laborious process of creating a fair copy of the , whose half-million words were copied by hand and apparently greatly revised at least once. Other works by Bacon include his "Tract on the Multiplication of Species" (), "On Burning Lenses" (), the and , the "Compendium of the Study of Philosophy" and "of Theology" ( and ), and his Computus. The "Compendium of the Study of Theology", presumably written in the last years of his life, was an anticlimax: adding nothing new, it is principally devoted to the concerns of the 1260s. Apocrypha The Mirror of Alchimy (), a short treatise on the origin and composition of metals, is traditionally credited to Bacon. It espouses the Arabian theory of mercury and sulphur forming the other metals, with vague allusions to transmutation. Stillman opined that "there is nothing in it that is characteristic of Roger Bacon's style or ideas, nor that distinguishes it from many unimportant alchemical lucubrations of anonymous writers of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries", and Muir and Lippmann also considered it a pseudepigraph. The cryptic Voynich manuscript has been attributed to Bacon by various sources, including by its first recorded owner, but historians of science Lynn Thorndike and George Sarton dismissed these claims as unsupported, and the vellum of the manuscript has since been dated to the 15th century. Legacy Bacon was largely ignored by his contemporaries in favour of other scholars such as Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas, although his works were studied by Bonaventure, John Pecham, and Peter of Limoges, through whom he may have influenced Raymond Lull. He was also partially responsible for the addition of optics () to the medieval university curriculum. By the early modern period, the English considered him the epitome of a wise and subtle possessor of forbidden knowledge, a Faust-like magician who had tricked the devil and so was able to go to heaven. Of these legends, one of the most prominent was that he created a talking brazen head which could