Inappropriate charms on a goat

[houyhnhnm102]

No: HPFGUIDX 158449

I am reading _Doctor Mirabilis_, the fictional recreation of the life 
of Roger Bacon, by James Blish.

It recounts the Father of Experimental Science's first challenge to 
the Auctoritates, demonstrating by experiment(!) that an adamant could 
not be broken by the blood of a goat.  In Blish's novel Bacon kept the 
goat in his apartment. 

It made me think of Aberforth.  Then I thought, naw, I can't see JK 
Rowling being interested enough in the history of science to know 
anything about Roger Bacon.  But then I realized that while I see 
alchemists like Roger Bacon and others, from Jabir to Newton, as 
proto-scientists groping in the dim light of the dawn of reason for a 
theory of matter, others might see them as figures of occult-
mysticism-whatever.  So Rowling might be familiar with Roger Bacon 
that way--Nicholas Flamel and all that.

So for those of you who are into that, the Aberforth-Roger Bacon 
connection might be a line of inquiry