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(Eatbolic Cbnrcbmen 
 in Science 
 
 [FIRST SERIES] 
 
 SKETCHES OF THE LIVES OF CATHOLIC 
 ECCLESIASTICS WHO WERE AMONG 
 THE GREAT FOUNDERS IN SCIENCE 
 
 JAMES J. WALSH, K.St.G., M.D., Ph.D., Litt.D. 
 
 Dean and Professor of Medicine and of Nervous Diseases 
 at Fordham University School of Medicine; Professor 
 of Physiological Psychology in the Cathedral Col- 
 lege, New York; Member of A.M. A., N. Y. 
 State Med. Soc, A.A.A.S., Life Mem. 
 of N. Y. Historical Society. 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 ^\ 
 
 Philadelphia 
 American Ctckstasttcal Eetoieto 
 
 MCMX. 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
Copyright, iqo6, 1910 
 
 American Ecclesiastical IReview 
 Gbe 2)olpbin ipress 
 
 7092 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN 
 IN SCIENCE 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2010 with funding from 
 
 Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/catholicchurchmeOOwals 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 THE following sketches of the lives of clergymen 
 who were great scientists have appeared at various 
 times during the past five years in Catholic magazines. 
 They were written because the materials for them had 
 gradually accumulated during the preparation of vari- 
 ous courses of lectures, and it seemed advisable to put 
 them in order in such a way that they might be helpful 
 to others working along similar lines. They all range 
 themselves naturally around the central idea that the 
 submission of the human reason to Christian belief, and 
 of the mind and heart to the authority of the Church, 
 is quite compatible with original thinking of the highest 
 order, and with that absolute freedom of investigation 
 into physical science, which has only too often been 
 said to be quite impossible to churchmen. For this 
 reason friends have suggested that they should be 
 published together in a form in which they would be 
 more easy of consultation than when scattered in dif- 
 ferent periodicals. It was urged, too, that they would 
 thus also be more effective for the cause which they 
 uphold. This friendly suggestion has been yielded to, 
 whether justifiably or not the reader must decide for 
 himself. There is so great a flood of books, good, bad, 
 and indifferent, ascribing their existence to the advice of 
 well-meaning friends, that we poor authors are evi- 
 dently not in a position to judge for ourselves of the 
 merit of our works or of the possible interest they 
 may arouse. 
 
 (vii) 
 
Vlll PREFACE 
 
 I have to thank the editors of the American Catholic 
 Quarterly Review, of the Ave Maria, and of The 
 Ecclesiastical Review and The Dolphin, for their kind 
 permission to republish the articles which appeared 
 originally in their pages. All of them, though sub- 
 stantially remaining the same, have been revised, modi- 
 fied in a number of particulars, and added to very 
 considerably in most cases. 
 
 The call for a second edition — the third thousand — 
 of this little book is gratifying. Its sale encouraged 
 the preparation of a Second Series of Catholic 
 Churchmen in Science, and now the continued de- 
 mand suggests a Third Series, which will be issued 
 during the year. Some minor corrections have been 
 made in this edition, but the book is substantially the 
 same. 
 
"& sortoto'fii croton of aDmito.' 
 
 THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO THE 
 MEMORY OF MY MOTHER 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface ix 
 
 I. The Supposed Opposition of Science and 
 
 Religion 3 
 
 II. Copernicus and His Times 15 
 
 III. Basil Valentine: Founder of Modern 
 
 Chemistry 45 
 
 IV. Linacre: Scholar, Physician, Priest 79 
 
 V. Father Kircher, S.J. : Scientist, 
 
 Orientalist, and Collector 11 1 
 
 VI. Bishop Stensen: Anatomist and Father 
 
 of Geology 137 
 
 VII. Abbe Hauy: Father of Crystallog- 
 raphy 169 
 
 VIII. Abbot Mendel: A New Outlook in 
 
 Heredity 195 
 
 (ix) 
 
I. 
 
 THE SUPPOSED OPPOSITION OF 
 SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 
 
BOSTON COLLEGE 
 
 FACULTY LIBRARY 
 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE SUPPOSED OPPOSITION OF SCIENCE 
 AND RELIGION. 
 
 A COMMON impression prevails that there 
 is serious, if not invincible, opposition be- 
 tween science and religion. This persuasion has 
 been minimized to a great degree in recent years, 
 and yet sufficient of it remains to make a great 
 many people think that, if there is not entire in- 
 compatibility between science and religion, there 
 is at least such a diversity of purposes and aims 
 in these two great realms of human thought that 
 those who cultivate one field are not able to ap- 
 preciate the labors of those who occupy them- 
 selves in the other. Indeed, it is usually accepted 
 as a truth that to follow science with assiduity is 
 practically sure to lead to unorthodoxy in re- 
 ligion. This is supposed to be especially true if 
 the acquisition of scientific knowledge is pur- 
 sued along lines that involve original research 
 and new investigation. Somehow, it is thought 
 that any one who has a mind free enough from 
 the influence of prejudice and tradition to be- 
 come an original thinker or investigator, is in- 
 evitably prone to abandon the old orthodox lines 
 of thought in respect to religion. 
 
 Like a good many other convictions and per- 
 suasions that exist more or less as common- 
 
 3 
 
CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 -C_ 
 
 places in the subconscious intellects of a great 
 many people, this is not true. Our American 
 humorist said that it is not so much the ignor- 
 ance of mankind that makes him ridiculous as 
 the knowing so many things " that ain't so." 
 The supposed opposition between science and re- 
 ligion is precisely an apposite type of one of the 
 things " that ain't so." It is so firmly fixed as 
 a rule, however, that many people have accepted 
 it without being quite conscious of the fact that 
 it exists as one of the elements influencing many 
 of their judgments — a very important factor in 
 their apperception. 
 
 Now, it so happens that a number of prom- 
 inent original investigators in modern science 
 __were not only thoroughly orthodox in their re- 
 ligious beliefs, but were even faithful clergymen 
 and guiding spirits for others in the path of 
 Christianity. The names of those who are in- 
 cluded in the present volume is the best proof of 
 this. The series of sketches was written at vari- 
 ous times, and yet there was a central thought 
 guiding the selection of the various scientific 
 workers. Most of them lived at about the time 
 when, according to an unfortunate tradition that 
 has been very generally accepted, the Church 
 dominated human thinking so tyrannously as 
 practically to preclude all notion of original in- 
 vestigation in any line of thought, but especially 
 in matters relating to physical science. Most of 
 the men whose lives are sketched lived during 
 the fifteenth, sixteenth, and first half of the seven. 
 
SCIENCE AND RELIGION 
 
 teenth centuries. All of them were Catholic 
 clergymen of high standing, and none of them 
 suffered anything like persecution for his opin- 
 ions; all remained faithful adherents of the 
 Church through long lives. 
 
 It is hoped that this volume, without being in 
 any sense controversial, may tend to throw light 
 on many points that have been the subject of 
 controversy; and by showing how absolutely 
 free these great clergymen-scientists were to 
 pursue their investigations in science, it may 
 serve to demonstrate how utterly unfounded is 
 the prejudice that would declare that the eccle- 
 siastical authorities of these particular centuries 
 were united in their opposition to scientific ad- 
 vance. 
 
 There is no doubt that at times men have been 
 the subject of persecution because of scientific 
 opinions. In all of these cases, without excep- 
 tion, however — and this is particularly true of 
 such men as Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Mich- 
 ael Servetus — a little investigation of the personal 
 character of the individuals involved in these 
 persecutions will show the victims to have been 
 of that especially irritating class of individuals 
 who so constantly awaken opposition to whatever 
 opinions they may hold by upholding them over- 
 strenuously and inopportunely. They were the 
 kind of men who could say nothing without, to 
 some extent at least, arousing the resentment of 
 those around them who still clung to older ideas. 
 We all know this class of individual very well. 
 
6 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 In these gentler modern times we may even be- 
 wail the fact that there is no such expeditious 
 method of disposing of him as in the olden time. 
 This is not a defence of what was done in their 
 regard, but is a word of explanation that shows 
 how human were the motives at work and how 
 unecclesiastical the procedures, even though 
 church institutions, Protestant and Catholic alike, 
 were used by the offended parties to rid them of 
 obnoxious argumentators. 
 
 In this matter it must not be forgotten that 
 persecution has been the very common associate 
 of noteworthy advances in science, quite apart 
 from any question of the relations between 
 science and religion. There has scarcely been a 
 single important advance in the history of ap- 
 plied science especially, that has not brought 
 down upon the devoted head of the discoverer, 
 for a time at least, the ill-will of his own gener- 
 ation. Take the case of medicine, for instance. 
 Vesalius was persecuted, but not by the ecclesias- 
 tical authorities. The bitter opposition to him 
 and to his work came from his colleagues in 
 medicine, who thought that he was departing 
 from the teaching of Galen, and considered that 
 a cardinal medical heresy not to be forgiven. 
 Harvey, the famous discoverer of the circulation 
 of the blood, lost much of his lucrative medical 
 practice after the publication of his discovery, 
 because his medical contemporaries thought the 
 notion of the heart pumping blood through the 
 arteries to be so foolish that they refused to 
 
SCIENCE AND RELIGION 
 
 admit that it could come from a man of common 
 sense, much less from a scientific physician. Nor 
 need it be thought that this spirit of opposition 
 to novelty existed only in the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries. Almost in our own time 
 Semmelweis, who first taught the necessity for 
 extreme cleanliness in obstetrical work, met with 
 so much opposition in the introduction of the 
 precautions he considerd necessary that he was 
 finally driven insane. His methods reduced the 
 mortality in the great lying-in hospitals of 
 Europe from nearly ten per cent for such cases 
 down to less than one per cent, thus saving many 
 thousands of lives every year. 
 
 Despite this very natural tendency to decry 
 the value of new discoveries in science and the 
 opposition they aroused, it will be found that 
 the lives of these clergymen scientists show us 
 that they met with much more sympathy in their 
 work than was usually accorded to original in- 
 vestigators in science in other paths in life. This 
 is so different from the ordinary impression in 
 the matter that it seems worth while calling it to 
 particular attention. While we have selected 
 lives of certain of the great leaders in science, we 
 would not wish it to be understood that these 
 are the only ones among the clergymen of the 
 last four centuries who deserve an honorable 
 place high up in the roll of successful scientific 
 investigators. Only those are taken who illus- 
 trate activity in sciences that are supposed to 
 have been especially forbidden to clergymen. It 
 
8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 has been said over and over again, for instance, 
 that there was distinct ecclesiastical opposition to 
 the study of chemistry. Indeed, many writers 
 have not hesitated to say that there was a bull, or 
 at least a decree, issued by one or more of the 
 popes forbidding the study of chemistry. This 
 is not only not true, but the very pope who is said 
 to have issued the decree, John XXII, was him- 
 self an ardent student of the medical sciences. 
 We still possess several books from him on these 
 subjects, and his decree was meant only to sup- 
 press pseudo-science, which, as always, was ex- 
 ploiting the people for its own ends. The fact 
 that a century later the foundation of modern 
 chemical pharmacology was laid by a Benedictine 
 monk, Basil Valentine, shows how unfounded is 
 the idea that the papal decree actually hampered 
 in any way the development of chemical inves- 
 tigation or the advance of chemical science. 
 
 Owing to the Galileo controversy, astronomy 
 is ordinarily supposed to have been another of 
 the sciences to which it was extremely indiscreet 
 at least, not to say dangerous, for a clergyman 
 to devote himself. The great founder of mod- 
 ern astronomy, however, Copernicus, was not 
 only a clergyman, but one indeed so faithful and 
 ardent that it is said to have been owing to his 
 efforts that the diocese in which he lived did not 
 go over to Lutheranism during his lifetime, as 
 did most of the other dioceses in that part of 
 Germany. The fact that Copernicus's book was 
 involved in the Galileo trial has rendered his 
 
SCIENCE AND RELIGION 
 
 position still further misunderstood, but the mat- 
 ter is fully cleared up in the subsequent sketch of 
 his life. As a matter of fact, it is in astronomy 
 particularly that clergymen have always been in 
 the forefront of advance ; and it must not be for- 
 gotten that it was the Catholic Church that 
 secured the scientific data necessary for the cor- 
 rection of the Julian Calendar, and that it was a 
 pope who proclaimed the advisability of the cor- 
 rection to the world. Down to our own day 
 there have always been very prominent clergy- 
 men astronomers. One of the best known names 
 in the history of the astronomy of the nineteenth 
 century is that of Father Piazzi, to whom we 
 owe the discovery of the first of the asteroids. 
 Other well-known names, such as Father Secchi, 
 who was the head of the papal observatory at 
 Rome, and Father Perry, the English Jesuit, 
 might well be mentioned. The papal observa- 
 tory at Rome has for centuries been doing some 
 of the best work in astronomy accomplished any- 
 where, although it has always been limited in its 
 means, has had inadequate resources to draw on, 
 and has succeeded in accomplishing what it has 
 done only because of the generous devotion of 
 those attached to it. 
 
 To go back to the Galileo controversy for a 
 moment, there seems no better answer to the 
 assertion that his trial shows clearly the opposi- 
 tion between religion, or at least ecclesiastical 
 authorities, and science, than to recall, as we have 
 done, in writing the accompanying sketch of the 
 
10 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 life of Father Kircher, S. J., that just after the 
 trial Roman ecclesiastics very generally were 
 ready to encourage liberally a man who devoted 
 himself to all forms of physical science, who 
 was an original thinker in many of them, who 
 was a great teacher, whose writings did more to 
 disseminate knowledge of advances in science 
 than those of any man of his time, and whose 
 idea of the collection of scientific curiosities into 
 a great museum at Rome (which still bears his 
 name) was one of the fertile germinal sugges- 
 tions in which modern science was to find seeds 
 for future growth. 
 
 It is often asserted that geology was one of 
 the sciences that was distinctly opposed by 
 churchmen ; yet we shall see that the father of 
 modern geology, one of the greatest anatomists 
 of his time, was not only a convert to Catholicity, 
 but became a clergyman about the time he was 
 writing the little book that laid the foundation 
 of modern geology. We shall see, too, that, far 
 from religion and science clashing in him, he 
 afterwards was made a bishop, in the hope that 
 he should be able to go back to his native land 
 and induce others to become members of that 
 Church wherein he had found peace and happi- 
 ness. 
 
 In the modern times biology has been sup- 
 posed to be the special subject of opposition, or 
 at least fear, on the part of ecclesiastical author- 
 ities. It is for this reason that the life of Abbot 
 Mendel has been introduced. While working in 
 
SCIENCE AND RELIGION II 
 
 his monastery garden in the little town of Briinn 
 in Moravia, this Augustinian monk discovered 
 certain precious laws of heredity that are consid- 
 ered by progressive twentieth-century scientists 
 to be the most important contributions to the 
 difficult problems relating to inheritance in biol- 
 ogy that have been made. 
 
 These constitute the reasons for this little book 
 on Catholic clergymen scientists. It is published, 
 not with any ulterior motives, but simply to im- 
 press certain details of truth in the history of 
 science that have been neglected in recent years 
 and, by presenting sympathetic lives of great 
 clergymen scientists, to show that not only is 
 there no essential opposition between science and 
 religion, but on the contrary that the quiet peace 
 of the cloister and of a religious life have often 
 contributed not a little to that precious placidity 
 of mind which seems to be so necessary for the 
 discovery of great, new scientific truths. 
 
II. 
 
 COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES. 
 
ALL the vast and most progressive 
 systems that human wisdom 
 has brought forth as substitutes for 
 religion, have never succeeded in in- 
 teresting any but the learned, the 
 ambitious, or at most the prosperous 
 and happy. But the great majority 
 of mankind can never come under 
 these categories. The great major- 
 ity of men are suffering, and suffering 
 from moral as well as physical evils. 
 Man's first bread is grief, and his first 
 want is consolation. Now which of 
 these systems has ever consoled an 
 afflicted heart, or repeopled a lonely 
 one? Which of these teachers has 
 ever shown men how to wipe away a 
 tear? Christianity alone has from the 
 beginning promised to console man 
 in the sorrows incidental to life by 
 purifying the inclinations of his heart, 
 and she alone has kept her promise. — 
 Montalembert, Introduction to Life 
 of St. Elizabeth. 
 
NTCOLAO COPERNICO 
 
II. 
 
 COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES. 
 
 THE association of the name of Copernicus 
 with that of Galileo has always cast an air 
 of unorthodoxy about the great astronomer. 
 The condemnation of certain propositions in his 
 work on astronomy in which Copernicus first set 
 forth the idea of the universe as we know it at 
 present, in contradistinction to the old Ptolemaic 
 system of astronomy, would seem to emphasize 
 this suspicion of unorthodox thinking. He is 
 rightly looked upon as one of the great pioneers 
 of our modern physical science, and, as it is gen- 
 erally supposed that scientific tendencies lead 
 away from religion, there are doubtless many 
 who look upon Copernicus as naturally one of 
 the leaders in this rationalistic movement. It is 
 forgotten that scarcely any of the great original 
 thinkers have escaped the stigma of having cer- 
 tain propositions in some of their books con- 
 demned, and that this indeed is only an index of 
 the fallibility of the human mind and of the 
 need there is for some authoritative teacher. 
 The sentences in Copernicus's book requiring 
 correction were but few, and were rather matters 
 of terminology than of actual perversion of ac- 
 cepted teaching. It was as such that their modi- 
 fication was suggested. In spite of this, the im- 
 
 15 
 
l6 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 pression remains that Copernicus must be con- 
 sidered as a rationalizing scientist, the first in a 
 long roll of original scientific investigators whose 
 work has made the edifice of Christianity totter 
 by removing many of the foundation-stones of 
 its traditional authority. 
 
 fit is rather surprising, in view of this com- 
 mon impression with regard to Copernicus, to 
 find him, according to recent biographers, a faith- 
 ful clergyman in honor with his ecclesiastical 
 superiors, a distinguished physician whose chief 
 patients were clerical friends of prominent posi- 
 tion and the great noblemen of his day, who not 
 only retained all his faith and reverence for the 
 p. Church, but seems to have been especially relig- 
 ious, a devoted adherent of the Blessed Virgin 
 Mother of God, and the author of a series of 
 poems in her honor that constitute a distinct con- 
 tribution to the literature of his time. 
 
 All this should not be astonishing, however; 
 for in the list of the churchmen of the half cen- 
 tury just before the great religious revolt in Ger- 
 many are to be found some of the best known 
 names in the history of the intellectual develop- 
 ment of the race. This statement is so contrary 
 to the usual impression that obtains in regard to 
 the character of that period as to be a distinct 
 source of surprise to the ordinary reader of his- 
 tory who has the realization of its truth thrust 
 upon him for the first time. Just before the so- 
 p called Reformation, the clergy are considered to 
 L have been so sunk in ignorance, or at least to 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 1 7 
 
 have been so indifferent to intellectual pursuits 
 and so cramped in mind as regards progress, or 
 so timorous because of inquisition methods, that_y 
 no great advances in thought, and especially none 
 in science, could possibly be looked for from 
 them. To find, then, that not only were faithful 
 churchmen leaders in thought, discoverers in 
 science, organizers in education, initiators of new- 
 progress, teachers of the New Learning, but that 
 they were also typical representatives and yet 
 prudent directors of the advancing spirit of that 
 truly wonderful time, is apt to make us think 
 that surely — as the Count de Maistre said one 
 hundred years ago, and the Cambridge Modern 
 History repeats at the beginning of the twen- 
 tieth century when treating of this very period — • 
 "history has been a conspiracy against the truth." 
 Not quite fifty years before Luther's move- 
 ment of protest began — that is, in 1471 — there 
 passed away in a little town in the Rhineland a 
 man who has been a greater spiritual force than 
 perhaps any other single man that has ever ex- 
 isted. This was Thomas a Kempis, a product of J r 
 the schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, 
 a teaching order that during these fifty years 
 before the Protestant Revolution had over ten 
 thousand pupils in its schools in the Rhineland 
 and the Netherlands alone. As among these 
 pupils there occur such names as Erasmus, Nich- 
 olas of Cusa, Agricola, not to mention many less 
 illustrious, some idea of this old teaching insti- 
 tution, that has been very aptly compared to our 
 
l8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 modern Brothers of the Christian Schools, can 
 be realized. 
 
 Kempis was a worthy initiator of a great half 
 century. He had among his contemporaries, or 
 followers in the next generation, such men as 
 Grocyn, Dean Colet, and Linacre in England, 
 Cardinal Ximenes in Spain, and Copernicus in 
 Germany. Considering the usual impression in 
 this matter as regards the lack of interest at Rome 
 in serious study, it is curiously interesting to 
 realize how closely these great scholars and think- 
 ers were in touch with the famous popes of the 
 f* Renaissance period. The second half of the six- 
 teenth century saw the elevation to the papacy 
 of some of the most learned and worthy men that 
 have ever occupied the Chair of Peter. In 1447 
 Nicholas V became pope, and during his eight 
 years of pontificate initiated a movement of sym- 
 pathy with modern art and letters that was never 
 to be extinguished. To him more than to any 
 other may be attributed the foundation of the 
 Vatican Library. To him also is attributed the 
 famous expression that " no art can be too lofty 
 for the service of the Church." He was suc- 
 ceeded by Calixtus III, a patron of learning, who 
 was followed by Pius II, the famous yEneas Syl- 
 vius, one of the greatest scholars and most 
 learned men of his day, who had done more for 
 the spread of culture and of education in the 
 various parts of Europe than perhaps any other 
 alive at the time. 
 
 The next Pope, Paul II, accomplished much 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES IO, 
 
 during a period of great danger by arousing the 
 Christian opposition to the Saracens. His en- 
 couragement and material aid to the Hungarians, 
 who were making a bold stand against the Ori- 
 ental invaders, merit for him a place in the role 
 of defenders of civilization. To him is due the 
 introduction of the recently discovered art of 
 printing and its installation on a sumptuous scale 
 worthy of the center of Christian culture. His 
 successor, Sixtus IV, deserves the title of the 
 founder of modern Rome. Bridges, aqueducts, 
 public buildings, libraries, churches — all owe to 
 his fostering care their restoration and renewed 
 foundation. He made it the purpose of his life 
 to attract distinguished humanistic scholars to 
 his capital, and Rome became the metropolis of 
 culture and learning as well as the mother city 
 of Christendom. 
 
 Under such popes it is no wonder that Rome 
 and the cities of Italy generally became the homes 
 of art and culture, centers of the new humanistic 
 learning and the shelters of the scholars of the 
 outer world. The Italian universities entered on 
 a period of intellectual and educational develop- 
 ment as glorious almost as the art movement 
 that characterized the time. As this was marked 
 "by the work of such men as that universal genius 
 Leonardo da Vinci, of Michael Angelo, poet, 
 painter, sculptor, architect; of Raphael, Titian, 
 and Correggio, whose contemporaries were 
 worthy of them in every way, some idea can be 
 attained of the wonderful era that developed. No 
 
 j 
 
20 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 wonder scholars in every department of learning 
 flocked to Italy for inspiration and the enthusiasm 
 bred of scholarly fellowship in such an environ- 
 ment. From England came men like Linacre, 
 Selling, Grocyn, and Dean Colet; Erasmus came 
 from the Netherlands, and Copernicus from 
 Poland. Copernicus there obtained that scientific 
 
 f training which was later to prove so fruitful in 
 his practical work as a physician and in his sci- 
 entific work as the founder of modern astronomy. 
 It may be as well to say at the beginning that 
 [ even Copernicus was not the first to suggest that 
 the earth moved, and not the sun ; and that, curi- 
 ously enough, his anticipator was another church- 
 man, Nicholas of Cusa, the famous Bishop of 
 Brixen. Readers of Janssen's History of the 
 German People will remember that the distin- 
 guished historian introduces his monumental 
 work by a short sketch of the career of Cusanus,J 
 as he is called, who may be well taken as the 
 typical pre-Reformation scholar and clergyman. 
 Cusa wrote in a manuscript — which is still pre- 
 served in the hospital of Cues, or Cusa — pub- 
 lished for the first time by Professor Clemens in 
 1847 : " I have long considered that this earth 
 can not be fixed, but moves as do the other stars 
 — sed movetur ut alice stellce" What a curious 
 
 T commentary these words, written more than half 
 a century before Galileo was born, form on the 
 
 [ famous expression so often quoted because sup- 
 posed to have been drawn from Galileo by the 
 condemnation of his doctrine at Rome : E pur se 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 21 
 
 muove — " and yet it moves !" Cusanus was a 
 Cardinal, the personal friend of three popes, and 
 he seems to have had no hesitation in expressing 
 his opinion in the matter. In the same manu- 
 script the Cardinal adds : "And to my mind the 
 earth revolves upon its axis once in a day and a 
 night." Cusanus was, moreover, one of the most 
 independent thinkers that the world has ever 
 seen, yet he was intrusted by the pope about the 
 middle of the fifteenth century with the refor- 
 mation of abuses in the Church in Germany. 
 The pope seems to have been glad to be able to 
 secure a man of such straightforward ways for 
 his reformatory designs. 
 
 The ideas of Nicholas of Cusa with regard to 
 knowledge and the liberty of judgment in things 
 not matters of faith can be very well appreciated 
 from some of his expressions. " To know and 
 to think/' he says in one passage, " to see the 
 truth with the eye of the mind is always a joy. 
 The older a man grows, the greater is the pleas- 
 ure it affords him ; and the more he devotes him- 
 self to the search after truth, the stronger grows 
 his desire of possessing it. As love is the life of 
 the heart, so is the endeavor after knowledge and 
 truth the life of the mind. In the midst of the 
 movements of time, of the daily work of life, of 
 its perplexities and contradictions, we should lift 
 our gaze fearlessly to the clear vault of heaven 
 and seek ever to obtain a firmer grasp of, and 
 keener insight into, the origin of all goodness and 
 duty, the capacities of our own hearts and minds, 
 
22 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 the intellectual fruits of mankind throughout the 
 centuries, and the wondrous works of nature 
 around us ; but ever remembering that in humil- 
 ity alone lies true greatness, and that knowledge 
 and wisdom are alone profitable in so far as our 
 lives are governed by them." 1 It is no wonder, 
 then, that the time was ripe for Copernicus and 
 his great work in astronomy, nor that that work 
 should be accomplished while he was a canon of 
 a cathedral and for a time the vicar-general of a 
 diocese. 
 
 It is now nearly five years since Father Adolph 
 Muller, S. J., professor of Astronomy in the Pon- 
 tifical Gregorian University of Rome, and direc- 
 tor of a private observatory on the Janiculum in 
 that city, wrote his historical scientific study 2 
 of the great founder of modern astronomy. 
 The book has been reviewed, criticized and dis- 
 cussed very thoroughly since then, and has been 
 translated into several languages. The latest 
 translation was into Italian, the work of Father 
 Pietro Mezzetti, S. J., 3 and was published in 
 Rome at the end of 1902 — having had the benefit 
 
 1 History of the German People at the Close of the 
 Middle Ages. By Johannes Janssen. Translated from 
 the German by M. A. Mitchell and A. M. Christie. 
 Vol. I, p. 3. 
 
 2 Nikolaus Kopernicus, Der Altmeister der neueren 
 Astronomie ) Ein Lebens und Kultur Bild. Von Adolf 
 Muller, S. J. 
 
 3 Professor of Astronomy and Physics at the Pontif- 
 ical Leonine College of Anagni. 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 23 
 
 of the author's revision. The historical details, 
 then, of Copernicus's life may be considered to 
 have been cast into definite shape, and his career 
 may be appreciated with confidence as to the ab- 
 solute accuracy and essential significance of all 
 its features. 
 
 Nicholas Copernicus — to give him the Latin 
 and more usual form of his name — was the \j/ 
 youngest of four children of Niclas Copernigk, 
 who removed from Cracow in Poland to Thorn 
 in East Prussia (though then a city of Poland), 
 where he married Barbara Watzelrode, a daugh- 
 ter of one of the oldest and wealthiest families of 
 the province. His mother's brother, after hav- 
 ing been a canon for many years in the cathedral' 
 of Frauenburg, was elected Bishop of the Prov- 
 ince of Ermland. The future astronomer was 
 jjporn in 1473, at a time when Thorn, after hav- 
 ing been for over two hundred years under the 
 rule of the Teutonic Knights, had for some 
 seven years been under the dominion of the King 
 of Poland. There were two boys and two girls 
 in the family ; and their fervent Catholicity can 
 be judged from the fact that all of them, parents 
 and children, were inscribed among the members 
 of the Third Order of St. Dominic. Barbara, 
 the older sister, became a religious in the Cister- 
 cian Convent of Kulm, of which her aunt Cath- 
 erine was abbess, and of which later on she her- 
 self became abbess. Andrew, the oldest son, be- 
 came a priest; and Nicholas, the subject of this 
 sketch, at least assumed, as we shall see, all the 
 
24 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 obligations of the ecclesiastical life, though it is 
 not certain that he received the major religious 
 orders. 
 
 Copernicus's collegiate education was obtained 
 at the University of Cracow, at that time one of 
 the most important seats of learning in Europe. 
 The five-hundredth anniversary of the founding 
 of this University was celebrated with great 
 pomp only a few years ago. Its origin, how- 
 ever, dates back to the times of Casimir the Great, 
 at the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of 
 the fourteenth century. Its foundation was due 
 to the same spirit of enthusiasic devotion to 
 letters that gave us all the other great univer- 
 sities of the thirteenth century. The original in- 
 stitution was so much improved by Jagello, King 
 of Poland, at the beginning of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury, that it bears his name and is known as the 
 Jagellonian University. It was very natural for 
 Copernicus to go back to his father's native city 
 for his education; but his ambitious spirit was 
 not content with the opportunities afforded there. 
 He does not seem to have taken his academic de- 
 grees, and the tradition that he received his doc- 
 torate in medicine at the University of Cracow 
 cannot be substantiated by any documentary evi- 
 dence. 
 
 At Cracow, Copernicus devoted himself mainly 
 to classical studies, though his interest in astron- 
 omy seems to have been awakened there. In 
 fact, it is said that his desire to be able to read 
 Ptolemy's astronomy in the original Greek, and 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 25 
 
 to obtain a good copy of it, led him to look to 
 Italy for his further education. During his years 
 at Cracow, however, he seems to have made nu- 
 merous observations in astronomy, as most of the 
 astronomical data in his books are found reduced 
 to the meridian' of Cracow. The observatory of 
 Frauenburg, at which his work in astronomy in 
 later life was carried on, was on the same merid- 
 ian; so that it is difficult to say, as have some of 
 his biographers, that, since Cracow was the cap- 
 ital of his native country, motives of patriotism 
 influenced him to continue his observations ac- 
 cording to this same meridian. Copernicus was 
 anxious, no doubt, to come in contact with some 
 of the great astronomers at the universities of 
 Italy, whom he knew by reputation and whose 
 work was attracting attention all over Europe at 
 that time. 
 
 How faithfully Copernicus applied himself to 
 his classical studies can be best appreciated from 
 some Latin poems written by him during his stu- 
 dent days. These poems are an index, too, of 
 the personal character of the man, and give some 
 interesting hints of the religious side of his char- 
 acter. Altogether there are seven Latin odes, 
 each ode composed of seven strophes. The seven 
 odes are united by a certain community of in- 
 terest or succession of subjects. All of them 
 refer to the history of the Redeemer either in 
 types or in reality. In the first one the prophets 
 prefigure the appearance of the Saviour; in the 
 second the patriarchs sigh for His coming; the 
 
26 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 third depicts the scene of the Nativity in the 
 Cave of Bethlehem ; the fourth is concerned with 
 the Circumcision and the imposition of the Name 
 chosen by the Holy Ghost; the fifth treats of the 
 Star and the Magi and their guidance to the 
 Manger; the sixth concerns the presentation in 
 the Temple ; and the seventh, the scene in which 
 Jesus at the age of twelve disputes with the doc- 
 tors in the Temple at Jerusalem. 
 
 Copernicus's recent biographers have called 
 attention particularly to the poetical beauties with 
 which he surrounds every mention of the Blessed 
 Virgin and her qualities. As is evident even 
 from our brief resume of the subjects of the 
 odes, the themes selected are just those in which 
 the special devotion of the writer to the Mother 
 of the Saviour could be very well brought out. 
 There are, besides, a number of astronomical 
 allusions which stamp the poems as the work of 
 Copernicus, and which have been sufficient to 
 defend their authenticity against the attacks made 
 by certain critics, who tried to point out how 
 different was the style from that of Copernicus's 
 later years in his scientific writings. The tradi- 
 tion of authorship is, however, too well estab- 
 lished on other grounds to be disturbed by criti- 
 cism of this sort. The poems were dedicated to 
 the Pope. In writing poetry Copernicus was 
 only doing what Tycho Brahe and Kepler, his 
 great successors in astronomy, did after him; 
 and the argument with regard to the difference 
 of style in the two kinds of writings would hold 
 also as regards these authors. 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 27 
 
 Copernicus's years as a boy and man — that is, 
 up to the age of thirty-five — corresponded with 
 a time of great intellectual activity in Europe. 
 This fact is not as generally recognized as it 
 should be, for intellectual activity is supposed to 
 have awakened after the so-called Reformation. 
 During the years from 1472 to 1506, however, 
 there were founded in Germany alone no less 
 than six universities : those of Ingolstadt, Treves, 
 Tubingen, Mentz, Wittenberg, and Frankfort- 
 on-the-Oder. These were not by any means the 
 first great institutions of learning that arose in 
 Germany. The universities of Prague and 
 Vienna were more than a century old, and, with 
 Heidelberg, Cologne, Erfurt, Leipsic, and Ros- 
 tock, besides Greifswald and Freiburg, founded 
 about the middle of the fifteenth century, had 
 reached a high state of development, and con- 
 tained larger numbers of students, with few ex- 
 ceptions, than these same institutions have ever 
 had down to our own day. In most cases their 
 charters were derived from the pope; and most 
 of the universities were actually recognized as 
 ecclesiastical institutions, in the sense that their 
 officials held ecclesiastical authority. 
 
 At this time — the end of the fifteenth and the 
 beginning of the sixteenth century — it was not 
 unusual for students, in their enthusiasm for 
 learning, to attempt to exhaust nearly the whole 
 round of university studies. Medicine seems to 
 have been a favorite subject with scholars who 
 were widely interested in knowledge for its own 
 
28 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 sake. Almost at the same time that Copernicus 
 was studying in Italy, the distinguished Eng- 
 lish Greek scholar, Linacre, was also engaged 
 in what would now be called post-graduate 
 work at various Italian universities, and in 
 the household of Lorenzo the Magnificent at 
 Florence, with whose son — so much did Lorenzo 
 think of him — he was allowed to study Greek. 
 Linacre (as will be seen more at length in the 
 sketch of his life in this volume), besides being 
 the greatest Greek scholar of his time, the friend 
 later of More and Colet and Erasmus in London, 
 was also the greatest physician in England. 
 
 To those familiar with the times, it may be a 
 source of surprise to think of Copernicus, inter- 
 ested as we know him to have been in literature 
 and devoted so cordially to astronomy, yet tak- 
 ing up medicine as a profession. He seems, 
 however, to have been led to do so by his dis- 
 tinguished teacher, Novara, who realized the 
 talent of his Polish pupil for mathematics and 
 astronomy and yet felt that he should have some 
 profession in life. A century ago Coleridge, the 
 English writer, said that a literary man should 
 have some other occupation. Oliver Wendell 
 Holmes improved upon this by adding: "And, as 
 far as possible, he should confine himself to the 
 other occupation." Novara seems to have real- 
 ized that Copernicus might be under the neces- 
 sity of knowing how to do something else be- 
 sides making astronomical observations, in order 
 to gain his living; and as medicine was satisfy- 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 20, 
 
 ingly scientific, the old teacher suggested his tak- 
 ing it up as a profession. Copernicus made his 
 medical studies in Ferrara and Padua, and ob- 
 tained his doctorate with honors from Ferrara. 
 
 Copernicus seems to have taken up the prac- 
 tice of his profession seriously, and to have per- 
 severed in it to the end of his life. His biog- 
 raphers say that in the exercise of his professional 
 duties he was animated by the spirit of a person 
 who had devoted himself to the ecclesiastical life. 
 While he did not publicly practise his profession, 
 he was ever ready to assist the poor ; and he also 
 acquired great reputation in the surrounding 
 country for his medical attendance upon clerics 
 of all ranks. This continued to be the case, not- 
 withstanding the fact that after the death of his 
 uncle his mother inherited considerable wealth, 
 and the family circumstances changed so much 
 that he might well have given up any labors that 
 were meant only to add to his income. In a 
 word, he seems to have had a sincere interest in 
 his professional work, and to have continued its 
 exercise because of the opportunities it afforded 
 for the satisfaction of a mind devoted to scien- 
 tific research. 
 
 Copernicus acquired considerable reputation 
 by his medical services. His friend Giese speaks 
 of him as a very skilful physician, and even calls 
 him a second iEsculapius. Maurice Ferber, who 
 became Bishop of Ermland in 1523, suffered 
 from a severe chronic illness that began about 
 1529. He obtained permission from the canons 
 
30 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 of the cathedral to have Doctor Copernicus, 
 whose ability and zeal he never ceased to praise, 
 to come from the cathedral town where he ordi- 
 narily resided to Heilsburg, in order to have 
 him near him. Bishop Ferber's successor, Dan- 
 tisco, also secured Copernicus's aid in a severe 
 illness, and declared that his restoration to health 
 was mainly due to the efforts of his learned 
 physician. Giese was so confident of the Doc- 
 tor's skill that when he became Bishop of Kulm 
 and on one of his episcopal visitations fell ill at 
 a considerable distance from Copernicus's place 
 of residence, he insisted on having the astron- 
 omer doctor brought to take care of him. 
 
 In 1 541 Duke Albert of Prussia became very 
 much worried over the illness of one of his most 
 trusted counsellors. In his distress he had re- 
 course to Copernicus, and his letter asking the 
 Canon of the Cathedral of Frauenburg- to come 
 to attend the patient is still extant. He says that 
 the cure of the illness is " very much at his 
 heart " ; and, as every other means has failed, 
 he hopes Copernicus will do what he can for the 
 assistance of his faithful and valued counsellor. 
 Copernicus yielded to the request, and the coun- 
 sellor began to improve shortly after his arrival. 
 At the end of some weeks the Duke wrote again 
 to the canons of the cathedral asking that the 
 leave of absence granted to Copernicus should be 
 extended in order to enable him to complete the 
 cure which had been so happily begun. In this 
 second letter the Duke talks of Copernicus as a 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 3 1 
 
 most skilful and learned physician. At the end 
 of the month there is a third letter from the 
 Duke, in which he thanks all the canons of the 
 cathedral for their goodness in having granted 
 the desired permission, and he adds that he shall 
 ever feel under obligations " for the assistance 
 rendered by that very worthy and excellent physi- 
 cian, Nicholas Copernicus, a doctor who is de- 
 serving of all honor." Not long afterward, 
 when Copernicus's book on astronomy was pub- 
 lished, a copy of it was sent to the Duke, and he 
 replied that he was deeply grateful for it, and 
 that he should always preserve it as a souvenir 
 of the most learned and gentlest of men. 
 
 There are a number of notes on the art of 
 medicine made by Copernicus in the books of the 
 cathedral library at Frauenburg. They serve to 
 show how faithful a student he was, and to a 
 certain extent give an idea of the independent 
 habit of mind which he brought to the investiga- 
 tion of medicine as well as to the study of astron- 
 omy. Unfortunately, these have not as yet found 
 an editor; but it is to be hoped that we shall 
 soon know more of the medical thinking of a 
 man over whose mind tradition, in the unworthier 
 sense of that word, exercised so little influence. 
 
 In 1530 Copernicus wrote a short prelude to 
 the longer work on astronomy which he was to 
 publish later. The propositions contained in this 
 work show how far he had advanced on the road 
 to his ultimate discovery. After a few words of 
 introduction, the following seven axioms are laid 
 down : — 
 
32 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 1. The celestial spheres and their orbits have 
 not a single center. 
 
 2. The center of the earth is not the center of 
 the universe, but only the center of gravity and 
 of the moon's orbit. 
 
 3. The planes of the orbits lie around the sun, 
 which may be considered as the center of the 
 universe. 
 
 4. The distance from the earth to the sun 
 compared with that from the earth to the fixed 
 stars is extremely small. 
 
 5. The daily motion of the heavenly sphere is 
 apparent — that is, it is an effect of the rotary 
 motion of the earth upon it axis. 
 
 6. The apparent motions of the moon and of 
 the sun are so different because of the effect pro- 
 duced by the motion of the earth. 
 
 7. The movements of the earth account for the 
 apparent retrograde motion and other irregular- 
 ities of the movements of the planets. It is 
 enough to assume that the earth alone moves, in 
 order to explain all the other movements ob- 
 served in the heavens. 
 
 It is no wonder that one of his bishop-friends, 
 Frisio, writing to another bishop-friend, Dan- 
 tisco, said : " If Copernicus succeeds in demon- 
 strating the truth of his thesis — and we may well 
 consider that he will from this prelude — he will 
 give us a new heaven and a new earth/' This 
 shorter exposition of Copernicus's views was 
 found in manuscript in the imperial library in 
 Vienna only about a quarter of a century ago. 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 33 
 
 It is mentioned by Tycho Brahe in one of his 
 works on astronomy in which he reviews the 
 various contemporary advances made in the 
 knowledge of the heavens. 
 
 The publication of Copernicus's great work, 
 " De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium," was 
 delayed until he was advanced in years, because 
 his astronomical opinions were constantly pro- 
 gressing; and, with the patience of true genius, 
 he was not satisfied with anything less than the 
 perfect expression of truth as he saw it. It has 
 sometimes been said that it was delayed because 
 Copernicus feared the storm of religious perse- 
 cution which he foresaw it would surely arouse. 
 How utterly without foundation is this pretence, 
 which has unfortunately crept into serious his- 
 tory, can be seen from the fact that Pope Paul 
 III accepted the dedication of the work; and of 
 the twelve popes who immediately followed Paul 
 not one even thought of proceeding against 
 Copernicus's work. His teaching was never 
 questioned by any of the Roman Congregations 
 for nearly one hundred years after his death. 
 Galileo's injudicous insistence in his presenta- 
 tion of Copernicus's doctrine, on the novelties 
 of opinion that controverted long-established 
 beliefs, was . then responsible for the condem- 
 nation by the Congregation of the Index; 
 and, as we shall see, this was not absolute, but 
 only required that certain passages should be" 
 corrected. The corrections demanded were un- 
 important as regards the actual science, and 
 
34 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 merely insisted that Copernicus's teaching was 
 hypothesis and not yet actual demonstration. 
 
 It must not be forgotten, after all, that the 
 reasons advanced by Copernicus for his idea of 
 the movements of the planets were not supported 
 by any absolute demonstration, but only by rea- 
 sons from analogy. Nearly a hundred years 
 later than his time, even after the first discoveries 
 had been made by the newly constructed tele- 
 scopes, in Galileo's day, there was no absolute 
 proof of the true system of the heavens. The 
 famous Jesuit astronomer, Father Secchi, says 
 the reasons adduced by Galileo were no real 
 proofs : they were only certain analogies, and by 
 no means excluded the possibility of the contrary 
 propositions with regard to the movements of 
 the heavens being true. " None of the real 
 proofs for the earth's rotation upon its axis were 
 known at the time of Galileo, nor were there 
 direct conclusive arguments for the earth's mov- 
 ing around the sun." Even Galileo himself con- 
 -^> fessed that he had not any strict demonstration 
 of his views, such as Cardinal Bellarmine re- 
 quested. He wrote to the Cardinal, " The sys- 
 tem seems to be true;" and he gave as a reason 
 that it corresponded to the phenomena. 
 
 According to the astronomers of the time, 
 however, the old Ptolemaic system, in the shape 
 in which it was explained by the Danish astron- 
 omer Tycho Brahe, who was acknowledged as 
 the greatest of European astronomers, appeared 
 to give quite a satisfactory explanation of the 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 35 
 
 phenomena observed. The English philosopher, 
 Lord Bacon, more than a decade after Galileo's 
 announcement, considered that there were cer- 
 tain phenomena in nature contrary to the Coper- 
 nican theory, and so he rejected it altogether. 
 This was within a few years of the condemna- 
 tion by the Congregation at Rome. As pointed 
 out by Father Heinzle, S. J., in his article on 
 Galileo in the "Catholic World" for 1887, 
 " science was so far from determining the ques- 
 tion of the truth or falsity of either the Ptolemaic 
 or the Copernican system that shortly before 
 1633, the year of Galileo's condemnation, a num- 
 "ber of savants, such as Fromond in Louvain, 
 Morin in Paris, Berigard in Pisa, Bartolinus in 
 Copenhagen, and Scheiner in Rome, wrote 
 against Copernicanism." 
 
 As we have said, Copernicus's book was not 
 condemned unconditionally by the Roman author- 
 ities, but only until it should be corrected. This 
 assured protection to the principal part of the 
 work, and the warning issued by the Roman 
 Congregation in the year 1820 particularizes the 
 details that had to be corrected. It is interesting 
 to note that whenever Copernicus is spoken of in 
 this Monitum it is always in flattering terms as 
 a " noble astrologer " — the word astrologer hav- 
 ing at that time no unworthy meaning. The 
 whole work is praised and its scientific quality 
 acknowledged. 
 
 The passages requiring correction were not 
 many. In the first book, at the beginning of the 
 
> 
 
 36 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 fifth chapter, Copernicus made the declaration 
 that " the immobility of the earth was not a de- 
 cided question, but was still open to discussion." 
 In place of these words it was suggested that the 
 following should be inserted : " In order to ex- 
 plain the apparent motions of the celestial bodies, 
 it is a matter of indifference whether we admit 
 that the earth occupies a place in the middle of 
 the heavens or not." 
 
 In the eighth chapter of the first book, Coper- 
 nicus said : " Why, then, this repugnance to con- 
 cede to our globe its own movement as natural 
 to it as is its spherical form? Why prefer to 
 make the whole heavens revolve around it, with 
 the great danger of disturbance that would re- 
 sult, instead of explaining all these apparent 
 movements of the heavenly bodies by the real 
 rotation of the earth, according to the words of 
 ^neas, ' We are carried from the port, and the 
 land and the cities recede ' ?" This passage was 
 to be modified as follows : " Why not, then, ad- 
 mit a certain mobility of the earth corresponding 
 to its form, since the whole universe of which 
 we know the bounds is moved, producing ap- 
 pearances which recall to the mind the well- 
 known saying of ^Eneas in Virgil, ' The land 
 and the cities recede ' ?" 
 
 Toward the end of the same chapter Coper- 
 nicus, continuing the same train of thought, says : 
 " I do not fear to add that it is incomparably 
 more unreasonable to make the immense vault 
 of the heavens revolve than to admit the revolu- 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 37 
 
 tion of our little terrestrial globe." This pas- 
 sage was to be modified as follows : " In one 
 case as well as in the other — that is, whether we 
 admit the rotation of the earth or that of the 
 heavenly spheres — we encounter the same diffi- 
 culties." 
 
 The ninth chapter of the first book begins with 
 these words : " There being no difficulty in ad- 
 mitting, then, the mobility of the earth, let us 
 proceed to see whether it has one or a number 
 of movements, and whether, therefore, our earth 
 is a simple planet like the other planets." The 
 following words were to be substituted : " Sup- 
 posing, then, that the earth does move, it is 
 necessary to examine whether this movement is 
 multiple or not." 
 
 Toward the middle of the tenth chapter Coper- 
 nicus declares : " I do not hesitate to defend the 
 proposition that the earth, accompanied by the 
 moon, moves around the sun ;" while the word- 
 ing of this proposition had to be changed so as 
 to substitute the term " admit " for " defend." 
 The title of the eleventh chapter, " Demonstra- 
 tion of the Triple Movement of the Earth," was 
 modified to read as follows : " The Hypothesis 
 of the Triple Movement of the Earth, and- the 
 Reasons Therefor." The title of the twentieth 
 chapter of the fourth book originally read : " On 
 the Size of the Three Stars [Sidera], the sun, 
 the moon, and the earth." The word " stars " 
 was removed from this title, the earth not being 
 considered as a star. The concluding words of 
 
38 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 the tenth chapter of the first book, " So great is 
 the magnificent work of the Omnipotent Artif- 
 icer," had to be cancelled, because they expressed 
 an assurance of the truth of his system not war- 
 ranted by knowledge. With these few unim- 
 portant changes, any one might read and study 
 Copernicus's work with perfect freedom. 
 
 Traditions to the contrary notwithstanding, 
 Galileo, because of the friendship and encourage- 
 ment of the churchmen in Italy, had been placed 
 in conditions eminently suited for study and in- 
 vestigation. Several popes and a number of 
 prominent ecclesiastics were his constant friends 
 and patrons. The perpetual secretary of the 
 Paris Academy of Sciences, M. Bertrand, him- 
 self a great mathematician and historian, de- 
 clares that the long life of Galileo was one of the 
 most enviable that is recorded in the history of 
 science. " The tale of his misfortunes has con- 
 firmed the triumph of the truth for which he 
 suffered. Let us tell the whole truth. This 
 great lesson was learned without any profound 
 sorrow to Galileo ; and his long life, considered 
 as a whole, was one of the most serene and en- 
 viable in the history of science." 
 
 Copernicus, like Galileo, had clerical friends 
 to thank for an environment that proved the 
 greatest possible aid to his scientific work. His 
 position as Canon of the Cathedral of Frauen- 
 burg provided him with learned leisure, while 
 his clerical friends took just enough interest in 
 his investigations and the preliminary announce- 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 39 
 
 merits of his discoveries to make his pursuit of 
 astronomical studies to some definite conclusion 
 a worthy aim in life. It was this assistance that 
 enabled him to publish his book eventually and 
 bring his great theory before the world. 
 
 Copernicus, far from having any leanings to- 
 ward the so-called " reform " movement (as has 
 often been asserted), was evidently a staunch 
 supporter of his friend and patron Bishop 
 Maurice Ferber, of Ermland, who kept his see 
 loyal to Rome at a time when the secularization 
 of the Teutonic order and the falling awa)^ of 
 many bishops all around him make his position 
 as a faithful son of the Church and that of his 
 diocese noteworthy in the history of that time 
 and place. It may well be said that under less 
 favorable conditions Copernicus's work might 
 never have been finished. As it was, his book 
 met with great opposition from the Reformers, 
 but remained absolutely acceptable even to the 
 most rigorous churchmen until Galileo's unfor- 
 tunate insistence on the points of it that were ( 
 opposed to generally accepted theories. ^U 
 
 During all his long life Copernicus remained 
 one of the simplest of men. Genius as he was, 
 he could not have failed to realize how great was 
 the significance of the discoveries he had made 
 in astronomy. In spite of this he continued to 
 exercise during a long career the simple duties 
 of his post as Canon of the Cathedral of Frauen- 
 berg, nor did he fail to give such time as was 
 asked of him for the medical treatment of the 
 
40 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 poor or of his friends, the ecclesiastics of the 
 neighborhood. These duties — as he seems to 
 have considered them — must have taken many 
 precious hours from his studies, but they were 
 given unstintingly. When he came to die, his 
 humility was even more prominent than during 
 life. It was at his own request that there was 
 graven upon his tombstone simply the prayer, 
 " I ask not the grace accorded to Paul, not that 
 given to Peter : give me only the favor Thou 
 didst show to the thief on the cross." There is 
 perhaps no better example in all the world of the 
 simplicity of true genius nor any better example 
 of how sublimely religious may be the soul that 
 has far transcended the bounds of the scientific 
 knowledge of its own day. 
 
 The greatness of Copernicus's life-work can 
 best be realized from the extent to which he 
 surpassed even well-known contemporaries in 
 astronomy and from his practical anticipation of 
 the opinions of some of his greatest successors. 
 Even Tycho Brahe, important though he is in 
 the history of astronomical science, taught many 
 years after Copernicus's death the doctrine that 
 the earth is the center of the universe. Newton 
 had in Copernicus a precursor who divined the 
 theory of universal gravitation; and even Kep- 
 ler's great laws, especially the elliptical form of 
 the orbits of the planets, are at least hinted at 
 in Copernicus's writings. He is certainly one of 
 the most original geniuses of all times ; and it is 
 interesting to find that the completeness of his 
 
COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES 41 
 
 scholarly career, far from being rendered abor- 
 tive by friction with ecclesiastical superiors, as 
 we might imagine probable from the traditions 
 that hang around his name, was rather made 
 possible by the sympathy and encouragement of 
 clerical friends and Church authorities. Coper- 
 nicus, the scholar, astronomer, physician, and 
 clergyman, is a type of the eve of the Reforma- 
 tion period, and his life is the best possible refu- 
 tation of the slanders with regard to the unpro- 
 gressiveness of the Church and churchmen of 
 that epoch which have unfortunately been only 
 too common in the histories of the time. 
 
III. 
 
 BASIL VALENTINE, FOUNDER OF 
 MODERN CHEMISTRY. 
 
LET us, then, banish into the 
 world of fiction that affirmation 
 so long repeated by foolish credulity 
 which made monasteries an asylum 
 for indolence and incapacity, for mis- 
 anthropy and pusillanimity, for feeble 
 and melancholic temperaments, and 
 for men who were no longer fit to 
 serve society in the world. Monas- 
 teries were never intended to collect 
 the invalids of the world. It was not 
 the sick souls, but on the contrary 
 the most vigorous and healthful the 
 human race has ever produced, who 
 presented themselves in crowds to 
 
 fill them. — MONTALEMBERT, Monks 
 
 of the West. 
 
III. 
 
 BASIL VALENTINE, FOUNDER OF MODERN 
 CHEMISTRY. 
 
 THE Protestant tradition which presumes 
 a priori that no good can possibly have 
 come out of the Nazareth of the times before the 
 Reformation, and especially the immediately pre- 
 ceding century, has served to obscure to an un- 
 fortunate degree the history of several hundred 
 years extremely important in every department 
 of education. Strange as it may seem to those 
 unfamiliar with the period, it is in that depart- 
 ment which is supposed to be so typically mod- 
 ern — the physical sciences — that this neglect is 
 most serious. Such a hold has this Portestant 
 tradition on even educated minds that it is a 
 source of great surprise to most people to be told 
 that there were in many parts of Europe original 
 observers in the physical sciences all during the 
 thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries who 
 were doing ground-breaking work of the highest 
 value, work that was destined to mean much for 
 the development of modern science. Speculations 
 and experiments with regard to the philosopher's 
 stone and the transmutation of metals are sup- 
 posed to fill up all the interests of the alchemists 
 of those days. As a matter of fact, however, 
 men were making original observations of very 
 
 45 
 
46 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 profound significance, and these were considered 
 so valuable by their contemporaries that, though 
 printing had not yet been invented, even the im- 
 mense labor involved in copying large folio vol- 
 umes by hand did not suffice to deter them from 
 multiplying the writings of these men and thus 
 preserving them for future generations, until the 
 printing-press came to perpetuate them. 
 
 At the beginning of the twentieth century, 
 with some of the supposed foundations of mod- 
 ern chemistry crumbling to pieces under the in- 
 fluences of the peculiarly active light thrown 
 upon older chemical theories by the discovery of 
 radium and the radio-active elements generally, 
 there is a reawakening of interest in some of 
 the old-time chemical observers whose work used 
 to be laughed at as so unscientific and whose 
 theory of the transmutation of elements into one 
 another was considered so absurd. The idea 
 that it would be impossible under any circum- 
 stances to convert one element into another be- 
 longs entirely to the nineteenth century. Even 
 so distinguished a mind as that of Newton, in 
 the preceding century, could not bring itself to 
 acknowledge the modern supposition of the ab- 
 surdity of metallic transformation, but, on the 
 contrary, believed very firmly in this as a basic 
 chemical principle and confessed that it might be 
 expected to occur at any time. He had seen 
 specimens of gold ores in connexion with metal- 
 lic copper, and had concluded that this was a 
 manifestation of the natural transformation of 
 one of these yellow metals into the other. 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 47 
 
 With the discovery that radium transforms 
 itself into helium, and that indeed all the so- 
 called radio-activities of the very heavy metals 
 are probably due to a natural transmutation pro- 
 cess constantly at work, the ideas of the older 
 chemists cease entirely to be a subject for amuse- 
 ment. The physical chemists of the present day 
 are very ready to admit that the old teaching of 
 the absolute independence of something over 
 seventy elements is no longer tenable, except as a 
 working hypothesis. The doctrine of matter and 
 form taught for so many centuries by the scholas- 
 tic philosophers which proclaimed that all matter 
 is composed of two principles, an underlying 
 material substratum and a dynamic or informing 
 principle, has now more acknowledged veri- 
 similitude, or lies at least closer to the generally 
 accepted ideas of the most progressive scientists, 
 than it has at any time for the last two or three 
 centuries. Not only the great physicists, but also 
 the great chemists, are speculating along lines 
 that suggest the existence of but one form of 
 matter, modified according to the energies that 
 it possesses under a varying physical and chem- 
 ical environment. This is, after all, only a re- 
 statement in modern terms of the teaching of St. 
 Thomas of Aquin in the thirteenth century. 
 
 It is not surprising, then, that there should be 
 a reawakening of interest in the lives of some of 
 the men who, dominated by the earlier scholastic 
 ideas and by the tradition of the possibility of 
 finding the philosopher's stone, which would 
 
48 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 transmute the baser metals into the precious 
 metals, devoted themselves with quite as much 
 zeal as any modern chemist to the observation of 
 chemical phenomena. One of the most interest- 
 ing of these — indeed he might well be said to be 
 the greatest of the alchemists — is the man whose 
 only name that we know is that which appears 
 on a series of manuscripts written in the High 
 German dialect of the end of the fifteenth and 
 the beginning of the sixteenth century. That 
 name is Basil Valentine, and the writer, accord- 
 ing to the best historical traditions, was a Bene- 
 dictine monk. The name Basil Valentine may 
 only have been a pseudonym, for it has been im- 
 possible to trace it among the records of the 
 monasteries of the time. That the writer was a 
 monk there seems to be no doubt, for his writ- 
 ings in manuscript and printed- form began to 
 have their vogue at a time when there was little 
 likelihood of their being attributed to a monk 
 unless an indubitable tradition connected them 
 with some monastery. 
 
 This Basil Valentine (to accept the only name 
 we have), as we can judge very well from his 
 writings, eminently deserves the designation of 
 the last of the alchemists and the first of the 
 chemists. There is practically a universal recog- 
 nition of the fact now that he deserves also the 
 title of Founder of Modern Chemistry, not only 
 because of the value of the observations con- 
 tained in his writings, but also because of the 
 fact that they proved so suggestive to certain 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 49 
 
 scientific geniuses during the century succeeding 
 Valentine's life. Almost more than to have 
 added to the precious heritage of knowledge for 
 mankind is it a boon for a scientific observer to 
 have awakened the spirit of observation in others 
 and to be the founder of a new school of thought. 
 This Basil Valentine undoubtedly did. 
 
 Besides, his work furnishes evidence that the 
 investigating spirit was abroad just when it is 
 usually supposed not to have been, for the Thur- 
 ingian monk surely did not do all his investigat- 
 ing alone, but must have received as well as 
 given many a suggestion to his contemporaries 
 
 In the history of education there are two com- 
 monplaces that are appealed to oftener than any 
 other as the sources of material with regard to 
 the influence of the Catholic Church on educa- 
 tion during the centuries preceding the Refor- 
 mation. These are the supposed idleness of the 
 monks, and the foolish belief in the transmuta- 
 tion of metals and the search for the philoso- 
 pher's stone which dominated the minds of so 
 many of the educated men of the time. It is in 
 Germany especially that these two features of 
 the pre-Reformation period are supposed to be 
 best illustrated. In recent years, however, there 
 nas come quite a revolution in the feelings even 
 of those outside of the Church with regard to 
 the proper appreciation of the work of the mon- 
 astic scholars of these earlier centuries. Even 
 though some of them did dream golden dreams 
 over their alembics, the love of knowledge meant 
 
50 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 more to them, as to the serious students of any 
 age, than anything that might be made by it. 
 As for their scientific beliefs, if there can be a 
 conversion of one element into another, as seems 
 true of radium, then the possibility of the trans- 
 mutation of metals is not so absurd as, for a cen- 
 tury or more, it has seemed ; and it is not im- 
 possible that at some time even gold may be 
 manufactured out of other metallic materials. 
 
 Of course, a still worthier change of mind has 
 come over the attitude of educators because of 
 the growing sense of appreciation for the won- 
 derful work of the monks of the Middle Ages, 
 and even of those centuries that are supposed to 
 show least of the influence of these groups of 
 men who, forgetting material progress, devoted 
 themselves to the preservation and the cultiva- 
 tion of the things of the spirit. The impression 
 that would consider the pre-Reformation monks 
 in Germany as unworthy of their high calling in 
 the great mass is almost entirely without foun- 
 dation. Obscure though the lives of most of 
 them were, many of them rose above their en- 
 vironment in such a way as to make their work 
 landmarks in the history of progress for all time. 
 
 Because their discoveries are buried in the old 
 Latin folios that are contained only in the best 
 libraries, not often consulted by the modern 
 scientist, it is usually thought that the scientific 
 investigators of these centuries before the Refor- 
 mation did no work that would be worth while 
 considering in our present day. It is only some 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 5 1 
 
 one who goes into this matter as a labor of love 
 who will consider it worth his while to take the 
 trouble seriously to consult these musty old 
 tomes. Many a scholar, however, has found his 
 labor well rewarded by the discovery of many 
 an anticipation of modern science in these vol- 
 umes so much neglected and where such treasure- 
 trove is least expected. Professor Clifford All- 
 butt, the Regius Professor of physics at the Uni- 
 versity of Cambridge, in his address on " The 
 Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery 
 Down to the End of the Sixteenth Century," 
 which was delivered at the St. Louis Congress 
 of Arts and Sciences during the Exposition in 
 1904, has shown how much that is supposed to 
 be distinctly modern in medicine, and above all 
 in surgery, was the subject of discussion at the 
 French and Italian universities of the thirteenth 
 century. William Salicet, for instance, who 
 taught at the University of Bologna, published 
 a large series of case histories, substituted the 
 knife for the Arabic use of the cautery, described 
 the danger of wounds of the neck, investigated 
 the causes of the failure of healing by first in- 
 tention, and sutured divided nerves. His pupil, 
 Lanfranc, who taught later at the University of 
 Paris, went farther than his master by distin- 
 guishing between venous and arterial hemor- 
 rhage, requiring digital compression for an hour 
 to stop hemorrhage from the venae pulsatiles — 
 the pulsating veins, as they were called — and if 
 this failed because of the size of the vessel, sug- 
 
 [boston college 
 
52 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 gesting the application of a ligature. Lanfranc's 
 chapter on injuries to the head still remains a 
 noteworthy book in surgery that establishes be- 
 yond a doubt how thoughtfully practical were 
 these teachers in the medieval universities. It 
 must be remembered that at this time all the 
 teachers in universities, even those in the med- 
 ical schools as well as those occupied with sur- 
 gery, were clerics. Professor Allbutt calls atten- 
 tion over and over again to this fact, because it 
 emphasizes the thoroughness of educational meth- 
 ods, in spite of the supposed difficulties that 
 would lie in the way of an exclusively clerical 
 teaching staff. 
 
 In chemistry the advances made during the 
 thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries 
 were even more noteworthy than those in any 
 other department of science. Albertus Magnus, 
 who taught at Paris, wrote no less than sixteen 
 treatises on chemical subjects, and, notwithstand- 
 ing the fact that he was a theologian as well as 
 a scientist and that his printed works filled six- 
 teen folio volumes, he somehow found the time 
 to make many observations for himself and per- 
 formed numberless experiments in order to clear 
 up doubts. The larger histories of chemistry 
 accord him his proper place and hail him as a 
 great founder in chemistry and a pioneer in orig- 
 inal investigation. 
 
 Even St. Thomas of Aquin, much as he was 
 occupied with theology and philosophy, found 
 some time to devote to chemical questions. After 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 53 
 
 all, this is only what might have been expected 
 of the favorite pupil of Albertus Magnus. Three 
 treatises on chemical subjects from Aquinas's 
 pen have been preserved for us, and it is to him 
 that we are said to owe the origin of the word 
 amalgam, which he first used in describing vari- 
 ous chemical methods of metalic combination 
 with mercury that were discovered in the search 
 for the genuine transmutation of metals. 
 
 Albertus Magnus's other great scientific pupil, 
 Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan friar, fol- 
 lowed more closely in the physical scientific ways 
 of his great master. Altogether he wrote some 
 eighteen treatises on chemical subjects. For a 
 long time it was considered that he was the in- 
 ventor of gunpowder, though this is now known 
 to have been introduced into Europe by the 
 Arabs. Roger Bacon studied gunpowder and 
 various other explosive combinations in consid- 
 erable detail, and it is for this reason that he 
 obtained the undeserved reputation of being an 
 original discoverer in this line. How well he 
 realized how much might be accomplished by 
 means of the energy stored up in explosives can 
 perhaps be best appreciated from the fact that he 
 suggested that boats would go along the rivers 
 and across the seas without either sails or oars 
 and that carriages would go along the streets 
 without horse or man power. He considered 
 that man would eventually invent a method of 
 harnessing these explosive mixtures and of util- 
 izing their energies for his purposes without 
 
54 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 danger. It is curiously interesting to find, as 
 we begin the twentieth century, and gasolene is 
 so commonly used for the driving of automo- 
 biles and motor boats and is being introduced 
 even on railroad cars in the West as the most 
 available source of energy for suburban traffic, 
 that this generation should only be fulfilling the 
 idea of the old Franciscan friar of the thirteenth 
 century, who prophesied that in explosives there 
 was the secret of eventually manageable energy 
 for transportation purposes. 
 
 Succeeding centuries were not as fruitful in 
 great scientists as the thirteenth, and yet at the 
 beginning of the fourteenth there was a pope, 
 three of whose scientific treatises — one on the 
 transmutation of metals, which he considers an 
 impossibility, at least as far as the manufacture 
 of gold and silver was concerned; a treatise on 
 diseases of the eyes, of which Professor Allbutt x 
 says that it was not without its distinctive prac- 
 tical value, though compiled so early in the his- 
 tory of eye surgery; and, finally, his treatise on 
 the preservation of the health, written when he 
 was himself over eighty years of age — are all 
 considered by good authorities as worthy of the 
 best scientific spirit of the time. This pope was 
 John XXII, of whom it has been said over and 
 over again by Protestant historians that he issued 
 a bull forbidding chemistry, though he was him- 
 self one of the enthusiastic students of chemistry 
 
 1 Address cited. 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 55 
 
 in his younger years and always retained his in- 
 terest in the science. 1 
 
 During the fourteenth century Arnold of Villa- 
 nova, the inventor of nitric acid, and the two 
 Hollanduses kept up the tradition of original in- 
 vestigation in chemistry. Altogether there are 
 some dozen treatises from these three men on 
 chemical subjects. The Hollanduses particularly 
 did their work in a. spirit of thoroughly frank, 
 original investigation. They were more inter- 
 ested in minerals than in any other class of sub- 
 stances, but did not waste much time on the 
 question of transmutation of metals. Professor 
 Thompson, the professor of chemistry at Edin- 
 burgh, said in his history of chemistry many 
 years ago that the Hollanduses have very clear 
 descriptions of their processes of treating min- 
 erals in investigating their composition, which 
 serve to show that their knowledge was by no 
 means entirely theoretical or acquired only from 
 books or by argumentation. 
 
 Before the end of this fourteenth century, ac- 
 cording to the best authorities on this subject, 
 Basil Valentine, the more particular subject of 
 our essay, was born. 
 
 Valentine's career is a typical example of the 
 personally obscure but intellectually brilliant lives 
 
 1 For the refutation of this calumny with regard to 
 John XXII, see " Pope John XXII and the supposed 
 Bull forbidding Chemistry," by James J. Walsh, Ph. D., 
 LL. D., in the Medical Library and Historical Journal, 
 October, 1905. 
 
56 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 which these old monks lived. It seems probable, 
 according to the best authorities, as we have said, 
 that his work began shortly before the middle of 
 the fifteenth century, although most of what was 
 important in it was accomplished during the 
 second half. It would not be so surprising, as 
 most people who have been brought up to con- 
 sider the period just before the Reformation in 
 Germany as wanting in progressive scholars 
 might imagine, for a supremely great original 
 investigator to have existed in North Germany 
 about this time. After all, before the end of the 
 century, Copernicus, the Pole, working in north- 
 ern Germany, had announced his theory that the 
 earth was not the center of the universe, and had 
 set forth all that this announcement meant. To 
 a bishop-friend who said to him, " But this means 
 that you are giving us a new universe," he re- 
 plied that the universe was already there, but his 
 theory would lead men to recognize its existence. 
 In southern Germany, Thomas a Kempis, who 
 died in 1471, had traced for man the outlines of 
 another universe, that of his own soul, from its 
 mystically practical side. These great Germans 
 were only the worthy contemporaries of many 
 other German scholars scarcely less distinguished 
 than these supremes geniuses. The second half 
 of the fifteenth century, the beginning of the 
 Renaissance in Germany as well as Italy, is that 
 wonderful time in history when somehow men's 
 eyes were opened to see farther and their minds 
 broadened to gather in more of the truth of 
 
BASIL VALENTINE S7 
 
 man's relation to the universe, than had ever be- 
 fore been the case in all the centuries of human 
 existence, or than has ever been possible even in 
 these more modern centuries, though supposedly 
 we are the heirs of all the ages in the foremost 
 files of time. 
 
 Coming as he did before printing, when the 
 spirit of tradition was even more rife and domi- 
 nating than it has been since, it is almost need- 
 less to say that there are many curious legends 
 associated with the name of Basil Valentine. 
 Two centuries before his time, Roger Bacon, 
 doing his work in England, had succeeded in 
 attracting so much attention even from the com- 
 mon people, because of his wonderful scientific 
 discoveries, that his name became a by-word and 
 many strange magical feats were attributed to 
 him. Friar Bacon was the great wizard even in 
 the plays of the Elizabethan period. A number 
 of the same sort of myths attached themselves to 
 the Benedictine monk of the fifteenth century. 
 He was proclaimed in popular story to have been 
 a wonderful magician. Even his manuscript, it 
 was said, had not been published directly, but 
 had been hidden in a pillar in the church attached 
 to the monastery and had been discovered there 
 after the splitting open of the pillar by a bolt of 
 lightning from heaven. It is the extension of 
 this tradition that has sometimes led to the 
 assumption that Valetine lived in an earlier cen- 
 tury, some even going so far as to say that he, 
 too, like Roger Bacon, was a product of the thir- 
 
58 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 teenth century. It seems reasonably possible, 
 however, to separate the traditional from what is 
 actual in his existence, and thus to obtain some 
 idea at least of his work, if not of the details of 
 his life. The internal evidence from his works 
 enable the historian of science to place him within 
 a half century of the discovery of America. 
 
 One of the stories told with regard to Basil 
 Valentine, because it has become a commonplace 
 in philology, has made him more generally known 
 than any of his actual discoveries. In one of the 
 most popular of the old-fashioned text-books of 
 chemistry in use a quarter of a century ago, in 
 the chapter on Antimony, there was a story that 
 I suppose students never forgot. It was said 
 that Basil Valentine, a monk of the Middle Ages, 
 was the discoverer of this substance. After hav- 
 ing experimented with it in a number of ways, 
 he threw some of it out of his laboratory one 
 day, where the swine of the monastery, finding it, 
 proceeded to gobble it up together with some 
 other refuse. He watched the effect upon the 
 swine very carefully, and found that, after a 
 preliminary period of digestive disturbance, these 
 swine developed an enormous appetite and be- 
 came fatter than any of the others. This seemed 
 a rather desirable result, and Basil Valentine, 
 ever on the search for the practical, thought that 
 he might use the remedy to good purpose even 
 on the members of the community. 
 
 Now, some of the monks in the monastery were 
 of rather frail health and delicate constitution, 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 59 
 
 and he thought that the putting on of a little fat 
 in their case might be a good thing. Accord- 
 ingly he administered, surreptitiously, some of 
 the salts of antimony, with which he was experi- 
 menting, in the food served to these monks. 
 The result, however, was not so favorable as in 
 the case of the hogs. Indeed, according to one, 
 though less authentic, version of the story, some 
 of the poor monks, the unconscious subjects of 
 the experiment, even perished as the result of 
 the ingestion of the antimonial compounds. Ac- 
 cording to the better version they suffered only 
 the usual unpleasant consequences of taking anti- 
 mony, which are, however, quite enough for a 
 fitting climax to the story. Basil Valentine called 
 the new substance which he had discovered anti- 
 mony, that is, opposed to monks. It might be 
 good for hogs, but it was a form of monks' bane, 
 as it were. 1 
 
 1 It is curious to trace how old are the traditions on 
 which some of these old stories that must now be re- 
 jected, are founded. I have come upon the story with 
 regard to Basil Valentine and the antimony and the 
 monks in an old French medical encyclopedia of biog- 
 raphy, published in the seventeenth century, and at that 
 time there was no doubt at all expressed as to its truth. 
 How much older than this it may be I do not know, 
 though it is probable that it comes from the sixteenth 
 century, when the kakoethes scribendi attacked many 
 people because of the facility of printing, and when 
 most of the good stories that have so worried the mod- 
 ern dry-as-dust historian in his researches for their 
 correction became a part of the body of supposed his- 
 torical tradition. 
 
60 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 Unfortunately for most of the good stories of 
 history, modern criticism has nearly always 
 failed to find any authentic basis for them, and 
 they have had to go the way of the legends of 
 Washington's hatchet and Tell's apple. We are 
 sorry to say that that seems to be true also of 
 this particular story. Antimony, the word, is 
 very probably derived from certain dialectic 
 forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the 
 name is no more derived from anti and monachus 
 than it is from anti and monos (opposed to single 
 existence), another fictitious derivation that has 
 been suggested, and one whose etymological value 
 is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is 
 practically never found alone in nature. 
 
 Notwithstanding the apparent cloud of un- 
 founded traditions that are associated with his 
 name, there can be no doubt at all of the fact 
 that Valentinus — to give him the Latin name by 
 which he is commonly designated in foreign liter- 
 atures — was one of the great geniuses who, work- 
 ing in obscurity, make precious steps into the 
 unknown that enable humanity after them to see 
 things more clearly than ever before. There are 
 definite historical grounds for placing Basil Val- 
 entine as the first of the series of careful ob- 
 servers who differentiated chemistry from the 
 old alchemy and applied its precious treasures of 
 information to the uses of medicine. It was be- 
 cause of the study of Basil Valentine's work that 
 Paracelsus broke away from the Galenic tradi- 
 tions, so supreme in medicine up to his time, 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 6l 
 
 and began our modern pharmaceutics. Follow- 
 ing on the heels of Paracelsus came Van Hel- 
 mont, the father of modern medical chemistry, 
 and these three did more than any others to en- 
 large the scope of medication and to make ob- 
 servation rather than authority the most import- 
 ant criterion of truth in medicine. Indeed, the 
 work of these three men dominated medicine, or 
 at least the department of pharmaceutics, down 
 almost to our own day, and their influence is still 
 felt in drug-giving. 
 
 While we do not know the absolute date of 
 either the birth or the death of Basil Valentine 
 and are not sure even of the exact period in 
 which he lived and did his work, we are sure 
 that a great original observer about the time of 
 the invention of printing studied mercury and 
 sulphur and various salts, and above all, intro- 
 duced antimony to the notice of the scientific 
 world, and especially to the favor of practition- 
 ers of medicine. His book, " The Triumphal 
 Chariot of Antimony," is full of conclusions not 
 quite justified by his premises nor by his obser- 
 vations. There is no doubt, however, that the 
 observational methods which he employed did 
 give an immense amount of knowledge and 
 formed the basis of the method of investigation 
 by which the chemical side of medicine was to 
 develop during the next two or three centuries. 
 Great harm was done by the abuse of antimony, 
 but then great harm is done by the abuse of any- 
 thing, no matter how good it may be. For a 
 
62 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 time it came to be the most important drug in 
 medicine and was only replaced by venesection. 
 
 The fact of the matter is that doctors were 
 looking for effects from their drugs, and anti- 
 mony is, above all things, effective. Patients, 
 too, wished to see the effect of the medicines 
 they took. They do so even yet, and when anti- 
 mony was administered there was no doubt about 
 its working. 
 
 Some five years ago, when Sir Michael Foster, 
 M. D., professor of physiology in the University 
 of Cambridge, England, was invited to deliver 
 the Lane lectures at the Cooper Medical College, 
 in San Francisco, he took for his subject " The 
 History of Physiology." Id the course of his 
 lecture on " The Rise of Chemical Physiology " 
 he began with the name of Basil Valentine, who 
 first attracted men's attention to the many chem- 
 ical substances around them that might be used 
 in the treatment of disease, and said of him: — 
 
 He was one of the alchemists, but in addition to his 
 inquiries into the properties of metals and his search for 
 the philosopher's stone, he busied himself with the nature 
 of drugs, vegetable and mineral, and with their action as 
 remedies for disease. He was no anatomist, no physiol- 
 ogist, but rather what nowadays we should call a phar- 
 macologist. He did not care for the problem of the 
 body, all he sought to understand was how the consti- 
 tuents of the soil and of plants might be treated so as 
 to be available for healing the sick and how they pro- 
 duced their effects. We apparently owe to him the in- 
 troduction of many chemical substances, for instance, of 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 63 
 
 hydrochloric acid, which he prepared from oil of vitriol 
 and salt, and of many vegetable drugs. And he was ap- 
 parently the author of certain conceptions which, as we 
 shall see, played an important part in the development of 
 chemistry and of physiology. To him, it seems, we owe 
 the idea of the three " elements," as they were and have 
 been called, replacing the old idea of the ancients of the 
 four elements — earth, air, fire, and water. It must be 
 remembered, however, that both in the ancient and in 
 the new idea the word " element " was not intended to 
 mean that which it means to us now, a fundamental unit 
 of matter, but a general quality or property of matter. 
 The three elements of Valentine were (1) sulphur, or 
 that which is combustible, which is changed or destroyed, 
 or which at all events disappears during burning or 
 combustion ; (2) mercury, that which temporarily disap- 
 pears during burning or combustion, which is dis- 
 sociated in the burning from the body burnt, but which 
 may be recovered, that is to say, that which is volatile, 
 and (3) salt, that which is fixed, the residue or ash 
 which remains after burning. 
 
 The most interesting of Basil Valentine's 
 books, and the one which has had the most en- 
 during influence, is undoubtedly " The Tri- 
 umphal Chariot of Antimony/' It has been 
 translated and has had a wide vogue in every lan- 
 guage of modern Europe. Its recommendation 
 of antimony had such an effect upon medical 
 practice that it continued to be the most import- 
 ant drug in the pharmacopceia down almost to 
 the middle of the nineteenth century. If any 
 proof were needed that Basil Valentine or that 
 the author of the books that go under that name 
 was a monk, it would be found in the introduc- 
 
64 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 tion to this volume, which not only states that 
 fact very clearly, but also in doing so makes use 
 of language that shows the writer to have been 
 deeply imbued with the old monastic spirit. I 
 quote the first paragraph of this introduction in 
 order to make clear what I mean. The quota- 
 tion is taken from the English translation of the 
 work as published in London in 1678. Curi- 
 ously enough, seeing the obscurity surrounding 
 Valentine himself, we do not know for sure who 
 made the translation. The translator apologizes 
 somewhat for the deeply religious spirit of the 
 book, but considers that he was not justified in 
 eliminating any of this. Of course, the transla- 
 tion is left in the quaint old-fashioned form so 
 eminently suited to the thoughts of the old mas- 
 ter, and the spelling and use of capitals is not 
 changed : 
 
 Basil Valentine: His Triumphant Chariot of Anti- 
 mony. — Since I, Basil Valentine, by Religious Vows am 
 bound to live according to the Order of St. Benedict, 
 and that requires another manner of spirit of Holiness 
 than the common state of Mortals exercised in the pro- 
 fane business of this World; I thought it my duty be- 
 fore all things, in the beginning of this little book, to 
 declare what is necessary to be known by the pious 
 Spagyrist [old-time name for medical chemist], inflamed 
 with an ardent desire of this Art, as what he ought to 
 do, and whereunto to direct his aim, that he may lay 
 such foundations of the whole matter as may be stable; 
 lest his Building, shaken with the Winds, happen to fall, 
 and the whole Edifice to be involved in shameful Ruine, 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 65 
 
 which otherwise, being founded on more firm and solid 
 principles, might have continued for a long series of 
 time. Which Admonition I judged was, is and always 
 will be a necessary part of my Religious Office; espe- 
 cially since we must all die, and no one of us which 
 are now, whether high or low, shall long be seen 
 among the number of men. For it concerns me to 
 recommend these Meditations of Mortality to Posterity, 
 leaving them behind me, not only that honor may be 
 given to the Divine Majesty, but also that Men may obey 
 him sincerely in all things. 
 
 In this my Meditation I found that there were five 
 principal heads, chiefly to be considered by the wise and 
 prudent spectators of our Wisdom and Art. The first of 
 which is, Invocation of God. The second, Contempla- 
 tion of Nature. The third, True Preparation. The 
 fourth, the Way of Using. The fifth, Utility and Fruit. 
 For he who regards not these, shall never obtain place 
 among true Chymists, or fill up the number of perfect 
 Spagyrists. Therefore, touching these five heads, we 
 shall here following treat and so far declare them, as 
 that the general Work may be brought to light and per- 
 fected by an intent and studious Operator. A 
 
 This book, though the title might seem to in- 
 dicate it, is not devoted entirely to the study of 
 antimony, but contains many important additions 
 to the chemistry of the time. For instance, Basil 
 Valentine explains in this work how what he 
 calls the spirit of salt might be obtained. He 
 succeeded in manufacturing this material by 
 treating common salt with oil of vitriol and heat. 
 From the description of the uses to which he 
 put the end product of his chemical manipulation, 
 it is evident that under the name of spirit of salt 
 
66 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 he is describing what we now know as hydro- 
 chloric acid. This is the first definite mention of 
 it in the history of science, and the method sug- 
 gested for its preparation is not very different 
 from that employed even at the present time. 
 He also suggests in this volume how alcohol may 
 be obtained in high strengths. He distilled the 
 spirit obtained from wine over carbonate of 
 potassium, and thus succeeded in depriving it of 
 a great proportion of its water. 
 
 We have said that he was deeply interested in 
 the philosopher's stone. Naturally this turned 
 his attention to the study of metals, and so it is 
 not surprising to find that he succeeded in for- 
 mulating a method by which metallic copper 
 could be obtained. The substance used for the 
 purpose was copper pyrites, which was changed 
 to an impure sulphate of copper by the action 
 of oil of vitriol and moist air. The sulphate of 
 copper occurred in solution, and the copper could 
 be precipitated from it by plunging an iron bar 
 into it. Basil Valentine recognized the presence 
 of this peculiar yellow metal and studied some 
 of its qualities. He does not seem to have been 
 quite sure, however, whether the phenomenon 
 that he witnessed was not really a transmutation 
 of the iron into copper, as a consequence of the 
 other chemicals present. 
 
 There are some observations on chemical physi- 
 ology, and especially with regard to respiration, 
 in the book on antimony which show their author 
 to have anticipated the true explanation of the 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 67 
 
 theory of respiration. He states that animals 
 breathe, because the air is needed to support their 
 life, and that all the animals exhibit the phenom- 
 enon of respiration. He even insists that the 
 fishes, though living in water, breathe air, and 
 he adduces in support of this idea the fact that 
 whenever a river is entirely frozen the fishes die. 
 The reason for this being, according to this old- 
 time physiologist, not. that the fishes are frozen 
 to death, but that they are not able to obtain air 
 in the ice as they did in the water, and conse- 
 quently perish. 
 
 There are many testimonies to the practical 
 character of all his knowledge and his desire to 
 apply it for the benefit of ' humanity. The old 
 monk could not repress the expression of his im- 
 patience with physicians who gave to patients 
 for diseases of which they knew little, remedies 
 of which they knew less. For him it was an un- 
 pardonable sin for a physician not to have faith- 
 fully studied the various mixtures that he pre- 
 scribed for his patients, and not to know not 
 only their appearance and taste and effect, but 
 also the limits of their application. Considering 
 that at the present time it is a frequent source 
 of complaint that physicians often prescribe rem- 
 edies with whose physical appearances they are 
 not familiar, this complaint of the old-time chem- 
 ist alchemist will be all the more interesting for 
 the modern physician. It is evident that when 
 Basil Valentine allows his ire to get the better 
 of him it is because of his indignation over the 
 
68 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 quacks who were abusing medicine and patients 
 in his time, as they have ever since. There is a 
 curious bit of aspersion on mere book-learning 
 in the passage that has a distinctly modern ring, 
 and one feels the truth of Russell Lowell's ex- 
 pression that to read a great genius, no matter 
 how antique, is like reading a commentary in the 
 morning paper, so up-to-date does genius ever 
 remain : — 
 
 And whensoever I shall have occasion to contend in 
 the School with such a Doctor, who knows not how 
 himself to prepare his own medicines, but commits that 
 business to another, I am sure I shall obtain the Palm 
 from him ; for indeed that good man knows not what 
 medicines he prescribes to the sick; whether the color 
 of them be white, black, grey, or blew, he cannot tell; 
 nor doth this wretched man know whether the medicine 
 he gives be dry or hot, Cold or humid; but he only 
 knows that he found it so written in his Books, and 
 thence pretends knowledge (or as it were, Possession) 
 by Prescription of a very long time; yet he desires to 
 further Information. Here again let it be lawful to ex- 
 claim, Good God, to what a state is the matter brought ! 
 what goodness of minde is in these men ! what care do 
 they take of the sick ! Wo, wo to them ! in the day of 
 Judgment they will find the fruit of their ignorance and 
 rashness, then they will see Him whom they pierced, 
 when they neglected their Neighbor, sought after money 
 and nothing else ; whereas were they cordial in their 
 profession, they would spend Nights and Days in Labour 
 that they might become more learned in their Art, 
 whence more certain health would accrew to the sick 
 with their Estimation and greater glory to themselves. 
 But since Labour is tedious to them, they commit the 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 69 
 
 matter to chance, and being secure of their Honour, and 
 content with their Fame, they (like Brawlers) defend 
 themselves with a certain garrulity, without any respect 
 had to Confidence or Truth. 
 
 Perhaps one of the reasons why Valentine's 
 book has been of such enduring interest is that 
 it is written in an eminently human vein and out 
 of a lively imagination. It is full of figures re- 
 lating to many other things besides chemistry, 
 which serve to show how deeply this investigat- 
 ing observer was attentive to all the problems of 
 life around him. For instance, when he wants 
 to describe the affinity that exists between many 
 substances in chemistry, and which makes it im- 
 possible for them not to be attracted to one an- 
 other, he takes a figure from the attractions that 
 he sees exist among men and women. There are 
 some paragraphs with regard to the influence of 
 the passion of love that one might think rather 
 a quotation from an old-time sermon than from 
 a great ground-breaking book in the science of 
 chemistry. 
 
 Love leaves nothing entire or sound in man; it im- 
 pedes his sleep ; he cannot rest either day or night ; it 
 takes off his appetite that he hath no disposition either 
 to meat or drink by reason of the continual torments of 
 his heart and mind. It deprives him of all Providence, 
 hence he neglects his affairs, vocation and business. 
 He minds neither study, labor nor prayer; casts away 
 all thoughts of anything but the body beloved; this is 
 his study, this his most vain occupation. If to lovers 
 the success be not answerable to their wish, or so soon 
 
JO CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 and prosperously as they desire, how many melancholies 
 henceforth arise, with griefs and sadnesses, with which 
 they pine away and wax so lean as they have scarcely 
 any flesh cleaving to the bones. Yea, at last they lose 
 the life itself, as may be proved by many examples ! for 
 such men, (which is an horrible thing to think of) slight 
 and neglect all perils and detriments, both of the body 
 and life, and of the soul and eternal salvation. 
 
 It is evident that human nature is not different 
 in our sophisticated twentieth century from that 
 which this observant old monk saw around him 
 in the fifteenth. He continues : — 
 
 How many testimonies of this violence which is in 
 love, are daily found? for it not only inflames the 
 younger sort, but it so far exaggerates some persons far 
 gone in years as through the burning heat thereof, they 
 are almost mad. Natural diseases are for the most part 
 governed by the complexion of man and therefore in- 
 vade some more fiercely, others more gently; but Love, 
 without distinction of poor or rich, young or old, seizeth 
 all, and having seized so blinds them as forgetting all 
 rules of reason, they neither see nor hear any snare. 
 
 But then the old monk thinks that he has said 
 enough about this subject and apologizes for his 
 digression in another paragraph that should re- 
 move any lingering doubt there may be with re- 
 gard to the genuineness of his monastic char- 
 acter. The personal element in his confession is 
 so naive and so simply straightforward that in- 
 stead of seeming to be the result of conceit, and 
 so repelling the reader, it rather attracts his 
 
BASIL VALENTINE JI 
 
 kindly feeling for its author. The paragraph 
 would remind one in certain ways of that per- 
 sonal element that was to become more popular 
 in literature after Montaigne had made such ex- 
 tensive use of it. 
 
 But of these enough; for it becomes not a religious 
 man to insist too long upon these cogitations, or to give 
 place to such a flame in his heart. Hitherto (without 
 boasting I speak it) I have throughout the whole course 
 of my life kept myself safe and free from it, and I pray 
 and invoke God to vouchsafe me his Grace that I may 
 keep holy and inviolate the faith which I have sworn, 
 and live contented with my spiritual spouse, the Holy, 
 Catholick Church. For no other reason have I alleaged 
 these than that I might express the love with which all 
 tinctures ought to be moved towards metals, if ever they 
 be admitted by them into true friendship, and by love, 
 which permeates the inmost parts, be converted into a 
 better state. 
 
 The application of the figure at the end of his 
 long digression is characteristic of the period in 
 which he wrote and to a considerable extent also 
 of the German literary methods of the time. 
 
 In this volume on the use of antimony there 
 are in most of the editions certain biographical 
 notes which have sometimes been accepted as 
 authentic, but oftener rejected. According to 
 these, Basil Valentine was born in a town in 
 Alsace, on the southern bank of the Rhine. As 
 a consequence of this, there are several towns 
 that have laid claim to being his birthplace. M. 
 Jean Reynaud, the distinguished French philo- 
 
72 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 sophical writer of the first half of the nineteenth 
 century, once said that Basil Valentine, like 
 Ossian and Homer, had many towns claim him 
 years after his death. He also suggested that, 
 like those old poets, it was possible that the 
 writings sometimes attributed to Basil Valentine 
 were really the work not of one man, but of sev- 
 eral individuals. There are, however, many ob- 
 jections to this theory, the most forceful of which 
 is the internal evidence of the books themselves 
 and their style and method of treatment. Other 
 biographic details contained in " The Triumphal 
 Chariot of Antimony " are undoubtedly more 
 correct. According to them, Basil Valentine 
 travelled in England and Holland on missions 
 for his Order, and went through France and 
 Spain on a pilgrimage to St. James of Compo- 
 stella. 
 
 Besides this work, there is a number of other 
 books of Basil Valentine's, printed during the 
 first half of the sixteenth century, that are well- 
 known and copies of which may be found in 
 most of the important libraries. The United 
 States Surgeon General's Library at Washing- 
 ton contains several of the works on medical 
 subjects, and the New York Academy of Medi- 
 cine Library has some valuable editions of his 
 works. Some of his other well-known books, 
 each of which is a good-sized octavo volume, 
 bear the following descriptive titles. (I give them 
 in English, though, as they are usually to be 
 found, they are in Latin, sixteenth-century trans- 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 73 
 
 lations of the original German) : " The World 
 in Miniature: or, The Mystery of the World 
 and of Human Medical Science/' published at 
 Marburg, 1609; — "The Chemical Apocalypse: 
 or, The Manifestation of Artificial Chemical 
 Compounds," published at Erfurt in 1624; — "A 
 Chemico-Philosophic Treatise Concerning Things 
 Natural and Preternatural, Especially Relating 
 to the Metals and the Minerals," published at 
 Frankfurt in 1676 ; — " Haliography : or, The 
 Science of Salts : A Treatise on the Prepara- 
 tion, Use and Chemical Properties of All the 
 Mineral, Animal and Vegetable Salts," published 
 at Bologna in 1644; — "The Twelve Keys of 
 Philosophy," Leipsic, 1630. 
 
 The great interest manifested in Basil Valen- 
 tine's work at the Renaissance period can be best 
 realized from the number of manuscript copies 
 and their wide distribution. His books were not 
 all printed at one place, but, on the contrary, in 
 different portions of Europe. The original edi- 
 tion of " The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony " 
 was published at Leipsic in the early part of the 
 sixteenth century. The first editions of the other 
 books, however, appeared at places so distant 
 from Leipsic as Amsterdam and Bologna, while 
 various cities of Germany, as Erfurt and Frank- 
 furt, claim the original editions of still other 
 works. Many of the manuscript copies still exist 
 in various libraries in Europe; and while there 
 is no doubt that some unimportant additions to 
 the supposed works of Basil Valentine have come 
 
74 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 from the attribution to him of scientific treatises 
 of other German writers, the style and the 
 method of the principal works mentioned are en- 
 tirely too similar not to have been the fruit of a 
 single mind and that possessed of a distinct in- 
 vestigating genius setting it far above any of its 
 contemporaries in scientific speculation and ob- 
 servation. 
 
 The most interesting feature of all of Basil 
 Valentine's writings that are extant is the dis- 
 tinctive tendency to make his observations of 
 special practical utility. His studies in antimony 
 were made mainly with the idea of showing how 
 that substance might be used in medicine. He 
 did not neglect to point out other possible uses, 
 however, and knew the secret of the employment 
 of antimony in order to give sharpness and defi- 
 nition to the impression produced by metal types. 
 It would seem as though he was the first scien- 
 tist who discussed this subject, and there is even 
 some question whether printers and type foun- 
 ders did not derive their ideas in this matter 
 from Basil Valentine, rather than he from them. 
 Interested as he was in the transmutation of 
 metals, he never failed to try to find and suggest 
 some medicinal use for all of the substances that 
 he investigated. His was no greedy search for 
 gold and no accumulation of investigations with 
 the idea of benefiting only himself. Mankind 
 was always in his mind, and perhaps there is no 
 better demonstration of his fulfilment of the 
 character of the monk than this constant solici- 
 
BASIL VALENTINE 75 
 
 tude to benefit others by every bit of investiga- 
 tion that he carried out. For him with medieval 
 nobleness of spirit the first part of every work 
 must be the invocation of God, and the last, 
 though no less important than the first, must be 
 the utility and fruit for mankind that can be de- 
 rived from it. 
 
IV. 
 
 LINACRE: SCHOLAR, PHYSICIAN, 
 PRIEST. 
 
LINACRE, as Dr. Payne remarks, 
 " was possessed from his youth 
 till his death by the enthusiasm of 
 learning. He was an idealist de- 
 voted to objects which the world 
 thought of little use." Painstaking, 
 accurate, critical, hypercritical per- 
 haps, he remains to-day the chief lit- 
 erary representative of British Med- 
 icine. Neither in Britain nor in 
 Greater Britain have we maintained 
 the place in the world of letters cre- 
 ated for us by Linacre's noble start. 
 Quoted by Osier in ^Equanimtias. 
 
THOMAS L'INACRE 
 
\ 
 
 1 
 
 U 
 
 IV. 
 
 LINACRE: SCHOLAR, PHYSICIAN, PRIEST. 
 
 NOT long ago, in one of his piquant little 
 essays, Mr. Augustine Birrell discussed 
 the question as to what really happened at the 
 time of the so-called Reformation in England. 
 There is much more doubt with regard to this 
 matter, even in the minds of non-Catholics, than 
 is usually suspected. Mr. Birrell seems to have 
 considered it one of the most important prob- 
 lems, and at the same time not by any means the 
 least intricate one, in modern English history. 
 The so-called High Church people emphatically 
 insist that there is no break in the continuity of 
 the Church of England, and that the modern 
 Anglicanism is a direct descendant of the old 
 British Church. They reject with scorn the idea 
 that it was the Lutheran movement on the Con- 
 tinent which brought about the changes in the 
 Anglican Church at that time. Protestantism 
 did not come into England for a considerable 
 period after the change in the constitution of the 
 Anglican Church, and when it did come its ten- 
 dencies were quite as subversal of the authority 
 of the Anglican as of the Roman Church. 
 Protestantism is the mother of Nonconformism 
 in England. It can be seen, then, that the ques- 
 tion as to what did really take place in the time 
 
 79 
 
80 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 of Henry VIII and of Edward VI is still open. 
 It has seemed to me that no little light on this 
 vexed historical question will be thrown by a 
 careful study of the life of Dr. Linacre, who, 
 besides being the best known physician of his 
 time in England, was the greatest scholar of the 
 English Renaissance period, yet had all his life 
 been on very intimate terms with the ecclesias- 
 tical authorities, and eventually gave up his 
 honors, his fortune, and his profession to be- 
 come a simple priest of the old English Church. 
 
 Considering the usually accepted notions as to 
 the sad state of affairs supposed to exist in the 
 Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
 this is a very remarkable occurrence, and de- 
 serves careful study to determine its complete 
 significance, for it tells better than anything else 
 the opinion of a distinguished contemporary. 
 Few men have ever been more highly thought of 
 by their own generation. None has been more 
 sincerely respected by intimate friends, who were 
 themselves the leaders of the thought of their 
 generation, than Thomas Linacre, scholar, physi- 
 cian and priest ; and his action must stand as the 
 highest possible tribute to the Church in Eng- 
 land at that time. 
 
 How unimpaired his practical judgment of 
 men and affairs was at the time he made his 
 change from royal physician to simple priest can 
 best be gathered from the sagacity displayed in 
 the foundation of the Royal College of Physi- 
 cians, an institution he was endowing with the 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 8i 
 
 wealth he had accumulated in some twenty years 
 of most lucrative medical practice. The Royal 
 College of Physicians represents the first attempt 
 to secure the regulation of the practice of medi- 
 cine in England, and, thanks to its founder's 
 wonderful foresight and practical wisdom, it re- 
 mains down to our own day, under its original 
 constitution, one of the most effective and highly 
 honored of British scientific foundations. No 
 distinction is more sought at the present time by 
 young British medical men, or by American or 
 even Continental graduates in medicine, than the 
 privilege of adding to their names the letters 
 " F. R. C. P. (Eng.)," Fellow of the Royal Col- 
 lege of Physicians of England. The College 
 worked the reformation of medical practice in 
 England, and its methods have proved the sug- 
 gestive formulae for many another such institu- 
 tion and for laws that all over the world protect, 
 to some extent at least, the public from quacks 
 and charlatans. 
 
 Linacre's change of profession at the end of 
 his life has been a fruitful source of conjecture 
 and misconception on the part of his biographers. 
 Few of them seem to be able to appreciate the 
 fact, common enough in the history of the 
 Church, that a man may, even when well on in 
 years, give up everything to which his life has 
 been so far directed, and from a sense of duty 
 devote himself entirely to the attainment of "the 
 one thing necessary." Linacre appears only to 
 have done what many another in the history of 
 
82 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries 
 did without any comment; but his English biog- 
 raphers insist on seeing ulterior motives in it, or 
 else fail entirely to understand it. The same 
 action is not so rare even in our own day that it 
 should be the source of misconception by later 
 writers. 
 
 Dr. S. Weir Mitchell has, in the early part of 
 Dr. North and His Friends, a very curious 
 passage with regard to Linacre. One of the 
 characters, St. Clair, says : " I saw, the other 
 day, at Owen's, a life of one Linacre, a doctor, 
 who had the luck to live about 1460 to 1524, 
 when men knew little and thought they knew all. 
 In his old age he took for novelty to reading St. 
 Matthew. The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters 
 were enough. He threw the book aside and 
 cried out, ' Either this is not the Gospel, or we 
 are not Christians.' What else could he say?" 
 St. Clair uses the story to enforce an idea of his 
 own, which he states as a question, as follows : 
 "And have none of you the courage to wrestle 
 with the thought I gave you, that Christ could 
 not have expected the mass of men to live the 
 life He pointed out as desirable for the first dis- 
 ciples of His faith?" 
 
 Dr. Mitchell's anecdote is not accepted by Lin- 
 acre's biographers generally, though it is copied 
 by Dr. Payne, the writer of the article on Lin- 
 acre in the (English) Dictionary of National 
 Biography, who, however, discredits it some- 
 what. The story is founded on Sir John Cheke's 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 83 
 
 account of the conversion of Linacre. It is very- 
 doubtful, however, whether Linacre's depreca- 
 tions of the actions of Christians had reference 
 to anything more than the practice of false swear- 
 ing so forcibly denounced in the Scriptures, 
 which had apparently become frequent in his 
 time. This is Selden's version of the story as 
 quoted by Dr. Johnson, who was Linacre's well- 
 known biographer. Sir John Cheke in his ac- 
 count seems to hint that this chance reading of 
 the Scriptures represented the first occasion Lin- 
 acre had ever taken of an opportunity to read 
 the New Testament. Perhaps we are expected 
 to believe that, following the worn-out Protes- 
 tant tradition of the old Church's discouraging 
 of the reading of the Bible, and of the extreme 
 scarcity of copies of the Book, this was the first 
 time he had ever had a good opportunity to read 
 it. This, of course, is nonsense. 
 
 Linacre's early education had been obtained at 
 the school of the monastery of Christ Church at 
 Canterbury, and the monastery schools all used 
 the New Testament as a text-book, and as the 
 offices of the day at which the students were re- 
 quired to attend contain these very passages from 
 Matthew which Linacre is supposed to have read 
 for the first time later in life, this idea is pre- 
 posterous. Besides, Linacre, as one of the great 
 scholars of his time, intimate friend of Sir 
 Thomas More, of Dean Colet, and Erasmus, can 
 scarcely be thought to find his first copy of the 
 Bible only when advanced in years. This is evi- 
 
84 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 dently a post-Reformation addition, part of the 
 Protestant tradition with regard to the supposed 
 suppression of the Scriptures in pre-Reformation 
 days, which every one acknowledges now to be 
 without foundation. 
 
 Linacre, as many another before and since, 
 seems only to have realized the true significance 
 of the striking passages in Matthew after life's 
 experiences and disappointments had made him 
 take more seriously the clauses of the Sermon 
 on the Mount. There is much in fifth, sixth, 
 and seventh Matthew that might disturb the com- 
 placent equanimity of a man whose main objects 
 in life, though pursued with all honorable un- 
 selfishness, had been the personal satisfaction of 
 wide scholarship and success in his chosen pro- 
 fession. 
 
 With regard to Sir John Cheke's story, Dr. 
 John Noble Johnson, who wrote the life of 
 Thomas Linacre, 1 which is accepted as the 
 authoritative biography by all subsequent writers,, 
 says : " The whole statement carries with it an 
 air of invention, if not on the part of Cheke 
 himself, at least on that of the individual from 
 whom he derives it. and it is refuted by Lin- 
 
 1 " The Life of Thomas Linacre," Doctor in Medi- 
 cine, Physician to King Henry VIII, the Tutor and 
 Friend of Sir Thomas More and the Founder of the 
 College of Physicians in London. By John Noble John- 
 son, M. D., late Fellow of the Royal College of Physi- 
 cians, London. Edited by Robert Graves, of the Inner 
 Temple, Barrister at Law. London : Edward Lumley* 
 Chancery Lane. 1835. 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 85 
 
 acre's known habits of moderation and the many 
 ecclesiastical friendships which, with a single ex- 
 ception, were preserved without interruption 
 until his death. It was a most frequent mode of 
 silencing opposition to the received and estab- 
 lished tenets of the Church, when arguments 
 were wanting, to brand the impugner with the 
 opprobrious titles of heretic and infidel, the com- 
 mon resource of the enemies to innovation in 
 every age and country." 
 
 The interesting result of the reflections in- 
 spired in Linacre by the reading of Matthew 
 was, as has been said, the resignation of his high 
 office of Royal Physician and the surrender of 
 his wealth for the foundation of chairs in Medi- 
 cine and Greek at Oxford and Cambridge. With 
 the true liberal spirit of a man who wished to 
 accomplish as much good as possible, his foun- 
 dations were not limited to his own University 
 of Oxford. After these educational foundations, 
 however, his wealth was applied to the endow- 
 ment of the Royal College of Physicians and its 
 library, and to the provision of such accessories 
 as might be expected to make the College a per- 
 manently useful institution, though left at the 
 same time perfectly capable of that evolution 
 which would suit it to subsequent times and the 
 development of the science and practice of med- 
 icine. 
 
 It is evident that the life of such a man can 
 scarcely fail to be of personal as well as historic 
 interest. 
 
86 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 Thomas Linacre was born about 1460 — the 
 year is uncertain — at Canterbury. Nothing is 
 known of his parents or their condition, though 
 this very silence in their regard would seem to 
 indicate that they were poor and obscure. His 
 education was obtained at the school of the 
 monastery of Christ Church, Canterbury, then 
 presided over by the famous William Selling, the 
 first of the great students of the new learning in 
 England. Selling's interest seems to have helped 
 Linacre to get to Oxford, where he entered at 
 All Souls' College in 1480. In 1484 he was 
 elected a Fellow of the College, and seems to 
 have distinguished himself in Greek, to which 
 he applied himself with special assiduity under 
 Cornelio Vitelli. Though Greek is sometimes 
 spoken of as having been introduced into West- 
 ern Europe only at the beginning of the six- 
 teenth century, Linacre undoubtedly laid the 
 foundation of that remarkable knowledge of the 
 language which he displayed at a later period of 
 his life, during his student days at Oxford in 
 the last quarter of the fifteenth century. 
 
 Linacre went to Italy under the most auspic- 
 ious circumstances. His old tutor and friend at 
 Canterbury, Selling, who had become one of the 
 leading ecclesiastics of England, was sent to 
 Rome as an Ambassador by Henry VII. He 
 took Linacre with him. A number of English 
 scholars had recently been in Italy and had 
 attracted attention by their geniality, by their 
 thorough-going devotion to scholarly studies, 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 87 
 
 and by their success in their work. Selling him- 
 self had made a number of firm friends among 
 the Italian students of the New Learning on a 
 former visit, and they now welcomed him with 
 enthusiasm and were ready to receive his pro- 
 tege with goodwill and provide him with the 
 best opportunities for study. As a member of 
 the train of the English ambassador, Linacre had 
 an entree to political circles that proved of great 
 service to him, and put him on a distinct footing 
 above that of the ordinary English student in 
 Italy. 
 
 Partly because of these and partly because of 
 his own interesting and attractive personal char- 
 acter, Linacre had a number of special oppor- 
 tunities promptly placed at his disposal. Church 
 dignitaries in Rome welcomed him and he was 
 at once received into scholarly circles wherever 
 he went in Italy. Almost as soon as he arrived 
 in Florence, where he expected seriously to take 
 up the study of Latin and Greek, he became the 
 intimate friend of the family of Lorenzo de' 
 Medici, who was so charmed with his personality 
 and his readily recognizable talent that he chose 
 him for the companion of his son's studies and 
 received him into his own household. 
 
 Politian was at this time the tutor of the 
 young de' Medici in Latin, and Demetrius Chal- 
 condylas the tutor in Greek. Under these two 
 eminent scholars Linacre obtained a knowledge 
 of Latin and Greek such as it would have been 
 impossible to have obtained under any other cir- 
 
88 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 cumstances, and which with his talents at once 
 stamped him as one of the foremost humanistic 
 scholars in Europe. While in Florence he came 
 in contact with Lorenzo the Magnificent's 
 younger son, who afterwards became Leo X. 
 The friendship thus formed lasted all during 
 Linacre's lifetime, and later on he dedicated at 
 least one of his books to Alexander de' Medici 
 after the latter's elevation to the papal throne. 
 
 It is no wonder that Linacre always looked 
 back on Italy as the Alma Mater — the fond 
 mother in the fullest sense of the term — to whom 
 he owed his precious opportunities for education 
 and the broadest possible culture. In after-life 
 the expression of his feelings was often tinged 
 with romantic tenderness. It is said that when 
 he was crossing the Alps, on his homeward jour- 
 ney, leaving Italy after finishing his years of 
 apprenticeship of study, standing on the highest 
 point of the mountains from which he could still 
 see the Italian plains, he built with his own 
 hands a rough altar of stone and dedicated it to 
 the land of his studies — the land in which he had 
 spent six happy years — under the fond title of 
 Sancta Mater Studiorum. 
 
 At first, after his return from Italy, Linacre 
 lectured on Greek at Oxford. Something of the 
 influence acquired over English students and the 
 good he accomplished may be appreciated from 
 the fact that with Grocyn he had such students 
 as More and the famous Dean Colet. Erasmus 
 also was attracted from the Netherlands and 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 89 
 
 studied Greek under Linacre, to whom he refers 
 in the most kindly and appreciative terms many 
 times in his after life. Linacre wrote books be- 
 sides lecturing, and his work on certain fine 
 points in the grammar of classical Latinity proved 
 a revelation to English students of the old clas- 
 sical languages, for nothing so advanced as this 
 had ever before been attempted outside Italy. 
 In one of the last years of the fifteenth century 
 Linacre was appointed tutor to Prince Arthur, 
 the elder brother of Henry VIII, to whom it will 
 be remembered that Catherine of Aragon had 
 been betrothed before her marriage with Henry. 
 Arthur's untimely death, however, soon put an 
 end to Linacres' tutorship. 
 
 As pointed out by Einstein, the reputation of 
 Grocyn and Linacre was not confined to Eng- 
 land, but soon spread all over the Continent. 
 After the death of the great Italian humanists of 
 the fifteenth century, who had no worthy succes- 
 sors in the Italian peninsula, these two men be- 
 came the principal European representatives of 
 the New Learning. There were other distin- 
 guished men, however, such as Vives, the Span- 
 iard; Lascaris, the Greek; Buda, or Budaeus, the 
 Frenchman, and Erasmus, whom we have al- 
 ready mentioned — all of whom joined at various 
 times in praising Linacre. 
 
 Some of Linacre's books were published by 
 the elder Aldus at Venice; and Aldus is even 
 said to have sent his regrets on publishing his 
 edition of Linacre's translation of " The Sphere 
 
90 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 of Proclus," that the distinguished English hu- 
 manist had not forwarded him others of his 
 works to print. Aldus appreciatively added the 
 hope that the eloquence and classic severity of 
 style in Linacre's works and in those of the 
 English humanists generally " might shame the 
 Italian philosophers and scholars out of their un- 
 cultured methods of writing." 
 
 Augusta Theodosia Drane (Mother Raphael), 
 in her book on " Christian Schools and Schol- 
 ars," gives a very pleasant picture of how 
 Dean Colet, Eramus, and More used at this 
 time to spend their afternoons down at Stepney 
 (then a very charming suburb of London), of 
 whose parish church Colet was the vicar. They 
 stopped at Colet's house and were entertained 
 by his mother, to whom we find pleasant refer- 
 ences in the letters that passed between these 
 scholars. Linacre was also often of the party, 
 and the conversations between these greatest stu- 
 dents and literary geniuses of their age would 
 indeed be interesting reading, if we could only 
 have had preserved for us, in some way, the 
 table-talk of those afternoons. Erasmus partic- 
 ularly was noted for his wit and for his ability to 
 turn aside any serious discussions that might 
 arise among his friends, so as to prevent any- 
 think like unpleasant argument in their friendly 
 intercourse. A favorite way seems to have been 
 to insist on telling one of the old jokes from a 
 classic author whose origin would naturally be 
 presumed to be much later than the date the 
 New Learning had found for it. 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 91 
 
 Dean Colet's mother appears to have been 
 much more than merely the conventional hostess. 
 Erasmus sketches her in her ninetieth year with 
 her countenance still so fair and cheerful that 
 you would think she had never shed a tear. Her 
 son tells in some of his letters to Erasmus and 
 More of how much his mother liked his visitors 
 and how agreeable she found their talk and witty 
 conversation. They seem to have appreciated 
 her in turn, for in Mother Raphael's chapter on 
 English Scholars of the Renaissance there is 
 something of a description of her garden, in 
 which were to be found strawberries, lately 
 brought from Holland, some of the finer varieties 
 of which Mrs. Colet possessed through Eras- 
 mus's acquaintance in that country. Mrs. Colet 
 also had some of the damask roses that had lately 
 been introduced into England by Linacre, who 
 was naturally anxious that the mother of his 
 friend should have the opportunity to raise some 
 of the beautiful flowers he was so much inter- 
 ested in domesticating in England. 
 
 It is a very charming picture, this, of the 
 early humanists in England, and very different 
 from what might easily be imagined by those 
 unfamiliar with the details of the life of the 
 period. Linacre was later to give up his worldly 
 emoluments and honors and become a clergyman, 
 in order to do good and at the same time satisfy 
 his own craving for self-abnegation. More was 
 to rise to the highest positions in England, and 
 then for conscience' sake was to suffer death 
 
92 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 rather than yield to the wishes of his king in a 
 matter in which he saw principle involved. Dean 
 Colet himself was to be the ornament of the 
 English clergy and the model of the scholar 
 clergyman of the eve of the Reformation, to 
 whom many generations were to look back as a 
 worthy object of reverence. Erasmus was to 
 become involved first with and then against 
 Luther, and to be offered a cardinal's hat before 
 his death. His work, like Newman's, was done 
 entirely in the intellectual field. Meantime, in 
 the morning of life, all of them were enjoying 
 the pleasures of friendly intercourse and the 
 charms of domestic felicity under circumstances 
 that showed that their study of humanism and 
 their admiration for the classics impaired none 
 of their sympathetic humanity or their apprecia- 
 tion of the innocent delights of the present. 
 
 For us, however, Linacre's most interesting bio- 
 graphic details are those which relate to medicine, 
 for, besides his humanistic studies while in Italy, 
 Linacre graduated in medicine, obtaining the de- 
 gree of doctor at Padua. The memory of the 
 brilliant disputation which he sustained in the 
 presence of the medical faculty in order to obtain 
 his degree is still one of the precious traditions 
 in the medical school of Padua. He does not 
 seem to have considered his medical education 
 finished, however, by the mere fact of having 
 obtained his doctor's degree, and there is a tra- 
 dition of his having studied later at Vicenza 
 under Nicholas Leonicenus, the most celebrated 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 93 
 
 physician and scholar in Italy at the end of the 
 fifteenth century, who many years afterwards 
 referred with pardonable pride to the fact that 
 he had been Linacre' s teacher in medicine. 
 
 It may seem strange to many that Linacre, 
 with all his knowledge of the classics, should 
 have devoted himself for so many years to the 
 study of medicine in addition to his humanistic 
 studies. It must not be forgotten, however, that 
 the revival of the classics of Latin and Greek 
 brought with it a renewed knowledge of the 
 great Latin and Greek fathers of medicine, Hip- 
 pocrates and Galen. This had a wonderful effect 
 in inspiring the medical students of the time with 
 renewed enthusiasm for the work in which they 
 v/ere engaged. A knowledge of the classics led 
 to the restoration of the study of anatomy, bot- 
 any, and of clinical medicine, which had been 
 neglected in the midst of application to the Ara- 
 bian writers in medicine during the preceding 
 centuries. The restoration of the classics made 
 of medicine a progressive science in which every 
 student felt the possibility of making great dis- 
 coveries that would endure not only for his own 
 reputation but for the benefit of humanity. 
 
 These thoughts seem to have attracted many 
 promising young men to the study of medicine. 
 The result was a period of writing and active 
 observation in medicine that undoubtedly makes 
 this one of the most important of literary medical 
 eras. Some idea of the activity of the writers 
 of the time can be gathered from the important 
 
94 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 medical books — most of them large folios — 
 which were printed during the last half of the 
 sixteenth century in Italy. There is a series of 
 these books to be seen in one of the cases of the 
 library of the Surgeon-General at Washington, 
 which, though by no means complete, must be a 
 source of never-ending surprise to those who are 
 apt to think of this period as a saison morte in 
 medical literature. 
 
 There must have been an extremely great in- 
 terest in medicine to justify all this printing. 
 Some of the books are among the real incunabula 
 of the art of printing. For instance, in 1474 
 there was published at Bologna De Manfredi's 
 " Liber de Homine ;" at Venice, in 1476, Petrus 
 de Albano's work on medicine ; and in the next 
 twenty years from the same home of printing 
 there came large tomes by Angelata, a transla- 
 tion of Celsus, and Aurelius Cornelius and 
 Articellus's " Thesaurus Medicorum Veterum," 
 besides several translations of Avicenna and Pla- 
 tina's work " De Honesta Voluptate et Valetu- 
 dine." At Ferrara, Arculanus's great work was 
 published, while at Modena there appeared the 
 " Hortus Sanitatis," or Garden of Health, whose 
 author was J. Cuba. There were also transla- 
 tions from other Arabian authors on medicine in 
 addition to Avicenna, notably a translation of 
 Rhazes Abu Bekr Muhammed Ben Zankariah 
 Abrazi, a distinguished writer among the Ara- 
 bian physicians of the Middle Ages. 
 
 Linacre's translations of Galen remain still the 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 95 
 
 standard, and they have been reprinted many 
 times. As Erasmus once wrote to a friend, in 
 sending some of these books of Galen, " I pre- 
 sent you with the works of Galen, now by the 
 help of Linacre speaking better Latin than they 
 ever before spoke Greek." Linacre also trans- 
 lated Aristotle into Latin, and Erasmus paid 
 them the high compliment of saying that Lin- 
 acre's Latin was as lucid, as straightforward, 
 and as thoroughly intelligible as was Aristotle's 
 Greek. Of the translations of Aristotle unfor- 
 tunately none is extant. Of Galen we have the 
 "De Sanitate Tuenda," the " Methodus Me- 
 dendi," the " De Symptomatum DifTerentiis et 
 Causis," and the " De Pulsuum Usu." The latter 
 particularly is a noteworthy monograph on an 
 important subject, in which Galen's observations 
 were of great value. Under the title, " The 
 Significance of the Pulse," it has been translated 
 into English, and has influenced many genera- 
 tions of English medical men. 
 
 While we have very few remains of Linacre's 
 work as a physician, there seems to be no doubt 
 that he was considered by all those best capable 
 of judging, to stand at the head of his profession 
 in England. To his care, as one of his biog- 
 raphers remarked, was committed the health of 
 the foremost in Church and State. Besides be- 
 ing the Royal Physician, he was the regular 
 medical attendant of Cardinal Wolsey, of Arch- 
 bishop Warham, the Primate of England, of 
 Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, the Keeper 
 
96 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 of the Privy Seal, and of Sir Reginald Bray, 
 Knight of the Garter and Lord High Treasurer, 
 and of all of the famous scholars of England. 
 
 Erasmus, whilst absent in France, writes to 
 give him an account of his feelings, and begs 
 him to prescribe for him, as he knows no one 
 else to whom he can turn with equal confidence. 
 After a voyage across the channel, during which 
 he had been four days at sea — making a passage 
 by the way that now takes less than two hours — 
 Erasmus describes his condition, his headache, 
 with the glands behind his ears swollen, his 
 temples throbbing, a constant buzzing in his ears ; 
 and laments that no Linacre was at hand to re- 
 store him to health by skilful advice. In a sub- 
 sequent letter he writes from Paris to ask for a 
 copy of a prescription given him while in Lon- 
 don by Linacre, but which a stupid servant had 
 left at the apothecary shop, so that Erasmus 
 could not have it filled in Paris. 
 
 An instance of his skill in prognosis, the most 
 difficult part of the practice of medicine accord- 
 ing to Hippocrates and all subsequent author- 
 ities, is cited by all his biographers, with regard 
 to his friend William Lily, the grammarian. 
 Lily was suffering from a malignant tumor in- 
 volving the hip, which surgeons in consultation 
 had decided should be removed. Linacre plainly 
 foretold that its removal would surely prove 
 fatal, and the event verified his unfavorable prog- 
 nosis. Generally it seems to have been consid- 
 ered that his opinion was of great value in all 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 97 
 
 serious matters, and it was eagerly sought for. 
 Some of the nobility and clergy of the time came 
 even from the Continent over to England — by 
 no means an easy journe}^, even for a healthy 
 man in those days, as can be appreciated from 
 Erasmus's experience just cited — in order to ob- 
 tain Linacre's opinion. 
 
 One of Erasmus's letters to Billibaldus Pirck- 
 heimer contains a particular account of the 
 method of treatment by which he was relieved of 
 his severe pain under Linacre's direction in a 
 very tormenting attack of renal colic. The de- 
 tails, especially the use of poultice applications as 
 hot as could be borne, show that Linacre thor- 
 oughly understood the use of heat in the relaxa- 
 tion of spasm, while his careful preparation of 
 the remedies to be employed in the presence of 
 the patient himself would seem to show that he 
 had a very high appreciation of how much the 
 mental state of the patient and the attitude of 
 expectancy thus awakened may have in giving 
 relief even in cases of severe pain. 
 
 The only medical writings of Linacre's that we 
 possess are translations. We have said already 
 that the reversion at the end of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury to the classical authorities in medicine un- 
 doubtedly did much to introduce the observant 
 phase of medical science, which had its highest 
 expression in Vesalius at the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century and continued to flourish so 
 fruitfully during the next two centuries at most 
 of the Italian universities. His translations then 
 
98 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 were of themselves more suggestive contributions 
 to medicine than would perhaps have been any- 
 even of his original observations, since the mind 
 of his generation was not ready as yet to be in- 
 fluenced by discoveries made by contemporaries. 
 
 The best proof of Linacre's great practical in- 
 terest in medicine is his realization of the need 
 for the Royal College of Physicians and his 
 arrangements for it. 
 
 The Roll of the College, which comprises bio- 
 graphical sketches of all the eminent physicians 
 whose names are recorded in the annals from 
 the foundation of the College in 15 18, and is 
 published under the authority of the College 
 itself, contains the best tribute to Linacre's work 
 that can possibly be paid. It says : " The most 
 magnificent of Linacre's labors was the design 
 of the Royal College of Physicians of London — 
 a standing monument of the enlightened views 
 and generosity of its projectors. In the execu- 
 tion of it Linacre stood alone, for the munificence 
 of the Crown was limited to a grant of letters 
 patent ; whilst the expenses and provision of the 
 College was left to be defrayed out of his own 
 means, or of those who were associated with him 
 in its foundation." "In the year 1518," says 
 Dr. Johnson, 1 " when Linacre's scheme was car- 
 ried into effect, the practice of medicine was 
 scarcely elevated above that of the mechanical 
 arts, nor was the majority of its practitioners 
 
 1 Life of Linacre, London, 1835. 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 99 
 
 among the laity better instructed than the me- 
 chanics by whom these arts were exercised. 
 With the diffusion of learning to the republics 
 and states of Italy, establishments solely for the 
 advancement of science had been formed with 
 success ; but no society devoted to the interests 
 of learning yet existed in England, unfettered by 
 a union with the hierarchy, or exempted from 
 the rigors and seclusions which were imposed 
 upon its members as the necessary obligation of 
 a monastic and religious life. In reflecting on 
 the advantages which had been derived from 
 these institutions, Linacre did not forget the im- 
 possibility of adapting rules and regulations 
 which accorded with the state of society in the 
 Middle Ages to the improved state of learning 
 in his own, and his plans were avowedly modelled 
 on some similar community of which many cities 
 of Italy afforded rather striking examples." 
 
 Some idea of the state into which the practice 
 of medicine had fallen in England before Lin- 
 acre's foundation of the Royal College of Physi- 
 cians may be gathered from the words of the 
 charter of the College. " Before this period a 
 great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom 
 the greater part had no insight into physic, nor 
 into any other kind of learning — some could not 
 even read the letters on the book, so far forth 
 that common artificers as smiths, weavers and 
 women — boldly and accustomably took upon them 
 great cures to the high displeasure of God, great 
 infamy to the faculty, and the grievous hurt, 
 
IOO CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 damage, and destruction of many of the King's 
 liege people." 
 
 After the foundation of the College there was 
 a definite way of deciding formally who were, or 
 were not, legally licensed to practise. As a con- 
 sequence, when serious malpractice came to public 
 notice, those without a license were occasionally 
 treated in the most summary manner. Stowe, in 
 his chronicles, gives a very vivid and picturesque 
 description of the treatment of one of these 
 quacks who had been especially flagrant in his 
 imposition upon the people. A counterfeit doc- 
 tor was set on horseback, his face to the horse's 
 tail, the tail being forced into his hand as a bridle, 
 a collar of jordans about his neck, a whetstone 
 on his breast, and so led through the city of 
 London with ringing of basins, and banished. 
 " Such deceivers," continued the old chronicler, 
 " no doubt are many, who being never trained 
 up in reading or practice of physics and Chirur- 
 gery do boast to do great cures, especially upon 
 women, as to make them straight that before 
 were crooked, corbed, or crumped in any part of 
 their bodies and other such things. But the con- 
 trary is true. For some have received gold 
 when they have better deserved the whetstone." 1 
 Human nature has not changed very much in the 
 
 1 " To get the whetstone " is an old English expres- 
 sion, meaning to take the prize for lying. It is derived 
 from the old custom of driving rogues, whose wits were 
 too sharp, out of town with a whetstone around their 
 necks. 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest ioi 
 
 four centuries since Linacre's foundation, and 
 while the model that he set in the matter of pro- 
 viding a proper licensing body for physicians has 
 done something to lessen the evils complained of, 
 the abuses still remain ; and the old chronicler 
 will find in our time not a few who, in his 
 opinion, might deserve the whetstone. We can 
 scarcely realize how much Linacre accomplished 
 by means of the Royal College of Physicians, or 
 how great was the organizing spirit of the man 
 to enable him to recognize the best way out of 
 the chaos of medical practice in his time. 
 
 " The wisdom of Linacre's plan," wrote Dr. 
 Friend, " speaks for itself. His scheme, with- 
 out doubt, was not only to create a good under- 
 standing and unanimity among his own profes- 
 sion (which of itself was an excellent thought), 
 but to make them more useful to the public. 
 And he imagined that by separating them from 
 the vulgar empirics and setting them upon such 
 a reputable foot of distinction, there would al- 
 ways arise a spirit of emulation among men liber- 
 ally educated, which would animate them in pur- 
 suing their inquiries into the nature of diseases 
 and the methods of cure for the benefit of man- 
 kind ; and perhaps no founder ever had the good 
 fortune to have his designs succeed more to his 
 wish." 
 
 His plans with regard to the teaching of medi- 
 cine at the two great English Universities did 
 not succeed so well, but that was the fault not of 
 Linacre nor of the directions left in his will, but 
 
102 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 of the times, which were awry for educational 
 matters. Notwithstanding Linacre's bequest of 
 funds for two professorships at Oxford and one 
 at Cambridge, it is typical of the times that the 
 chairs were not founded for many years. Dur- 
 ing Henry VIII's time, the great effort of gov- 
 ernment was not to encourage new foundations 
 but to break up old ones, in order to obtain 
 money for the royal treasury, so that educational 
 institutions of all kinds suffered eclipse. The 
 first formal action with regard to the Linacre be- 
 quest was taken in the third year of Edward VI. 
 Two lectureships were established in Merton Col- 
 lege, Oxford, and one in St. John's College, 
 Cambridge. Linacre's idea had been that these 
 foundations should be University lectureships, 
 but Anthony Wood says that the University had 
 lost in prestige so much during Henry VIII's 
 time that it was considered preferable to attach 
 the lectureships to Merton College, which had 
 considerable reputation because of its medical 
 school. During Elizabeth's time these Linacre 
 lectureships sank to be sinecures and for nearly 
 a hundred years served but for the support of a 
 fellowship. The Oxford foundation was revived 
 in 1856 by the University Commissioners, and 
 the present splendid foundation of the lectures in 
 physiology bears Linacre's name in honor of his 
 original grant. 
 
 At the age of about fifty Linacre was ordained 
 priest. His idea in becoming a clergyman, as 
 confessed in letters to his friends, was partly in 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 103 
 
 order to obtain leisure for his favorite studies, 
 but also out of the desire to give himself up to 
 something other than the mere worldly pursuits 
 in which he had been occupied during all his pre- 
 vious life. His biographer, Dr. Johnson, says: 
 " In examining the motives of this choice of 
 Linacre's, it would seem that he was guided less 
 by the expectation of dignity and preferment 
 than by the desire of retirement and of rendering 
 himself acquainted with those writings which 
 might afford him consolation in old age and re- 
 lief from the infirmities which a life of assiduous 
 study and application had tended to produce." 
 
 The precise time of Linacre's ordination is not 
 known, nor is it certain whether he was ordained 
 by Archbishop Warham of Canterbury, or by 
 Cardinal Wolsey, the Archbishop of York. He 
 received his first clerical appointment from War- 
 ham, by whom he was collated to the rectory of 
 Mersham in Kent. He held this place scarcely 
 a month, but his resignation was followed by his 
 installation as prebend in the Cathedral of Wells, 
 and by an admission to the Church of Hawkhurst 
 in Kent, which he held until the year of his death. 
 Seven years later he was made prebend in the 
 Collegiate Chapel of St. Stephen, Westminster, 
 and in the following year he became prebendary 
 of South Newbold in the Church of York. This 
 was in the year 15 18. In the following year he 
 received the dignified and lucrative appointment 
 of presentor to the Cathedral of York, for which 
 he was indebted to Cardinal Wolsey, to whom 
 
104 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 about this time he dedicated his translation of 
 Galen " On the Use of the Pulse." He seems 
 also to have held several other benefices during 
 the later years of his life, although some of them 
 were resigned within so short a time as to make 
 it difficult to understand why he should have 
 accepted them, since the expenses of institution 
 must have exceeded the profits which were de- 
 rived from them during the period of possession. 
 
 Linacre owed his clerical opportunities during 
 the last years of his life particularly to Arch- 
 bishop Warham, who, as ambassador, primate, 
 and chancellor, occupied a large and honorable 
 place in the history of the times. Erasmus says 
 of him in one of his letters : " Such were his 
 vigilance and attention in all matters relating to 
 religion and to the offices of the Church that no 
 concern which was foreign to them seemed ever 
 to distract him. He had sufficient time for a 
 scrupulous performance of the accustomed exer- 
 cises of prayer, for the almost daily celebration 
 of the Mass, for twice or thrice hearing divine 
 service, for determining suits, for receiving em- 
 bassies, for consultation with the king when 
 matters of moment required his presence, for 
 the vistation of churches when regulation was 
 needed, for the welcome of frequently two hund- 
 dred guests, and lastly for a literary leisure." 
 
 As the close friend of such men, it is evident 
 that Linacre must have accomplished much good 
 as a clergyman; and it seems not unlikely that 
 his frequent changes of rectorship were rather 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 105 
 
 due to the fact that the Primate wished to make 
 use of his influence in various parts of his dio- 
 cese for the benefit of religion than for any per- 
 sonal motives on Linacre's part, who, in order 
 to enter the service of the Church, had given up 
 so much more than he could expect as a clergy- 
 man. 
 
 Linacre as a clergyman continued to deserve 
 the goodwill and esteem of all his former friends, 
 and seems to have made many new ones. At the 
 time of his death he was one of the most honored 
 individuals in England. All of his biographers 
 are agreed in stating that he was the representa- 
 tive Englishman of his time, looked up to by all 
 his contemporaries, respected and admired by 
 those who had not the opportunity of his inti- 
 mate acquaintance, and heartily loved by friends, 
 who were themselves some of the best men of 
 the time. 
 
 The concluding paragraph of the appreciation 
 of Linacre's character in Lives of British 
 Physicians x is as follows : " To sum up his 
 character it was said of him that no Englishman 
 of his day had had such famous masters, namely, 
 Demetrius and Politian of Florence ; such noble 
 patrons, Lorenzo de' Medici, Henry VII and 
 Henry VIII ; such high-born scholars, the Prince 
 Arthur and Princess Mary of England; or such 
 learned friends, for amongst the latter were to 
 be enumerated Erasmus, Melanchthon, Latimer, 
 
 1 London : John Murray, 1830. 
 
106 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 Tonstal, and Sir Thomas More." His biog- 
 rapher might have added the names of others of 
 the ore-Reformation period, men of culture and 
 character whose merits only the historical re- 
 searches of recent years have brought out — Prior 
 Selling, Dean Colet (though his friendship was 
 unfortunately interrupted), Archbishop Warham, 
 Cardinal Wolsey, Grocyn, and further scholars 
 and churchmen. 
 
 Dr. J. F. Payne, in summing up the opinion 
 of Linacre held by his contemporaries, in the 
 "Dictionary of National Biography" (British), 
 pays a high tribute to the man. " Linacre's per- 
 sonal character was highly esteemed by his con- 
 temporaries'. He was evidently capable of abso- 
 lute devotion to a great cause, animated by 
 genuine public spirit and a boundless zeal for 
 learning." Erasmus sketches him humorously in 
 the " Encomium Moriae " (The Praise of Fool- 
 ishness) — with a play on the word Moriae in 
 reference to his great friend, Thomas More, of 
 whom Erasmus thought so much — showing him 
 a tireless student. The distinguished foreign 
 scholar, however, considered Linacre as an en- 
 thusiast in recondite studies, but no mere pedant. 
 Dr. Payne closes his appreciation with these 
 words : " Linacre had, it would seem, no ene- 
 mies." 
 
 Caius, the distinguished English physician and 
 scholar, himself one of the best known members 
 of the Royal College of Physicians and the 
 founder of Caius College, Cambridge, sketches 
 
linacre: scholar, physician, priest 107 
 
 Linacre's character (he had as a young man 
 known him personally) in very sympathetic vein. 
 As Dr. Caius was one of the greatest English- 
 men of his time in the middle of the sixteenth 
 century, his opinion must carry great weight. It 
 is to him that we owe the famous epitaph that 
 for long in old St. Paul's, London, was to be 
 read on Linacre's tombstone: — 
 
 " Fraudes dolosque mire perosus, fidus amicis, 
 omnibus ordinibus juxta carus. A stern hater of 
 deceit and underhand ways, faithful to his 
 friends, equally dear to ail classes." 
 
 Surely this is a worthy tribute to the great 
 physician, clergyman, scholar, and philanthropist 
 of the eve of the Reformation in England. 
 
V. 
 
 FATHER KIRCHER, S.J.: 
 
 SCIENTIST, ORIENTALIST, 
 
 AND COLLECTOR. 
 
OPORTET autem neque recenti- 
 ores viros in his fraudare quae 
 vel repererunt vel recte secuti sunt; 
 et tamen ea quae apud antiquiores 
 aliquos posita sunt auctoribus suis 
 reddere. — Celsus de Medidna. 
 
ATHANASIUS KIRCHER 
 
V. 
 
 FATHER KIRCHER, S.J.: SCIENTIST, ORIEN- 
 TALIST, AND COLLECTOR. 
 
 EXCEPT in the minds of the unconquerably 
 intolerant, the Galileo controversy has in 
 recent years settled down to occupy something of 
 its proper place in the history of the supposed 
 conflict between religion and science. In touch- 
 ing the subject in the life of Copernicus we sug- 
 gested that it has come to be generally recog- 
 niezd, as M. Bertrand, the perpetual Secretary of 
 the Paris Academy of Sciences, himself a dis- 
 tinguished mathematician and historian, declares, 
 that " the great lesson for those who would wish 
 to oppose reason with violence was clearly to be 
 read in Galileo's story, and the scandal of his 
 condemnation was learned without any profound 
 sorrow to Galileo himself ; and his long life, con- 
 sidered as a whole, was the most serene and en- 
 viable in the history of science." Somehow, not- 
 withstanding the directness of this declara- 
 tion, there is still left in the minds of many 
 an impression rather difficult to eradicate that 
 there was definite, persistent opposition to every- 
 thing associated with scientific progress among 
 the churchmen of the time of Galileo. 
 
 Perhaps no better answer to this unfortunate, 
 because absolutely untrue, impression could be 
 
 in 
 
112 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 formulated than is to be found in a sketch of the 
 career of Father Athanasius Kircher, the distin- 
 guished Jesuit who for so many years occupied 
 himself with nearly every branch of science in 
 Rome, under the fostering care of the Church. 
 He had been Professor of Physics, Mathematics, 
 and Oriental Languages at Wiirzburg, but was 
 driven from there by the disturbances incident to 
 the Thirty Years' War, in 163 1. He continued 
 his scientific investigation at Avignon. From 
 here, within two years after Galileo's trial in 
 1635, he was, through the influence of Cardinal 
 Barberini, summoned to Rome, where he devoted 
 himself to mathematics at first, and then to every 
 branch of science, as well as the Oriental lan- 
 guages, not only with the approval, but also with 
 the most liberal pecuniary aid from the ecclesias- 
 tical authorities of the papal court and city. 
 
 Some idea of the breadth of Father Kircher's 
 scientific sympathy and his genius for scientific 
 observation and discovery, which amounted al- 
 most to intuition, may be gathered from the fact 
 that to him we owe the first definite statement of 
 the germ theory of disease ; and he seems to have 
 been the first to recognize the presence of what 
 are now called microbes. At the same time his 
 works on magnetism contained not only all the 
 knowledge of his own time, but also some won- 
 derful suggestions as to the possibilities of the 
 development of this science. His studies with 
 regard to light are almost as epochal as those 
 with regard to magnetism. Besides these, he 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. : SCIENTIST 113 
 
 was the first to find any clue to the Egyptian 
 hieroglyphics, and yet found time to write a geo- 
 graphical work on Latium, the country surround- 
 ing Rome, and to make collections for his museum 
 which rendered it in its time the best scientific 
 collection in the world. It may very well indeed 
 be said that visitors to Rome with scientific ten- 
 dencies found as much that was suggestive in 
 Father Kircher's museum — the " Kircherianum," 
 as it came to be called — as artists and sculptors 
 and architects found in the Vatican collections of 
 the papal city. 
 
 All of this work was accomplished within the 
 half century after Galileo's trial, for Father Kir- 
 cher died in 1680, at the age of seventy-eight, 
 having lived, as so many of the great scientists 
 have done, a long life in the midst of the most 
 persistent activity. Kircher, more than perhaps 
 any other, can be said to be the founder of mod- 
 ern natural science. Before any one else, in a 
 practical way, he realized the necessity for the 
 collection of an immense amount of data, if 
 science was to be founded on the broad, firm 
 foundation of observed truth. The principle 
 which had been announced by Bacon in the 
 " Novum Organon " — " to take all that comes 
 rather than to choose, and to heap up rather than 
 to register " — was never carried out as fully as 
 by Father Kircher. As Edmund Gosse said in 
 the June number of Harper's, 1904, " Bacon 
 had started a great idea, but he had not carried 
 it out. He is not the founder, he is the prophet 
 
114 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 of modern physical science. To be in direct 
 touch with nature, to adventure in the unexplored 
 fields of knowledge, and to do this by carrying 
 out an endless course of slow and sure experi- 
 ments, this was the counsel of the ' Novum Or- 
 ganon.' " Bacon died in 1626, and scarcely more 
 than a decade had passed before Kircher was 
 carrying out the work thus outlined by the Eng- 
 lish philosopher in a way that was surprisingly 
 successful, even looked at from the standpoint of 
 our modern science. Needless to say, however, it 
 was not because of Bacon's suggestion that he 
 did so, for it is more than doubtful whether 
 he knew of Bacon's writings until long after 
 the lines of his life-work had been traced by his 
 own inquiring spirit. The fulness of time had 
 come. The inductive philosophy was in the air. 
 Bacon's formulae, which the English philosopher 
 never practically applied, and Father Kircher's 
 assiduous collection of data, were but expressions 
 of the spirit of the times. How faithfully the 
 work of the first modern inductive scientist was 
 accomplished we shall see. 
 
 It may be easily imagined that a certain inter- 
 est in Father Kircher, apart from his scientific 
 attainments and the desire to show how much 
 and how successful was the attention given to 
 natural science by churchmen about the time of 
 the Galileo controversy, might influence this judg- 
 ment of the distinguished Jesuit's scientific accom- 
 plishments. With regard to his discoveries in 
 medicine especially, and above all his announce- 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. : SCIENTIST 115 
 
 ment of the microbic origin of contagious disease, 
 it may be thought that this was a mere chance 
 expression and not at all the result of serious 
 scientific conclusions. Tyndall, however, the dis- 
 tinguished English physicist, would not be the 
 one to give credit for scientific discoveries, and 
 to a clergyman in a distant century, unless there 
 was definite evidence of the discovery. It is not 
 generally known that to the great English physi- 
 cist we owe the almost absolute demonstration of 
 the impossibility of spontaneous generation, to- 
 gether with a series of studies showing the exist- 
 ence everywhere in the atmosphere of minute 
 forms of life to which fermentative changes and 
 also the infectious diseases — though at that time 
 this was only a probability — are to be attributed. 
 When Tyndall was reviewing, in the midst of the 
 controversy over spontaneous generation, the 
 question of the microbic origin of disease, he 
 said : " Side by side with many other theories has 
 run the germ theory of epidemic disease. The 
 notion was expressed by Kircher and favored by 
 Linnaeus, that epidemic diseases may be due to 
 germs which enter the body and produce dis- 
 turbance by the development within the body of 
 parasitic forms of life." 
 
 How much attention Father Kircher's book on 
 the pest or plague, in which his theory of the 
 micro-organismal origin of disease is put for- 
 ward, attracted from the medical profession can 
 t>e understood from the fact that it was submitted 
 to three of the most distinguished physicians in 
 
Il6 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 Rome before being printed, and that their testi- 
 mony to its value as a contribution to medicine 
 prefaced the first edition. They are not sparing 
 in their praise of it. Dr. Joseph Benedict Sini- 
 baldus, who was the Professor of the Practice of 
 Medicine in the Roman University at the time, 
 says that " Father Kircher's book not only con- 
 tains an excellent resume of all that is known 
 about the pest or plague, but also as many val- 
 uable hints and suggestions on the origin and 
 spread of the disease, which had never before 
 been made." He considers it a very wonderful 
 thing that a non-medical man should have been 
 able to place himself so thoroughly in touch with 
 the present state of medicine in respect to this 
 disease and then point out the conditions of 
 future progress. 
 
 Dr. Paul Zachias, who was a distinguished 
 Roman physician of the time, said that he had 
 long known Father Kircher as an eminent writer 
 on other subjects, but that after reading his book 
 on the pest he must consider him also distin- 
 guished in medical writing. He says : " While 
 he has set his hand at other's harvests, he has 
 done it with so much wisdom and prudence as to 
 win the admiration of the harvesters already in 
 the field." He adds that there can be no doubt 
 that it would be a source of profit for medical 
 men to read this little book and that it will un- 
 doubtedly prove beneficial to future generations. 
 
 Testimony of another kind to the value of 
 Father Kircher's book is to be found in the fact 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. : SCIENTIST 117 
 
 that within a half-year after its publication in 
 Latin it appeared in several other languages. It 
 is too much the custom of these modern times to 
 consider that scientific progress in the centuries 
 before our own and its immediate predecessor 
 was likely to attract little attention for many 
 years, and was especially slow to make its way 
 into foreign countries. Anything, however, of 
 real importance in science took but a very short 
 time to travel from one country to another in 
 Europe in the seventeenth century, and the fact 
 that scientific men generally used Latin as a com- 
 mon language made the spread of discoveries and 
 speculations much easier even than at the present 
 time. Our increased means of communication 
 have really only served to allow sensational an- 
 nouncements of a progress in science — which is 
 usually no progress at all — to be spread quite as 
 effectually in modern times as were real advances 
 in the older days. 
 
 There is no good account of Father Kircher's 
 life available in English, and it has seemed only 
 proper that the more important at least of the 
 details of the life of the man who thus anticipated 
 the beginnings of modern bacteriology and of the 
 relations of micro-organisms to disease, should 
 not be left in obscurity. His life history is all the 
 more interesting and important because it illus- 
 trates the interest of the churchmen of the time, 
 and especially of the Roman ecclesiastical author- 
 ities, in all forms of science ; for Father Kircher 
 is undoubtedly one of the greatest scholars of his- 
 
Il8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 tory and one of the scientific geniuses in whose 
 works can be found, as the result of some won- 
 derful principles of intuition incomprehensible to 
 the slower intellectual operations of ordinary 
 men, anticipations of many of the discoveries of 
 the after-time. There is scarcely a modern 
 science he did not touch upon, and nothing that 
 he touched did he fail to illuminate. His mag- 
 nificent collections in the museum of the Roman 
 College demonstrate very well his extremely wide 
 interests in all scientific matters. 
 
 The history of Father Kircher's career fur- 
 nishes perhaps the best possible refutation of the 
 oft-repeated slander that Jesuit education was 
 narrow and was so founded upon and rooted in 
 authority that original research and investigation, 
 in scientific matters particularly, were impossible, 
 and that it utterly failed to encourage new dis- 
 coveries of any kind. As a matter of fact, Kir- 
 cher was not only not hampered in his work by 
 his superiors or by the ecclesiastical authorities, 
 but the respect in which he was held at Rome 
 enabled him to use the influence of the Church 
 and of great churchmen all over the world, with 
 the best possible effect, for the assembling at the 
 Roman College of objects of the most various 
 kinds, illustrating especially the modern sciences 
 of archeology, ethnology, and paleontology, be- 
 sides Egyptian and Assyrian history. 
 
 Athanasius Kircher was born 2 May, 1602, at 
 Geisa, near Fulda, in South Germany. He was 
 educated at the Jesuit College of Fulda, and at 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. I SCIENTIST 119 
 
 the early age of sixteen, having completed his 
 college course, entered the Jesuit novitiate at 
 Mainz. After his novitiate he continued his phil- 
 osophical and classical studies at Paderborn and 
 completed his years of scholastic teaching in vari- 
 ous cities of South Germany — Munster, Cologne, 
 and Coblenz — finally finishing his education by 
 theological studies at Cologne and Mainz. 
 
 Toward the end of the third decade of the 
 seventeenth century he became Professor of Phil- 
 osophy and Mathematics at Wiirzburg. Here his 
 interest in Oriental languages began, and he 
 established a special course in this subject at the 
 University of Wiirzburg. During the Thirty 
 Years' War, however, the invasion of Germany 
 very seriously disturbed university work, and fin- 
 ally in 1 63 1 Father Kircher was sent by his 
 superiors to Avignon in South France, where he 
 continued his teaching some four years, attract- 
 ing no little attention by his wide interest in 
 many sciences and by various scientific works that 
 showed him to be a man of very broad genius. 
 
 In 1635, through the influence of Cardinal Bar- 
 berini, he was summoned to Rome, where he be- 
 came Professor of Mathematics and Oriental 
 Languages in the famous Roman College of the 
 Jesuits, which was considered at that time one of 
 the greatest educational institutions in the world. 
 His interest in science, however, was not lessened 
 by teaching duties that would apparently have 
 demanded all his time ; and, as we shall see, he 
 continued to issue books on the most diverse 
 
120 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 scientific subjects, most of them illustrated by 
 absolutely new experimental observations and all 
 of them attracting widespread attention. 
 
 Father Kircher began his career as a writer 
 on science at the early age of twenty-seven, when 
 he issued his first work on magnetism. The title 
 of this volume, "Ars Magnesia turn Theorema- 
 tice turn Problematice Proposita," shows that the 
 subject was not treated entirely from a specula- 
 tive standpoint. Indeed, in the preface he states 
 that he hopes that the principal value of the book 
 will be found in the fact that the knowledge of 
 magnetism is presented by a new method, with 
 special demonstrations, and that the conclusions 
 are confirmed by various practical uses and long- 
 continued experience with magnets of various 
 kinds. 
 
 Although it may be a source of great surprise, 
 Father Kircher's genius was essentially experi- 
 mental. He has been spoken of not infrequently 
 as a man who collected the scientific information 
 of his time in such a way as to display, as 
 says the Encyclopaedia Britannica, " a wide and 
 varied learning, but that he was a man singularly 
 devoid of judgment and critical discernment." 
 He was in some respects the direct opposite of the 
 opinion thus expressed, since his learning was 
 always of a practical character, and there are very 
 few subjects in this writing which he has not him- 
 self illustrated by means of new and ingenious 
 experiments. 
 
 Perhaps the best possible proof of this is to be 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. : SCIENTIST 121 
 
 found in the fact that his second scientific work 
 was on the construction of sun-dials, and that one 
 of the discoveries he himself considered most val- 
 uable was the invention of a calculating machine, 
 as well as of a complicated arrangement for illus- 
 trating the positions of the stars in the heavens. 
 He constructed, moreover, a large burning-glass 
 in order to demonstrate the possibility of the story 
 told of Archimedes, that he had succeeded in 
 burning the enemy's ships in the harbor at Syra- 
 cuse by means of a large lens. 
 
 But Father Kircher's surest claim to being a 
 practical genius is to be found in his invention of 
 the magic lantern. It was another Jesuit, Aqui- 
 lonius, in his work on optics, issued in 1613, who 
 had first sought to explain how the two pictures 
 presented to the two eyes are fused into one, and 
 it was in a practical demonstration of this by 
 means of lenses that Kircher hit upon the inven- 
 tion of the projecting stereoscope. 
 
 After his call to Rome our subject continued 
 his work on magnetism, and in 1641 issued a fur- 
 ther treatise on the subject called " Magnes " or 
 " De Arte Magnetica." While he continued to 
 teach Oriental languages and issued in 1644 a 
 book with the title " Lingua ^Egyptiaca Resti- 
 tuta," he also continued to apply himself especially 
 to the development of physical science. Accord- 
 ingly in 1645 there appeared his volume "Ars 
 Magna Lucis et Umbrae." This was a treatise 
 on light, illustrated, as was his treatise on mag- 
 netism, by many original experiments and demon- 
 strations. 
 
122 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 During the five years until 1650 the depart- 
 ment of acoustics came under his consideration, 
 so that in that year we have from his pen a treat- 
 ise called " Musurgia Universalis," with the sub- 
 title, " The Art of Harmony and Discord ; a 
 treatise on the whole doctrine of sound with the 
 philosophy of music treated from the standpoint 
 of practical as well as theoretic science." Dur- 
 ing the next five years astronomy was his special 
 hobby, and the result was in 1656 a treatise on 
 astronomy called " Iter Celeste." This contained 
 a description of the earth and the heavens and 
 discussed the nature of the fixed and moving 
 stars, with various considerations as to the com- 
 position and structure of these bodies. A second 
 volume on this subject appeared in 1660. 
 
 The variety of Father Kircher's interests in 
 science was not yet exhausted, however. Five 
 years after the completion of his two volumes on 
 astronomy there came one on " Mundus Subter- 
 raneus." This treated of the modern subjects of 
 geology, metallurgy, and mineralogy, as well as 
 the chemistry of minerals. It also contained a 
 treatise on animals that live under the ground, 
 and on insects. This was considered one of the 
 author's greatest books, and the whole of it 
 was translated into French, whilst abstracts from 
 it, especially the chapters on poisons, appeared in 
 most of the other languages of Europe. Part of 
 it was translated even into English, though seven- 
 teenth-century Englishmen were loath to draw 
 their inspiration from Jesuit writers. 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. : SCIENTIST 1 23 
 
 Jesuits were, however, at this time generally 
 acknowledged on the Continent to be leaders in 
 every department of thought, sympathetic coad- 
 jutors in every step in scientific progress. Strange 
 as it may appear to those who will not understand 
 the Jesuit spirit of love for learning, two of the 
 most distinguished scientists whose names are 
 immortal in the history of physical sciences in dif- 
 fent departments during this century, Kepler and 
 Harvey, were on intimate terms of friendship 
 with the Jesuits of Germany. Harvey, on the 
 occasion of a visit to the Continent, stopped for 
 a prolonged visit with the Jesuits at Cologne, so 
 that some of his English friends joked him about 
 the possibility of his making converts of the 
 Jesuits. These witticisms, however, did not seem 
 to distract Harvey very much, for he returned on 
 a subsequent occasion to spend some further days 
 with his Jesuit scientific friends along the Rhine. 
 
 In the meantime Father Kircher was issuing 
 notable books on his always favorite subject of 
 the Oriental languages. In 1650 there appeared 
 " Obeliscus Pamphilius," containing an explana- 
 tion of the hieroglyphics to be found on the obe- 
 lisk which by the order of Innocent X, a member 
 of the Pamfili family, was placed in the Piazza 
 Navona by Bernini. This is no mere pamphlet, 
 as might be thought, but a book of 560 pages. 
 In 1652 there appeared " CEdipus iEgyptiacus," 
 that is. the revealer of the sphinx-like riddle of 
 the Egyptian ancient languages. In 1653 a sec- 
 ond volume of this appeared, and in 1655 a third 
 
124 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 volume. It was considered so important that it 
 was translated into Russian and other Slav lan- 
 guages, besides several other European lan- 
 guages. His book, " Lingua ^Egyptiaca Resti- 
 tuta," which appeared in 1644, when Kircher was 
 forty-two years of age, is considered to be of 
 value yet in the study of Oriental languages, and 
 was dedicated to the patron, Emperor Ferdinand 
 III, whose liberality made its publication possible. 
 
 It is often a subject for conjecture just how 
 science was studied and taught in centuries be- 
 fore the nineteenth, and just what text-books 
 were employed. A little familiarity with Father 
 Kircher's publications, however, will show that 
 there was plenty of very suitable material for 
 text-books to be found in his works. Under his 
 own direction, what at the present time would be 
 called a text-book of physics, but which at that 
 time was called " Physiologia Experimentalis," 
 was issued, containing all the experimental and 
 demonstrative parts of his various books on chem- 
 istry, physics, music, magnetism, and mechanics, 
 as well as acoustics and optics. This formed the 
 groundwork of most text-books of science for a 
 full century afterwards. Indeed, until the be- 
 ginning of the distinctly modern science of chem- 
 istry with the discoveries of Priestley and Lavoi- 
 sier, there was to be little added of serious im- 
 port in science. 
 
 Perhaps the most commendable feature of 
 Father Kircher's books is the fact that he him- 
 self seems never to have considered that he had 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. ■ SCIENTIST 125 
 
 exhausted a subject. The first work he published 
 was on magnetism. Some twelve years later he 
 returned to the subject, and wrote a more exten- 
 sive work, containing many improvements over 
 the first volume. The same thing is true of his 
 studies in sound. In 1650, when not quite fifty 
 years of age, he issued his " Musurgia Univer- 
 salis," a sub-title of which stated that it contains 
 the whole doctrine of sound and the practical and 
 theoretical philosophy of music. A little over 
 twenty years later, however, he published the 
 "Phonurgia Nova," the sub-title of which showed 
 that it was mainly concerned with the experi- 
 mental demonstration of various truths in acous- 
 tics and with the development of the doctrine he 
 had originally stated in the " Musurgia." 
 
 It is no wonder that his contemporaries spoke 
 of him as the Doctor centum artium — the teacher 
 of a hundred arts — for there was practically no 
 branch of scientific knowledge in his time in 
 which he was not expert. Scientific visitors to 
 Rome always considered it one of the privileges 
 of their stay in the papal city to have the oppor- 
 tunity to meet Father Kircher, and it was thought 
 a very great honor to be shown through his 
 museum by himself. 
 
 Of course, it is difficult for present-day scien- 
 tists to imagine a man exhausting the whole 
 round of science in this way. Many who have 
 read but little more than the titles of Father Kir- 
 cher's many books are accordingly prone to speak 
 of him as a mine of information, but without any 
 
 V 
 
126 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 proper critical judgment. He has succeeded, ac- 
 cording to them, in heaping together an immense 
 amount of information, but it is of the most dis- 
 parate value. There is no doubt that he took 
 account of many things in science that are mani- 
 festly absurd. Astrology, for instance, had not, 
 in his time, gone out of fashion entirely, and he 
 refers many events in men's lives to the influence 
 of the stars. He even made rules for astrological 
 predictions, and his astronomical machine for 
 exhibiting the motions of the stars was also meant 
 to be helpful in the construction of astrological 
 tables. It must not be forgotten, however, that in 
 his time the best astronomers, like Tycho Brahe 
 and even Kepler, had not entirely given up the 
 idea of the influence of the stars over man's 
 destiny. 
 
 As regards other sciences, there are details of 
 information that may appear quite as supersti- 
 tious as the belief in astrology. Kircher, for in- 
 stance, accepted the idea of the possibility of the 
 transmutation of metals. It is to be said, though, 
 that all mankind were convinced of this possibil- 
 ity, and indeed not entirely without reason. All 
 during the nineteenth century scientists believed 
 very firmly in the absolute independence of chem- 
 ical elements and their utter non-interchangeabil- 
 ity. As the result of recent discoveries, however, 
 in which one element has apparently been ob- 
 served giving rise to another, much of this doc- 
 trine has come to be considered as improbable, 
 and now the idea of possible transmutation of 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. I SCIENTIST 12J 
 
 metals and other chemical elements into one an- 
 other appears not so absurd as it was half a cen- 
 tury ago. 
 
 Any one who will take up a text-book of 
 science of a century ago will find in it many 
 glaring absurdities. It will seem almost impos- 
 sible that a scientific thinker, in his right senses, 
 could have accepted some of the propositions that 
 are calmly set down as absolute truths. Every 
 generation has made itself ridiculous by knowing 
 many things " that are not so," and even ours is 
 no exception. Father Kircher was not outside 
 this rule, though he was ahead of his generation 
 in the critical faculty that enabled him to elim- 
 inate many falsities and to illuminate half-truths 
 in the science of his day. 
 
 Undoubtedly the most interesting of Father 
 Kircher's scientific books is his work On the Pest, 
 with some considerations on its origin, mode of 
 distribution, and treatment, which about the 
 middle of the seventeenth century gathered to- 
 gether all the medical theories of the times as to 
 the causation of contagious disease, discussed 
 them with critical judgment and reached conclu- 
 sions which anticipate much of what is most mod- 
 ern in our present-day medicine. It is this work 
 of Father Kircher's that is now most often re- 
 ferred to, and very deservedly so, because it is 
 one of the classics which represents a landmark 
 in knowledge for all time. It merits a place 
 beside such books as Harvey on the Circulation 
 of Blood, or even Vesalius on Human Anat- 
 
128 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 omy. As we have seen, it is now quoted from 
 by our best recent authorities who attempt seri- 
 ously to trace the history of the microbic theory 
 of disease, and its conclusions are the result of 
 logical processes and not the mere chance light- 
 ing upon truth of a mind that had the theories of 
 the time before it. In it Father Kircher's genius 
 is best exhibited. It has the faults of his too 
 ready credibility; and his desire to discuss all 
 possible phases of the question, even those which 
 are now manifestly absurd, has led him into what 
 prove to be useless digressions. But on the whole 
 it represents very well the first great example of 
 the application of the principle of inductive 
 science to modern medicine. All the known facts 
 and observations are collected and discussed, and 
 then the conclusions are suggested. 
 
 It is very interesting to trace the development 
 of Father Kircher's ideas with regard to the 
 origin, causation, and communication of disease, 
 because in many points he so clearly anticipates 
 medical knowledge that has only come to be defi- 
 nitely accepted in very recent times. It has often 
 been pointed out that Sir Robert Boyle declared 
 that the processes of fermentation and those 
 which brought about infectious disease, were 
 probably of similar nature, and that the scientist 
 who solved the problem of the cause of fermenta- 
 tion would throw great light on the origin of 
 these diseases. This prophetic remark was abso- 
 lutely verified when Pasteur, a chemist who had 
 solved the problem of fermentation, also solved 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. : SCIENTIST 1 29 
 
 the weightier questions connected with human 
 diseases. Before even Boyle, however, Father 
 Kircher had expressed his opinion that disease 
 processes were similar to those of putrefaction. 
 He considered that putrefaction was due to the 
 presence of certain corpuscula, as he called them, 
 and these he said were also probably active in the 
 causation of infectious disease. 
 
 He was not sure whether or not these corpus- 
 cula were living, in the sense that they, could 
 multiply of themselves. He considered, however, 
 that this was very probable. As to their distri- 
 bution, he is especially happy in his anticipations 
 of modern medical progress. While he consid- 
 ered it very possible that they were carried 
 through the air, he gives it as his deliberate 
 opinion that living things were the most frequent 
 agents for the distribution of the corpuscles of 
 disease. He is sure that they are carried by flies, 
 for instance, and that they may be inoculated by 
 the stings of such insects as fleas or mosquitoes. 
 He even gives some examples that he knew of in 
 which this was demonstrated. Still more strik- 
 ing is his insistence on the fact that such a con- 
 tagious disease as pest may be carried by cats and 
 dogs and other domestic animals. The cat seemed 
 to him to be associated with special danger in this 
 matter, and he gives an example of a nunnery 
 which had carefully protected itself against pos- 
 sible infection, but had allowed a cat to come in, 
 with the result that some cases of the disease de- 
 veloped. 
 
I30 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 An interesting bit of discussion is to be found 
 in the chapter in which Father Kircher takes up 
 the consideration of the problem whether infec- 
 tious disease can ever be produced by the imag- 
 ination. He is speaking particularly of the pest, 
 but there is more than a suspicion that under the 
 name pest came at times of epidemics many of 
 our modern contagious diseases. Father Kircher 
 says that there is no doubt that worry plays an 
 important role in predisposing persons to take the 
 disease. He does not consider, however, that it 
 can originate of itself, or be engendered in the 
 person without contact with some previous case 
 of pest. With regard to the question of predis- 
 position he is very modern. He points out that 
 many persons do not take the disease, because 
 evidently of some protective quality which they 
 possess. He is sure, too, that the best possible 
 protection comes from keeping in good, general 
 health. 
 
 A curious suggestion is that with regard to the 
 grave-diggers and undertakers. It has often 
 been noted in Italy, so Father Kircher asserts, 
 that these individuals as a rule did not succumb to 
 the disease, notwithstanding their extreme expo- 
 sure, when the majority of the population were 
 suffering from it. Toward the end of the epi- 
 demic, however, at the time when the towns- 
 people were beginning to rejoice over its prac- 
 tical disappearance, it was not unusual to have 
 these caretakers of the dead brought down with 
 the disease — often, too, in fatal form. Father 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. I SCIENTIST I3I 
 
 Kircher considers that only strong and healthy 
 individuals would take up such an occupation. 
 That the satisfaction of accomplishing a large 
 amount of work and making money kept them in 
 good health. Later on, however, as the result of 
 overwork during the time of the epidemic and 
 also of discouragement because they saw the end 
 of prosperous times for them, they became predis- 
 posed to the disease and then fell victims. 
 
 With regard to the prevention of the pest in 
 individual cases, Father Kircher has some very 
 sensible remarks. He says that physicians as a 
 rule depend on certain medicinal protectives or 
 on amulets which they carry. The amulets he 
 considers to be merely superstitious. The sweet- 
 smelling substances that are sometimes employed 
 are probably without any preventive action. Cer- 
 tain physicians employed a prophylactic remedy 
 made up of very many substances. This is what 
 in modern days we would be apt to call a " gun- 
 shot prescription." It contained so many ingre- 
 dients that it was hoped that some one of them 
 would hit the right spot and prove effective. 
 Father Kircher has another name for it. We do 
 not know whether it is original with him, but in 
 any case it is worth while remembering. He 
 calls it a " calendar prescription," because when 
 written it resembled a list of the days of the 
 month. 
 
 His opinion of this " calendar prescription " is 
 not very high. It seems to him that if one ingre- 
 dient did good, most of the others would be 
 
132 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 almost as sure to do harm. The main factor in 
 prophylaxis to his mind was to keep in normal 
 health, and this seemed not quite compatible with 
 frequent recourse to a prescription containing so 
 many drugs that were almost sure to have no 
 good effect and might have an ill effect. It is all 
 the more interesting to find these common-sense 
 views because ordinarily Father Kircher is set 
 down as one who accepted most of the traditions 
 of his time without inquiring very deeply into 
 their origin or truth, simply reporting them out 
 of the fulness of his rather pedantic information. 
 In most cases it will be found, however, that, like 
 Herodotus, reporting the curious things that had 
 been told him in his travels, he is very careful to 
 state what are his own opinions and what he 
 owes to others and gives place to, though without 
 attaching much credence to them. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that his great con- 
 temporaries, Von Helmont and Paracelsus, were 
 not free from many of the curious scientific super- 
 stitions of their time, though they had, like him, 
 in many respects the true scientific spirit. Von 
 Helmont, for instance, was a firm believer in the 
 doctrine of spontaneous generation, and even 
 went so far as to consider that it had its appli- 
 cation to animals of rather high order. For in- 
 stance, one of his works contains a rather fam- 
 ous prescription to bring about the spontaneous 
 generation of mice. What was needed was a jar 
 of meal kept in a dark corner covered by some 
 soiled linen. After three weeks these elements 
 
FATHER KIRCHER, S.J. : SCIENTIST 1 33 
 
 would be found to have bred mice. Too much 
 must not be expected, then, of Kircher in the 
 matter of crediting supposedly scientific tradi- 
 tions. 
 
 It may seem surprising that Father Kircher's 
 book did not produce a greater impression upon 
 the medical research work and teaching of the 
 day and lead to an earlier development of mic- 
 robology. Unfortunately, however, the instru- 
 ments of precision necessary for such a study 
 were not then at hand, and the gradual loss of 
 prestige of the book is therefore readily to be 
 understood. The explanation of this delay in the 
 development of science is very well put by Crook- 
 shank, who is the professor of comparative path- 
 ology and bacteriology at King's College, Lon- 
 don, and one of the acknowledged authorities on 
 these subjects in the medical world. Professor 
 Crookshank says, at the beginning of the first 
 chapter of his text-book on bacteriology, in which 
 he traces the origin of the science, that the first 
 attempt to demonstrate the existence of the con- 
 tagium vivum dates back almost to the discovery 
 of the microscope x : — 
 
 Athanasius Kircher nearly two and a half centuries 
 ago expressed his belief that there were definite micro- 
 organisms to which diseases were attributable. The 
 microscope had revealed that all decomposing sub- 
 
 1 A Text-Book of Bacteriology. Including the Eti- 
 ology and Prevention of Infectious Diseases. By Edgar 
 M. Crookshank. Fourth Edition. London, 1896. 
 
134 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 stances swarmed with countless micro-organisms which 
 were invisible to the naked eye, and Kircher sought for 
 similar organisms in disease, which he considered might 
 be due to their agency. The microscopes which he de- 
 scribes obviously could not admit of the possibility of 
 studying or even detecting the micro-organisms which 
 are now known to be associated with certain diseases ; 
 and it is not surprising that his teaching did not at the 
 time gain much attention. They were destined, how- 
 ever, to receive a great impetus from the discoveries 
 which emanated not long after from the father of 
 microscopy, Leeuwenhoek. 
 
 This reference to Kircher's work, however, 
 shows that more cordial appreciation of his scien- 
 tific genius has come in our day, and it seems not 
 unlikely that in the progress *of more accurate 
 and detailed knowledge of scientific origins his 
 reputation will grow as it deserves. With that 
 doubtless will come a better understanding of the 
 true attitude of the scholars of the time — so many 
 of whom were churchmen — to so-called physical 
 science in contradistinction to philosophy, in 
 which of course they had always been profoundly 
 interested. The work done by Kircher could 
 never have been accomplished but for the sym- 
 pathetic interest of those who are falsely sup- 
 posed to have been bitterly opposed to all prog- 
 ress in the natural sciences, but whose opposition 
 was really limited to theoretic phases of scien- 
 tific inquiry that threatened, as has scientific 
 theory so often since, to prove directly contra- 
 dictory to revealed truth. 
 
VI. 
 
 BISHOP STENSEN: ANATOMIST 
 AND FATHER OF GEOLOGY. 
 
God makes sages and saints that 
 they may be fountain-heads of 
 wisdom and virtue for all who yearn 
 and aspire: and whoever has supe- 
 rior knowledge or ability is thereby 
 committed to more effectual and un- 
 selfish service of his fellow-men. If 
 the love of fame be but an infirmity 
 of noble souls, the craving of profes- 
 sional reputation is but conceit and 
 vanity. To be of help, and to be of 
 help not merely to animals, but to 
 immortal, pure, loving spirits — this 
 is the noblest earthly fate. — Bishop 
 Spalding: The Physician s Calling 
 and Education. 
 
NICOLAUS STENONIS 
 
VI. 
 
 BISHOP STENSEN, ANATOMIST AND FATHER 
 OF GEOLOGY. 
 
 IN the sketch of the life of Father Athanasius 
 Kircher, the distinguished Jesuit scientist, 
 mathematician, and Orientalist, I called attention 
 to the fact that, at the very time when Galileo 
 was tried and condemned at Rome, because of 
 his abuse of Scripture for the demonstration of 
 scientific thesis, a condemnation which has been 
 often since proclaimed to be due to the Church's 
 intolerant opposition to science, the ecclesiastical 
 authorities at Rome invited Father Kircher, who 
 was at that time teaching mathematics in Ger- 
 many, to come to Rome, and during the next half- 
 century encouraged him in every way in the cul- 
 tivation of all the physical sciences of the times. 
 It was to popes and cardinals, as well as to in- 
 fluential members of his own order of the Jesuits, 
 that Father Kircher owed his opportunities for 
 the foundation of a complete and magnificent 
 museum, illustrating many phases of natural 
 science — -the first of its kind in the world, and 
 which yet continues to be one of the noteworthy 
 collections. 
 
 During the decade in which the condemnation 
 of Galileo and the invitation of Father Kircher 
 to Rome took place, there was born, at Copen- 
 
 137 
 
I38 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 hagen, a man whose career of distinction in 
 science was to prove even more effectively than 
 that of Kircher, if possible, that there was no 
 opposition in ecclesiastical circles in Italy, dur- 
 ing this century, to the development of natural 
 science even in departments in respect to which 
 the Church has, over and over again, been said to 
 be specially intolerant. This scientist was Nich- 
 olas Stensen, the discoverer of the duct of the 
 parotid gland, which conducts saliva into the 
 mouth, and the founder, in the truest sense of the 
 word, of the modern science of geology. Sten- 
 sen's discovery of the duct which has since borne 
 his name was due to no mere accident; for he 
 was one of the really great anatomists of 
 all time, and one distinguished particularly for 
 his powers of original observation and investiga- 
 tion. To have the two distinctions, then, of a 
 leader in anatomy and a founder in geology, 
 stamps him as one of the supreme scientific 
 geniuses of all time, a man not only of a fruit- 
 fully inquiring disposition of mind, but also one 
 who possessed a very definite realization of how 
 important for the cause of scientific truth is the 
 necessity of testing all ideas with regard to 
 things physical, by actual observations of nature 
 and by drawing conclusions not wider than the 
 observed facts. 
 
 Notwithstanding this characteristically scientific 
 temper of mind, which, according to most mod- 
 ern ideas, at least, would seem to be sure to lead 
 him away from religious truth, Stensen at the 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 139 
 
 very height of his career as a scientist, while 
 studying anatomy and geology in Italy, became 
 a convert from Lutheranism, in which he had 
 been born, to Catholicity, and thereafter made it 
 one of the prime objects of his life to bring as 
 many others as possible of the separated breth- 
 ren into the fold of the Church. When he ac- 
 cepted the professorship of anatomy at the Uni- 
 versity of Copenhagen, it was with the definite 
 idea that he might be able to use the influence of 
 his position to make people realize how much of 
 religious truth there was in the old Church from 
 which they had been separated in the preceding 
 century. After a time, however, his zeal led him 
 to resign his position, and ask to be made a 
 priest, in order that he might be able more effec- 
 tively to fulfil what he now considered the main 
 purpose of his life, the winning of souls to the 
 Church. As, since his conversion, he had given 
 every evidence of the most sincere piety and 
 humble simplicity, his desires were granted. His 
 book on geology, however, was partly written 
 during the very time when he was preparing for 
 sacred orders, and was warmly welcomed by all 
 his Catholic friends. After spending some time 
 as a missionary, and attracting a great deal of 
 attention by his devout life and by the many 
 friends and converts he succeeded in making, the 
 recently converted Duke of Hanover asked that 
 the zealous Danish convert should be made bishop 
 of his capital city. This request was imme- 
 diately granted, and Stensen spent several years 
 
I40 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 in the hardest missionary labor in his new field. 
 As a matter of fact, his labors proved too much 
 for his rather delicate constitution, and he died at 
 the comparatively early age of forty-eight. The 
 visitor to the University of Copenhagen marvels 
 to find among the portraits of her professors of 
 anatomy one in the robes of a Roman Catholic 
 bishop. This is Stensen. In 1881, when the 
 International Geographical Congress met at 
 Bologna, it adjourned at the end of the session to 
 Florence to unveil a bust of Stensen, over his 
 tomb there. Here evidently is a man whose life 
 is well worth studying, because of all that it 
 means for the history of his time. 
 
 Nicholas Stensen — or, as he is often called, 
 Steno, because this is the Latin form of his name, 
 and Latin was practically exclusively used, dur- 
 ing his age, in scientific circles all over Europe — 
 was born 20 January, 1638, in Copenhagen. His 
 father died while he was comparatively young, 
 and his mother married again, both her husbands 
 being goldsmiths in high repute for their skill, 
 and both of them in rather well-to-do circum- 
 stances. His early education was obtained at 
 Copenhagen, and the results displayed in his 
 attainments show how well it must have been 
 conducted. Later in life he spoke and wrote 
 Latin very fluently and had, besides, a very thor- 
 ough knowledge of Greek and of Hebrew. Of 
 the modern languages, German, French, Italian, 
 and Low Dutch he knew very well, mainly from 
 residence in the various countries in which they 
 
BISHOP STENSEN : ANATOMIST I4I 
 
 are spoken. A more unusual attainment at that 
 time, and one showing the ardor of his thirst for 
 knowledge, was an acquaintance with English. 
 In early life he was especially fond of mathe- 
 matics and, indeed, it was almost by accident that 
 this did not become his chosen field of educa- 
 tional development. 
 
 At eighteen he became a student of the Uni- 
 versity of Copenhagen, and after some prelimi- 
 nary studies in philosophy and philology devoted 
 himself mainly to medicine. At this time the 
 Danish University was especially distinguished 
 for its work in anatomy. The famous family of 
 Bartholini, who had for several generations been 
 teaching there, had proved a copious source of 
 inspiration for the students in their department, 
 and as a consequence original investigation of a 
 high order, with enthusiasm for the development 
 of anatomical science, had become the rule. The 
 external situation was not favorable to learning, 
 for Denmark was engaged in harassing and 
 costly wars during a considerable portion of the 
 seventeenth century ; yet the work accomplished 
 here was, undoubtedly, some of the best in 
 Europe. Young Stensen had the advantage of 
 having Thomas Bartholini as his preceptor, and 
 soon, because of his enthusiasm for science, as 
 friend and father. 
 
 Stensen had been at the University scarcely 
 two years when the city of Copenhagen was be- 
 sieged by the Swedes. Professor Lutz, of the 
 University of St. Louis, who has recently written 
 
142 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 an article on Stensen, which appeared in the 
 Medical Library and Historical Journal for July, 
 1904, says of this period: 
 
 A regiment of students numbering two hundred and 
 sixty-six, called " the black coats " on account of their 
 dark clothes, was formed for the defence of the city; 
 upon its roster we find the name of young Steno. Dur- 
 ing the day they were at work mending the ramparts, 
 and the nights were spent in repelling the attacks of the 
 enemy. In the course of this long siege, the city was 
 compelled to cope with a more formidable enemy than 
 the Swedes — famine with all its horrors — before relief 
 came in the shape of provisions and reinforcements 
 furnished by the Dutch fleet. Throughout these tur- 
 bulent days the student soldiers rendered valuable 
 services to their country, and though it be true that 
 " inter arma silent musae " — " the war gods do not 
 favor the muses " — it appears nevertheless that Steno 
 attended the lectures and dissections which were con- 
 ducted by the teachers in the intervals when the stu- 
 dents were not on duty. 
 
 After some three years spent at the University 
 of Copenhagen, Stensen, as was the custom of 
 the times, went to pursue his post-graduate 
 studies in a foreign university. Bartholini fur- 
 nished him with a letter of recommendation to 
 Professor Blasius, who was teaching anatomy at 
 Amsterdam in Holland. Amsterdam had be- 
 come famous during the seventeenth century for 
 the very practical character of its anatomical 
 teaching. As the result of the cordial commen- 
 dation of Bartholini, Stensen became an inmate 
 of the house of Professor Blasius, and was given 
 
BISHOP STENSEN : ANATOMIST I43 
 
 special opportunities to pursue his anatomical 
 studies for himself. He had been but a very- 
 short time at Amsterdam, when he made the dis- 
 covery to which his name has ever since been 
 attached, that of the duct of the parotid gland. 
 Stensen's discovery was made while he was dis- 
 secting the head of a sheep. He found shortly 
 afterwards, however, that the canal could be 
 demonstrated to exist in the dog, though it was 
 not so large a structure. Blasius seems to have 
 been rather annoyed at the fact that a student, 
 just beginning work with him, should make so 
 important a discovery, and wished to claim the 
 honor of it for himself. There is no doubt, how- 
 ever, now, notwithstanding the discussion over 
 the priority of the discovery which took place at 
 the time, that Stensen was the first to make this 
 important observation. 
 
 Not long before, Wharton, an English observer, 
 had demonstrated the existence of a canal lead- 
 ing from the submaxillary gland into the mouth. 
 This might have been expected to lead to the dis- 
 covery of other glandular ducts, but so far had 
 not. As a matter of fact, the function of the 
 parotid gland was not well understood at this 
 time. During the discussion as to priority of 
 discovery, Steno pointed out one fact which he 
 very properly considers as the most conclusive 
 proof that Blasius did not discover the duct of 
 the gland. He says : " Blasius shows plainly in 
 his treatise ' De Medicina Generali ' that he has 
 never sought for the duct, for he does not assign 
 
144 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 to it either the proper point of beginning or end- 
 ing, and assigns to the parotid gland itself so un- 
 worthy a function as that of furnishing warmth 
 to the ear, so that if I were not perfectly sure 
 of having once shown him the duct myself, I 
 should be tempted to say that he had never 
 seen it." 
 
 Bartholini settled the controversy, and at the 
 same time removed any discouragement that 
 might have arisen in his young pupil's mind, by 
 writing to him: — 
 
 Your assiduity in investigating the secrets of the 
 human body, as well as your fortunate discoveries, are 
 highly praised by the learned of your country. The 
 fatherland congratulates itself upon such a citizen, I 
 upon such a pupil, through whose efforts anatomy 
 makes daily progress, and our lympathic vessels are 
 traced out more and more. You divide honors with 
 Wharton, since you have added to his internal duct 
 an external one, and have thereby discovered the 
 sources of the saliva concerning which many have 
 hitherto dreamed much, but which no one has (permit 
 the expression) pointed out with the finger. Con- 
 tinue, my Steno, to follow the path to immortal glory 
 which true anatomy holds out to you. 
 
 Under the stimulus of such encouragement, it 
 is no wonder that Stensen continued his original 
 work with eminent success. He published an ex- 
 tensive article on the glands of the eye and the 
 vessels of the nose. 
 
 Bartholini wrote to him again : " Your fame 
 is growing from day to day, for your pen* and 
 your sharp eye know no rest." Later he wrote 
 
BISHOP STENSEN : ANATOMIST I45 
 
 again : " You may count upon the favor of the 
 king as well as upon the applause of the learned." 
 After three years at the University of Amster- 
 dam, Steno returned to Copenhagen, where he 
 published his "Anatomical Observations Con- 
 cerning the Muscles and Glands." It was in this 
 book that he announced his persuasion that the 
 heart was a muscle. As he said himself, " the 
 heart has been considered the seat of natural 
 warmth, the throne of the soul; but if you ex- 
 amine it more closely, it turns out to be nothing 
 but a muscle. The men of the past would not 
 have been so grossly mistaken with regard to it, 
 had they not preferred their imaginary theories 
 to the results of the simple observation of 
 nature." It is easy to understand that this ob- 
 servation created a very great sensation. It had 
 much to do with overthrowing certain theoretic 
 systems of medicine, and nearly a century later 
 the distinguished physiologist, Haller, did not 
 hesitate to proclaim the volume in which it occurs, 
 as a " golden book." 
 
 Stensen's studies in anatomy stamp him as an 
 original genius of a high order, and this is all 
 the more remarkable because his career occurs 
 just in those years when there were distinguished 
 discoverers in anatomy in every country in 
 Europe. When Stensen began his work in anat- 
 omy, Harvey was still alive. The elder Bartho- 
 lini, the first who ever established an anatomical 
 museum, was another of his contemporaries. 
 Among the names of distinguished anatomists 
 
I46 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 with whom Stensen was brought intimately in 
 contact during the course of his studies in Hol- 
 land, France and Italy are those of Swammer- 
 dam, Van Home, and Malpighi. There is no 
 doubt that his intercourse with such men sharp- 
 ened his own intellectual activity, and increased 
 his enthusiasm for original investigation in con- 
 tradistinction to the mere accumulation of infor- 
 mation. 
 
 His contemporaries, indeed, exhausted most of 
 the adjectives of the Latin language in trying to 
 express their appreciation of his acuity of ob- 
 servation. He was spoken of as oculatissimus — 
 that is, as being all eyes, sabtilissimus, acutissi- 
 mus, sagacissimus in his knowledge of the human 
 body, and as the most perspicacious anatomist of 
 the time. Leibnitz and Haller were in accord in 
 considering him one of the greatest of anatom- 
 ists. In later years this admiration for Stensen's 
 genius has not been less enthusiastically ex- 
 pressed. Haeser, in his " History of Medicine," 
 the third edition of which appeared at Jena in 
 1879, sa y s : "Among the greatest anatomists of 
 the seventeenth century belongs Nicholas Steno, 
 the most distinguished pupil of Thomas Bartho- 
 lini. Steno was rightly considered in his own 
 time as one of the greatest of anatomical discov- 
 erers. There is scarcely any part of the human 
 body the knowledge of which was not rendered 
 more complete by his investigations." 
 
 The most valuable discovery made by Stensen 
 was undoubtedly that the heart is a muscle. It 
 
BISHOP STENSEN I ANATOMIST I47 
 
 must not be forgotten that in his time, Harvey's 
 discovery of the circulation of the blood was not 
 yet generally accepted; indeed, there were many 
 who considered the theory (as they called it) of 
 the English investigator as one of the passing 
 fads of medicine. Two significant discoveries, 
 made after Harvey, served, however, to establish 
 the theory of the circulation of the blood on a 
 firm basis and to make it a definite medical doc- 
 trine. The most important of these was Mal- 
 pighi's discovery that the capillaries — that is, the 
 minute vessels at the end of the arterial tree on 
 the surface of the body and in various organs — 
 served as the direct connexion between the veins 
 and the arteries. This demonstrated just how 
 the blood passed from the arterial to the venous 
 system. Scarcely less important, however, for 
 the confirmation of Harvey's teaching was Sten- 
 sen's demonstration of the muscular character of 
 the tissue of the heart. 
 
 Some of his observations upon muscles are ex- 
 tremely interesting, and, though he made many 
 mistakes in explaining their function, he added 
 not a little to the anatomical and physiological 
 knowledge of the time in their regard. He seems 
 to have been one of the first to recognize the fact 
 that in the higher animals the heart may continue 
 to beat for a considerable time after the animal 
 is apparently dead ; and, indeed, that by irritation 
 of the removed heart, voluntary contractions may 
 be brought about which will continue spontan- 
 eously for some moments. 
 
I48 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 With regard to the objections made by some, 
 that such studies as these upon muscles could 
 scarcely be expected to produce any direct result 
 for the treatment of disease, or in the ordinary 
 practice of medicine, Stensen said in reply that it 
 is only on the basis of the anatomical, physio- 
 logical, and pathological observation that prog- 
 ress in medicine is to be looked for. In spite, 
 then, of the discouragement of the many, who 
 look always for immediate practical results, 
 Stensen continued his investigation, and even 
 proposed to make an extended study of the 
 mechanism of the muscular action. 
 
 In the meantime, however, there had gradually 
 been coming into his life another element which 
 was to prove more absorbing than even his zeal 
 for scientific discovery. It is this which consti- 
 tutes the essential index of the man's character 
 and has been sadly misunderstood by many of 
 his biographers. 
 
 Sir Michael Foster, of Cambridge, England, 
 in his " Lectures on the History of Physiology," 
 originally delivered as the Lane Lectures at 
 Cooper Medical College, San Francisco, said:— 
 
 While thus engaged, still working at physiology, Sten- 
 sen turned his versatile mind to other problems, as 
 well as to those of comparative anatomy, and especially 
 to those of the infant, indeed hardly as yet born, 
 science of geology. His work " De solido intra soli- 
 dum " is thought by geologists to be a brilliant effort 
 toward the beginning of their science. 
 
 In 1672 he returned for a while to his native city of 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 149 
 
 Copenhagen, but within two years he was back again 
 at Florence; and then there came to him, while as 
 yet a young man of some thirty-six summers, a sudden 
 and profound change in his life. 
 
 In his early days he had heard much, too much 
 perhaps, of the doctrines of Luther. Probably he 
 had been repelled by the austere devotion which ruled 
 the paternal roof. And, as his answer to Bossuet 
 shows, his university life and studies, his intercourse 
 with the active intellects of many lands, and his pas- 
 sion for inquiry into natural knowledge, had freed 
 him from passive obedience to dogma. He doubtless, 
 as did many others of his time, looked upon himself 
 as one of the enlightened, as one raised above the 
 barren theological questions which were moving the 
 minds of lesser men. 
 
 Yet it was out of this sceptical state of mind, 
 that life in Italy and intimate contact with eccle- 
 siastics and religious, so often said to be likely 
 not to have any such effect, brought this acute 
 scientific mind into the Catholic Church. Nor 
 did he become merely a formal adherent, but an 
 ardent believer, and then an enthusiastic prose- 
 lytizer. One American writer of a history of 
 medicine, in his utter failure to comprehend or 
 sympathize with the change that came over Sten- 
 sen, speaks of him as having become at the end 
 of his life a mere " peripatetic converter of here- 
 tics. " This phase of Stensen's life has, however, 
 as ample significance as any that preceded it. 
 
 Steno's expectations of the professorship of 
 anatomy at Copenhagen were disappointed, but 
 the appointment went to Jacobson, whose work 
 indeed is scarcely less distinguished than that of 
 
150 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 his unsuccessful rival. The next few years Sten- 
 sen passed in Paris, where he was assiduous in 
 making dissections, and where he attracted much 
 attention ; and then, somewhat later, in Italy ; in 
 1665 an< ^ x 666 he was in Rome. Thence he went 
 to Florence, in order to perfect himself in Italian. 
 The next few years he spent in this city, having 
 received the appointment of body physician to 
 the Grand Duke, as well as an appointment of 
 visiting physician, as we would call it now, to 
 the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. 
 
 It was while at Florence that the whole cur- 
 rent of Stensen's life was changed by his conver- 
 sion to Catholicity. His position as physician to 
 the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova brought him 
 frequently into the apothecary shop attached to 
 the hospital. As a result he came to know very 
 well the religious in charge of the department, 
 Sister Maria Flavia, the daughter of a well- 
 known Tuscan family. At this time she had 
 been for some thirty-five years a nun. Before 
 long she learned that the distinguished young 
 physician, at this time scarcely thirty years of 
 age, who was such a pleasant gentleman in all 
 his ways, was a Lutheran. She began, as she 
 told afterwards, first by prayer, and then by 
 friendly suggestions, to attempt to win him to the 
 Catholic Church. Stensen, who seems already 
 to have been well-disposed toward the Church, 
 and who had always been known for a wonder- 
 ful purity of heart and simplicity of character, 
 listened very willingly to the naive words of the 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 151 
 
 old religious, who might very well have been his 
 mother. 
 
 Many years later, by the command of her con- 
 fessor, the good Sister related the detailed story 
 of his conversion. She began very simply by 
 telling him one day that if he did not accept the 
 true Catholic faith, he would surely go to hell. 
 He listened to this without any impatience, and 
 she said it a number of other times, half jokingly 
 perhaps, but much more than half in earnest. 
 As he listened so kindly, she said to him one day 
 that he must pray every day to God to let him 
 know the truth. This he promised to do and, as 
 she found out from his servant (what is it these 
 nuns do not find out?) he did pray every eve- 
 ning. One day, while he was in the apothecary 
 shop, the Angelus bell rang, and she asked him 
 to say the Angelus. He was perfectly willing to 
 say the first part of the Hail Mary, but he did 
 not want to say the second part, as he did not 
 believe in the invocation of the Blessed Virgin 
 and the saints. Then she asked him to visit the 
 Church of the Blessed Virgin, the Santissima 
 Nunziata, which he did. After this she sug- 
 gested to him that he should abstain from meat 
 on Fridays and Saturdays, which he promised to 
 do, and which the good nun found out once more 
 from his servant, he actually did do. And then 
 the religious thought it was time to suggest that 
 he should consult a clergyman, and his conver- 
 sion was not long delayed. 
 
 Young Stensen seems to have been the object 
 
152 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 of solicitude on the part of a number of the 
 good, elderly women with whom he was brought 
 in contact. He discussed with Signora Arnolfini 
 the great difficulty he had in believeing the mys- 
 tery of the Eucharist. Another good woman, the 
 Signora Lavinia Felice, seeing how interested he 
 was in things Catholic, succeeded in bringing him 
 to the notice of a prominent Jesuit in Florence. 
 As his friend, Sister Maria Flavia, had recom- 
 mended the same Father to him, he followed the 
 advice all the more readily, and it was not long 
 before his last doubts were solved. 
 
 It was after his conversion that Stensen re- 
 ceived his invitation to become the professor of 
 anatomy at the University of Copenhagen. 
 Much as he had become attached to Florence, the 
 thought of returning to his native city was sweet ; 
 and then besides he hoped that he might be able 
 to influence his countrymen in their views toward 
 the Catholic Church. It was not long, however, 
 before the bigotry of his compatriots made life 
 so unpleasant for him in Copenhagen that he re- 
 signed his position and returned to Italy. Vari- 
 ous official posts in Florence were open for him, 
 but now he had resolved to devote himself to the 
 service of the Church, and so he became a priest. 
 His contemporary, the Cardinal Archbishop of 
 Florence, said with regard to him : "Already as 
 a member of a Protestant sect he had lived a life 
 of innocence and had practised all the moral vir- 
 tues. After his conversion he had marked out 
 for himself so severe a method of life and had 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 153 
 
 remained so true to it that in a very short time 
 he reached a high degree of perfection." The 
 Archbishop does not hesitate to say that he had 
 become a man of constant union with God and 
 entirely dead to himself. There was very little 
 hesitation, then, in accepting him as a candidate 
 for the priesthood, and as his knowledge of the- 
 ology was very thorough, most of the delay in 
 raising him to that dignity came from his own 
 humility and his desire to prepare himself prop- 
 erly for the privilege. He made the exercises of 
 St. Ignatius as part of his preparation, and after 
 his ordination it was a source of remark with 
 how much devotion he said his first and all suc- 
 ceeding Masses. It was not long before the 
 piety of Stensen's life attracted great attention. 
 At this time he was in frequent communication 
 with such men as Spinoza and Leibnitz, the dis- 
 tinguished philosophers. It is curious to think 
 of the ardent mystic, the pantheistic philosopher, 
 and the speculative scientist, so different in char- 
 acter, having many interests in common. 
 
 It was during these years in Italy that Stensen 
 did what must be considered, undoubtedly, his 
 most important work, even more important, if 
 possible, than his anatomical discoveries. This 
 was his foundation of the science of geology. As 
 has been well said in a prominent text-book of 
 geology, his book on this subject sets him in that 
 group of men who as prophets of science often 
 run far ahead of their times to point out the path 
 which later centuries will follow in the road of 
 
154 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 knowledge. It is rather surprising to find that 
 the seventeenth century must enjoy the privilege 
 of being considered the cradle of geological 
 knowledge. There is no doubt, however, that 
 the great principles of the science were laid down 
 in Stensen's little book, which he intended only 
 to be an introduction to a more extensive work, 
 but the latter was unfortunately never completed, 
 nor, indeed, so far as we are able to decide now, 
 ever seriously begun. 
 
 One of the basic principles of the science of 
 geology Stensen taught as follows : " If a given 
 body of definite form, produced according to the 
 laws of nature, be carefully examined, it will 
 show in itself the place and manner of its origin." 
 This principle he showed would apply so com- 
 prehensively that the existence of many things, 
 hitherto apparently inexplicable, became rather 
 easy of solution. It must not be forgotten that 
 before this time two explanations for the exist- 
 ence of peculiar bodies, or of ordinary bodies, in 
 peculiar places, had been offered. According to 
 one school of thought, the fossils found deep in 
 the earth, or sometimes in the midst of rocks, 
 had been created there. It was as if the crea- 
 tive force had run beyond the ordinary bounds 
 of nature and had produced certain things, ordi- 
 narily associated with life, even in the midst of 
 dead matter. The other explanation suggested 
 was that the flood had in its work of destruction 
 upon earth caused many anomalous displacements 
 of living things, and had buried some of the ani- 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 155 
 
 mals under such circumstances that later they 
 were found even beneath rocks, or deep down in 
 the earth, far beyond where the animals could be 
 supposed to have penetrated by any ordinary 
 means during life. 
 
 Stensen had observed very faithfully the vari- 
 ous strata that are to be found wherever special 
 appearances of the earth's surface were exposed, 
 or wherever deep excavations were made. His 
 explanation of how these various strata are 
 formed will serve to show, perhaps better than 
 anything else, how far advanced he was in his 
 realization of ideas that are supposed to belong 
 only to modern geology. He said : " The pow- 
 dery layers of the earth's surface must necessar- 
 ily at some time have been held in suspension in 
 water, from which they were precipitated by their 
 own weight.. The movement of the fluid scat- 
 tered the precipitate here and there and gave to 
 it a level surface." 
 
 " Bodies of considerable circumference," Sten- 
 sen continues, " which are found in the various 
 layers of the earth, followed the laws of gravity 
 as regards their position and their relations to 
 one another. The powdery material of the 
 earth's strata took on so completely the form of 
 the bodies which it surrounded that even the 
 smallest apertures became filled up and the pow- 
 dery layer fitted accurately to the surface of the 
 object and even took something of its polish." 
 
 With regard to the composition of the various 
 strata of the earth, the father of geology con- 
 
156 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 sidered that if in a layer of rock all the portions 
 are of the same kind there is no reason to deny 
 that such a layer came into existence at the time 
 of creation, when the whole surface of the earth 
 was covered with fluid. If, however, in any one 
 stratum portions of another stratum are found, 
 or if the remains of plants or animals occur, there 
 is no doubt that such a stratum had not its origin 
 at the time of creation, but came into existence 
 later. 
 
 If there is to be found in a stratum traces of 
 sea salt, or the remains of sea animals, or por- 
 tions of vessels, or such like objects, which are 
 only to be encountered at the bottom of the sea, 
 then it must be considered that this portion of 
 the earth's surface once was below the sea level, 
 though it may happen that this occurred only by 
 the accident of a flood of some kind. The great 
 distance from the sea, or other body of water, at 
 the present time, may be due to the sinking of 
 the water level in the neighborhood, or by the 
 rising up of a mountain from some internal ter- 
 restrial cause in the interval of time. He con- 
 tinues : — 
 
 If one finds in any layer remains of branches of 
 trees, or herbs, then it is only right to conclude that 
 these objects were brought together because of flood 
 or of some such condition in the place where they 
 are now found. If in a layer coal and ashes and 
 burnt clay or other scorched bodies are found, then 
 it seems sure that some place in the neighborhood of 
 a watercourse a fire took place, and this is all the 
 more sure when the whole layer consists of ashes and 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 157 
 
 coal. Whenever in the same place the material of 
 which all the layers is composed is the same, there 
 seems to be no doubt that the fluid to which the 
 stratum owes its origin did not at different times ob- 
 tain different material for its building purposes. 
 
 In respect to the mountains and their forma- 
 tion, Stensen said very definitely: — 
 
 All the mountains which we see now have not ex- 
 isted from the beginning of things. Mountains do not, 
 however, grow as do plants. The stones of which 
 mountains are composed have only a certain analogy 
 with the bones of animals, but have no similarity in 
 structure or in origin, nor have they the same func- 
 tion and purpose. Mountain ranges, or chains of 
 mountains as some prefer to call them, do not always 
 run in certain directions, though this has sometimes 
 been claimed. Such claims correspond neither to rea- 
 son nor to observation. Mountains may be very 
 much disturbed in the course of years. Mountain 
 peaks rise and fall somewhat. Chasms open and shut 
 here and there in them, and though there are those 
 who pretend that it is only the credulous who will 
 accept the stories of such happenings, there is no 
 doubt that they have been established on trustworthy 
 evidence. 
 
 In the course of his observations in Italy, 
 Stensen had seen many mussel shells, which had 
 been gathered from various layers of the earth's 
 surface. With regard to the shells themselves, 
 he said that there could be no doubt that they 
 had come as the excretion of the mantle of the 
 mussel, and that the differences that could be 
 noted in them were in accordance with the vary- 
 ing forms of these animals. He pointed out, 
 however, that some of the mussel shells found in 
 
I58 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 strata of rock were really mussel shells in every 
 respect as regards the material of which they 
 were composed as well as their interior structure 
 and their external form, so that there could be 
 no possible question of their origin. On the other 
 hand, a certain number of the so-called mussel 
 shells were not composed of the ordinary mate- 
 rials of which such shells are usually made up ; 
 but had indeed only the external form of genuine 
 shells. Stensen considered, however, that even 
 these must be regarded as originating in real 
 mussel shells, the original substance having been 
 later on replaced by other material. He ex- 
 plained this replacement process in very much 
 the same way that we now suggest the explana- 
 tion of various processes of petrification. There 
 is no doubt that in this he went far beyond his 
 contemporaries, and pointed out very clearly 
 what was to be the teaching of generations long 
 after his own. 
 
 The same principles he applied to mussel shells, 
 Stensen considered must have their application 
 also to all other portions of animal bodies, teeth, 
 bones, whole skeletons, and even more perishable 
 animal materials that might be found buried in 
 the earth's strata. His treatment of the question 
 of the remains of plants was quite as satisfactory 
 as that of the animals. He distinguished be- 
 tween the impressions of plants, the petrification 
 of plants, the carbonization of plants, and then 
 dwelt somewhat on the tendency of certain min- 
 erals to form dendrites, that is, branching pro- 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 159 
 
 , cesses which look not unlike plants. He pointed 
 out how easy it is to be deceived by these ap- 
 pearances, and stated very clearly the distinction 
 between real plants and such simulated ones. 
 
 It will be scarcely necessary for us to apolo- 
 gize for having given so much space to Stensen's 
 work on geology. Many distinguished scientists, 
 however, have insisted that no greater advance 
 at the birth of a science was ever made than that 
 which Stensen accomplished in his geological 
 work. Hoffman says that after carefully study- 
 ing the work, he has come to the conclusion that 
 of the successors of Stensen, no student of the 
 mountains down to Werner's day had succeeded 
 in comprehending so many fruitful points of view 
 in geology. None of his great successors in 
 geology has succeeded in introducing so many 
 new ideas into the science as the first great ob- 
 server. For several centuries most of his suc- 
 cessors in geology remained far behind him in 
 creative genius, and so there is little progress 
 worth while noting in the knowledge of the 
 method of earth formation, until almost the be- 
 ginning of the nineteenth century, though his 
 little book was written in 1668 and 1669. 
 
 Leibnitz regretted very much that Stensen did 
 not complete his work on geology as he origin- 
 ally intended. Had he succeedeed in gathering 
 together all of his original observations, illus- 
 trated by the material he had collected, his work 
 would have had much greater effect. As it was, 
 the golden truth which he had expressed in such 
 
l60 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 few words, without being able always to state 
 just how he had come to his conclusions, was 
 only of avail to science in a limited way. Men 
 had to repeat his observations long years after- 
 wards in order to realize the truth of what he 
 had laid down. Leibnitz considered that it took 
 more than a century for geological science to 
 reach the point at which it had been left by 
 Steno's work, and which he had reached at a 
 single bound. There is scarcely a single modern 
 geologist interested at all in the history of the 
 science who has not paid a worthy tribute to 
 Steno's great basic discoveries in the science. It 
 was not a matter for surprise, then, that the In- 
 ternational Congress of Geologists which met at 
 Bologna in 1881 asembled at his tomb in Flor- 
 ence in order to do him honor, after the regular 
 sessions of the Congress had closed. They 
 erected to his memory a tablet with the follow- 
 ing scription : " Nicolae Stenonis imaginem 
 vides hospes quam aere collato docti amplius 
 mille ex universe terrarum orbe insculpendam 
 curarunt in memoriam ejus diei IV cal. Octobr. 
 an. MDCCCLXXXI quo geologi post conven- 
 tum Bononiae habitum praeside Joanne Capellinio 
 equite hue peregrinati sunt atque adstantibus 
 legatis flor Municipii et R. Instituti Altiorum 
 doctrinarum cineres viri inter geologos et ana- 
 tomicos praestantissimi in hujus templi hypogaeo 
 laurea corona honoris gratique animi ergo hones- 
 taverunt." * 
 
 1 You behold here, traveller, the bust of Nicholas 
 Steno as it was set up by more than a thousand scientists 
 
BISHOP STENSEN : ANATOMIST l6l 
 
 Stensen's work brought him in contact with 
 some of the distinguished men of the seventeenth 
 century, all of whom learned to appreciate his 
 breadth of intelligence and acuity of judgment. 
 We have already mentioned his epistolary rela- 
 tion with Spinoza, and have said something about 
 the controversy with Leibnitz, into' which, in spite 
 of his disinclination to controversy generally, he 
 was drawn by the circumstances of the time and 
 the solicitation of friends. Another great thinker 
 of the century with whom he was brought into 
 intimate relationship was Des Cartes, the distin- 
 guished philosopher. In fact, Des Cartes's sys- 
 tem of thought influenced Stensen not a little, 
 and he felt, when describing the function of 
 muscles in the human body, and especially when 
 he demonstrated that the heart was a muscle, that 
 the mechanical notions he was thus introducing 
 into anatomy were likely to prove confirmatory 
 of Des Cartes's philosophic speculations. Almost 
 more than any other, Stensen was the father of 
 many ideas that have since become common, with 
 regard to the physics of the human body and its 
 qualities as a machine. 
 
 With his breadth of view, from familiarity 
 
 from all over the world, as a memorial to him, on the 
 fourth of the Kalends of October, 1881. The geolo- 
 gists of the world, after their meeting in Bologna, 
 under the presidency of Count John Capellini, made 
 a pilgrimage to his tomb, and in the presence of the 
 chosen representatives of the municipality, and of the 
 learned professors of the University, honored the mor- 
 tal ashes of this man, illustrious among geologists and 
 anatomists. 
 
l62 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 with the progress of science generally in his time, 
 Steno's discussions of the reason for the lack of 
 exact knowledge and for the prevalence of error, 
 in spite of enthusiastic investigation, are worth 
 while appreciating. He considered that the rea- 
 son why so many portions of natural science are 
 still in doubt is that in the investigation of nat- 
 tural objects no careful distinction is made be- 
 tween what is known to a certainty and what is 
 known only with a certain amount of assurance. 
 He discusses the question of deductive and in- 
 ductive science, and considers that even those who 
 depend on experience will not infrequently be 
 found in error, because their conclusions are 
 wider than their premises, and because it only 
 too often happens that they admit principles as 
 true for which they have no sure evidence. 
 Stensen considered it important, therefore, not to 
 hurry on in the explanation of things, but, so far 
 as possible, to cling to old-time principles that 
 had been universally accepted, since nearly al- 
 ways these would be found to contain fruitful 
 germs of truth. 
 
 He was universally acknowledged as one of 
 the greatest original thinkers of his time, and his 
 conversion to the Church did much to dissipate 
 religious prejudices among those of German 
 nationality. His influence over distinguished 
 visitors who came to Florence, and who were 
 very glad to have the opportunity of making his 
 acquaintance, was such that not a few Northern 
 visitors became, like himself, converts to the 
 Church. 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 163 
 
 It was in the midst of this that the request of 
 the Duke of Hanover came that he should con- 
 sent to become the bishop of his capital city. It 
 was only after Stensen had been put under holy 
 obedience that he would consent to accept the 
 proffered dignity. His first thought was to dis- 
 tribute all his goods among the poor, and betake 
 himself even without shoes on his feet, on a 
 pedestrian journey to Rome. First, however, he 
 made a pilgrimage to Loretto, where he arrived 
 so overcome by the fatigue of the journey that 
 the clergyman who took care of him while there, 
 insisted on his accepting a pair of shoes from 
 him, though he could not prevail upon him to 
 travel in any other way than on foot. 
 
 His first action, after his consecration as 
 bishop, was to write a letter, sending his epis- 
 copal benediction to Sister Maria Flavia, to whom 
 he felt he owed the great privilege of his life. 
 His lasting sense of satisfaction and consolation 
 in his change of religion may be appreciated from 
 what is, perhaps, the most interesting personal 
 document that we have from Stensen's own hand, 
 in which, on the eighteenth anniversary of his 
 conversion, he writes to a friend to describe his 
 feelings. " To-morrow," he says, " I shall finish, 
 God willing, the eighteenth year of my happy life 
 as a member of the Church. I wish to acknowl- 
 edge once more my thankfulness for the part 
 which you took under God in my conversion. 
 As I hope to have the grace to be grateful to Him 
 forever, so I sigh for the opportunity to express 
 
164 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 my thank fulnes to you and your family. I can 
 feel that my own ingratitude toward God, my 
 slowness in His service, make me unworthy of 
 His graces ; but I hope that you who have helped 
 me to enter his service will not cease to pray, so 
 that I may obtain pardon for the past and grace 
 for the future, in order in some measure to repay 
 all the favors that have been conferred on me." 
 
 The distinguishing characteristic of his life as 
 a bishop was his insistence on poverty as the prin- 
 cipal element of his existence. He refused to 
 enter his diocese in state in the carriage which 
 the Duke offered to provide for him, but pro- 
 ceeded there on foot. No question of supposed 
 dignity could make him employ a number of ser- 
 vants, and his only retainers were converts made 
 by himself, who helped in the household and 
 whom he treated quite as equals. He became 
 engaged in one controversy on religious matters, 
 but said that he did not consider that converts 
 had ever been made by controversies. He com- 
 pared it, indeed, to the gladiatorial contests in 
 which the contestants had their heads completely 
 enveloped in armor, so as to prevent any possible 
 penetration of the weapons of an opponent. He 
 insisted especially that in religious controversies 
 the contending parties do not realize the signifi- 
 cance given to words by each other, and that 
 therefore no good can result. 
 
 After a time, Stensen did not find his work in 
 Hamburg very satisfactory, because it was typi- 
 cally a missionary country, and the Jesuit mis- 
 
bishop stensen: anatomist 165 
 
 sionaries who had been introduced were accom- 
 plishing all that could be hoped for. Accord- 
 ingly, when the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin 
 became a convert to the Catholic Church, and 
 asked that Stensen should be sent as a bishop 
 into his dukedom, the request was complied with. 
 Here, in the hardest kind of labor as a mission- 
 ary, and in the midst of poverty that was truly 
 apostolic, Stensen worked out the remaining 
 years of his life. At his death he was looked 
 upon as almost a saint. Notwithstanding his 
 close relationship with two reigning princes, he 
 did not leave enough personal effects to defray 
 the expenses of his funeral. Besides his bishop's 
 ring, and the very simple episcopal cross he wore, 
 he had nothing of any value except some relics 
 of St. Francis Xavier, St. Ignatius Loyola, and 
 St. Philip Neri, which he had prized above all 
 other treasures. 
 
 His missionary labors had not been marked by 
 any very striking success in the number of con- 
 verts made. In this his life would seem to have 
 been a bitter personal disappointment. He never 
 looked upon it as such, however, but continued 
 to be eminently cheerful and friendly until the 
 end. As a matter of fact, the influence of his 
 career was to be felt much more two centuries 
 after his death than during his lifetime. At the 
 present moment, his life is well known in north- 
 ern Germany, thanks to the biographic sketch 
 written by Father Plenkers for the Stimmen 
 aus Maria Laach, which has been very widely 
 
l66 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 circulated since its appearance in 1884. Some- 
 thing of the reaction among scientific minds in 
 Germany toward a healthier orthodoxy of feel- 
 ing, with regard to great religious questions, is 
 undoubtedly due to the spread of the knowledge 
 of the career of the great anatomist and geologist 
 who gave up his scientific work for the sake of 
 the spread of the higher truth. 
 
 After his death the Medici family asked for 
 and obtained the privilege of having his body 
 buried in San Lorenzo at Florence, with the 
 members of the princely Medici house. More 
 and more do visitors realize that the tablet over 
 his remains chronicles the death of a man who 
 was undoubtedly one of the world's great scien- 
 tists, and one of the most original thinkers of his 
 time, and that time a period greatly fertile in the 
 historv of science. 
 
VII. 
 
 ABBE HAUY, FATHER OF CRYS- 
 TALLOGRAPHY. 
 
THEY continue this day as they 
 were created, perfect in number 
 and measure and weight, and from 
 the ineffaceable characters impressed 
 on them we may learn that those 
 aspirations after accuracy in measure- 
 ment, truth in statement, and justice 
 in action, which we reckon among 
 our noblest attributes as men, are 
 ours because they are essential con- 
 stituents of the image of Him who in 
 the beginning created not only heaven 
 and earth, but the materials of 
 which heaven and earth consist. — 
 Clerk Maxwell On the Molecule, 
 "Nature," Vol. VIII. 1873. 
 
RENE JUST HAUY 
 
VII. 
 
 ABBE HAUY, 1 FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 
 
 MODERN learning is gradually losing some- 
 thing of the self-complacency that char- 
 acterized it in so constantly harboring the 
 thought that the most important discoveries in 
 physical science came in the nineteenth century. 
 A more general attention to critical history has 
 led to the realization that many of the primal 
 discoveries whose importance made the develop- 
 ment of modern science possible, came in earlier 
 centuries, though their full significance was not 
 then fully appreciated. The foundations of most 
 of our modern sciences were, indeed, laid in the 
 eighteenth century, but some of them came much 
 earlier. It is genius alone that is able to break 
 away from established traditions of knowledge, 
 and, stepping across the boundary into the un- 
 known, blaze a path along which it will be easy 
 for subsequent workers to follow. Only in re- 
 cent years has the due meed of appreciation for 
 these great pioneers become part of the precious 
 traditions of scientific knowledge. 
 
 We have seen that clergymen were great ori- 
 ginal investigators in science in the older times 
 and we shall find, though it may be a source of 
 
 1 Pronounced a-ue (Century Dictionary), nearly 
 represented by ah-we. 
 
 169 
 
170 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 astonishment to most people that even our mod- 
 ern science has had some supreme original work- 
 ers, during the last two centuries, in the ranks 
 of the Catholic clergy. 
 
 The eighteenth century was not behind the 
 seventeenth in original contributions made to 
 science by clergymen. About the middle of the 
 century, a Premonstratensian monk, Procopius 
 Dirwisch by name, of the little town of Prenditz 
 in Bohemia, demonstrated the identity of elec- 
 trical phenomena with lightning, thus anticipat- 
 ing the work of our own Franklin. Dirwisch 
 dared to set up a lightning-conductor, by which 
 during thunderstorms he obtained sparks from 
 clouds, and also learned to appreciate the danger 
 involved in this experiment. When, in 1751, he 
 printed his article on this subject, he pointed out 
 this danger. His warning, however, was not 
 always heeded, and at least one subsequent ex- 
 perimenter was struck dead by a charge of elec- 
 tricity. 
 
 Just at the junction of the last two centuries, 
 Father Piazzi enriched the realm of science by 
 one of the most important of modern discoveries 
 in astronomy. On the night of 31 December, 
 1800 — 1 January, 1801, he discovered the little 
 planet Ceres. This was the first of the asteroids, 
 so many more of which were to be revealed to 
 astronomical study during the next half-century. 
 Father Piazzi's discovery was made, not by 
 accident, but as the result of detailed astronom- 
 ical work of the most painstaking character. Pie 
 
ABBE HAUY : FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY I/I 
 
 had set out to make a map of the heavens, and to 
 determine and locate the absolute position of all 
 the visible stars. He had succeeded in cata- 
 loguing over 7,000 stars when his attention was 
 called to one, hitherto supposed to be fixed, which 
 he found had moved, during the interval between 
 two observations, from its original position. He 
 made still other observations, and thus deter- 
 mined the fact that it was a planetoid and not a 
 fixed star with which he had to deal. Needless 
 to say, his discovery proved a strong incentive to 
 patient astronomical study of the same kind; 
 and it is to these, rather than to great single dis- 
 coveries, that we owe whatever progress in 
 astronomy was made during the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Contemporary with both of these last-men- 
 tioned men, and worthy to share in the scientific 
 honors that were theirs, was the Abbe Hauy, 
 who toward the end of the second half of the 
 eighteenth century founded the science of crys- 
 tallography; made a series of observations the 
 value of which can never be disputed, originated 
 theories some of which have served down to our 
 own time as the basis of crystal knowledge, and 
 attracted the attention of many students to the 
 new science because of his charming personal 
 character and his winning teaching methods. 
 His life is a typical example of the value of work 
 done in patient obscurity, founded on observa- 
 tion, and not on brilliant theories ; and what he 
 accomplished stamps him as one of the great 
 
172 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 scientific geniuses of all time — one of the men 
 who widened the bounds of knowledge in direc- 
 tions hitherto considered inaccessible to the ordi- 
 nary methods of human investigation. 
 
 It is a commonplace of the lecturer on popu- 
 lar science at the present day, that the impulse to 
 the development of our modern scientific dis- 
 coveries which became so marked toward the end 
 of the eighteenth century, was due in a note- 
 worthy degree to the work of the French Ency- 
 clopedists. Their bringing together of all the 
 details of knowledge in a form in which it could 
 be readily consulted, and in which previous prog- 
 ress and the special lines of advance could be 
 realized, might be expected to prove a fruitful 
 source of suggestive investigation. As a matter 
 of fact, however, a detailed knowledge of the 
 past in science often seems to be rather a hind- 
 rance than a help to original genius, always 
 prone to take its own way if not too much dis- 
 turbed by the conventional knowledge already 
 gained. Most of the great discoverers in science 
 were comparatively young men when they began 
 their careers as original investigators ; and it was 
 apparently their freedom from the incubus of too 
 copious information that left their minds un- 
 trammelled to follow their own bent in seeking 
 for causes where others had failed to find any 
 hints of possible developments. 
 
 This was certainly the case with regard to 
 many of those distinguished founders who lived 
 in centuries prior to the nineteenth. Most of 
 
abbe hauy: father of crystallography 173 
 
 them were men under thirty years of age, and 
 not one of them had been noted, before he began 
 his own researches, for the extent of his knowl- 
 edge in the particular department of science in 
 which his work was to prove so fruitful. Their 
 lives illustrate the essential difference there is 
 between theory and observation in science. The 
 theorizer reaches conclusions that are popular as 
 a rule in his own generation, and receives the 
 honor due to a progressive scientist ; the observer 
 usually has his announcements of what he has 
 actually seen scouted by those who are engaged 
 in the same studies, and it is only succeeding 
 generations who appreciate how much he really 
 accomplished. 
 
 This was especially exemplified in the case of 
 the Abbe Hauy, whose work in crystallography 
 was to mean so much. What he learned was not 
 from books, but from contact with the actual ob- 
 jects of his department of science; and it is be- 
 cause the example of a life like this can scarcely 
 fail to serve a good purpose for the twentieth- 
 century student, in impressing the lesson of the 
 value of observation as opposed to theory, that 
 its details are retold. 
 
 Rene Just Hauy was born 28 February, 1743, 
 in the little village of Saint- Just, in the Depart- 
 ment of Oise, somewhat north of the center of 
 France. Like many another great genius, he 
 was the son of very poor parents. His father 
 was a struggling linen-weaver, who was able to 
 support himself only with difficulty. At first 
 
174 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 there seemed to be no other prospect for his eld- 
 est son than to succeed to his father's business. 
 Certainly there seemed to be no possibility that 
 he should be able to gain his livelihood by any 
 other means than by the work of his hands. 
 
 Fortunately, however, there was in Haiiy's- 
 native town a Premonstratensian monastery, and 
 it was not long before some of the monks began 
 to notice that the son of the weaver was of an 
 especially pious disposition and attended church 
 ceremonies very faithfully. The chance was 
 given to him to attend the monastery school, and 
 he succeeded admirably in his studies. As a 
 consequence, the prior had his attention directed 
 to the boy, and found in him the signs of a supe- 
 rior intelligence. He summoned the lad's par- 
 ents and discussed with them the possibility of 
 obtaining for their son an education. There 
 were many difficulties in the way, but the prin- 
 cipal one was their absolute financial inability to 
 help him. If the son was to obtain an education, 
 it must be somehow through his own efforts, and 
 without any expense to his parents. 
 
 The prior thereupon obtained for young Haiiy 
 a position as a member of a church choir in 
 Paris ; and, later, some of those to whom he had 
 recommended the boy secured for him a place in 
 the college of Navarre. Here, during the course 
 of a few years, he made such an impression upon 
 the members of the faculty that they asked him 
 to become one of the teaching corps of the insti- 
 tution. It was a very modest position that he 
 
ABBE HAUY : FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 1 75 
 
 held, and his salary scarcely more than paid for 
 his board and clothes and a few books. Haiiy 
 was well satisfied, however, because his position 
 provided him with opportunities for pursuing 
 the studies for which he cared most. At this 
 time he was interested mainly in literature, and 
 succeeded in learning several languages, which 
 were to be of considerable use to him later on in 
 his scientific career. 
 
 After some years spent in the college of 
 Navarre he was ordained priest, and not long 
 afterward became a member of the faculty of the 
 college of Cardinal Lemoine. Here his position 
 was somewhat better, and he was brought in con- 
 tact with many of the prominent scholars of 
 Paris. He seems, however, to have been quite 
 contented in his rather narrow circle of interests, 
 and was not specially anxious to advance him- 
 self. It is rather curious to realize that a man 
 who was later to spend all his time in the pur- 
 suit of the physical sciences, knew practically 
 nothing at all about them, and certainly had no 
 special interest in any particular branch of 
 science, until he reached the age of almost thirty 
 years. 
 
 Even then his first introduction to serious 
 science did not come because of any special in- 
 terest that had been aroused in his own mind, 
 but entirely because of his friendship for a dis- 
 tinguished old fellow-professor, whose walks he 
 used to share, and who was deeply interested in 
 botany. This was the Abbe Lhomond, a very 
 
I76 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 well-known scholar, to whom we owe a number 
 of classic text-books arranged especially for 
 young folk. 
 
 The Abbe's recreation consisted in botanizing 
 expeditions; and Haiiy, who had chosen the 
 kindly old priest as his spiritual director, was his 
 most frequent companion. Occasionally, when 
 M. Lhomond was ailing, and unable to take his 
 usual walks, Haiiy spent the time with him. He 
 rather regretted the fact that he did not know 
 enough about botany to be able to make collec- 
 tions of certain plants to bring to the professor 
 at such times, in order that the latter might not 
 entirely miss his favorite recreation. Accord- 
 ingly, one summer when he was on his vacation 
 at his country home, he asked one of the Pre- 
 monstratensian monks, who was very much in- 
 terested in botany, to teach him the principles of 
 the science, so as to enable him to recognize vari- 
 ous plants. Of course his request was granted. 
 He expected to have a pleasant surprise for Abbe 
 Lhomond on his return, and to draw even closer 
 in his friendly relations with him, because of 
 their mutual interest in what the old Abbe called 
 his scientia amabilis (lovely science). His little 
 plan worked to perfection, and there was won 
 for the study of physical science a new recruit, 
 who was to do as much as probably any one of 
 his generation to extend scientific knowledge in 
 one department, though that department was 
 rather distant from botany. 
 
 Haiiy's interest in botany, however, was to 
 
abbe hauy: father of crystallography 177 
 
 prove only temporary. It brought him in con- 
 tact with other departments of natural history, 
 and it was not long before he found that his 
 favorite study was that of minerals, and especially 
 of the various forms of crystals. So absorbed 
 did he become in this subject that nothing 
 pleased him better than the opportunity to spend 
 long days in the investigation of the comparative 
 size and shape of the crystals in the museum at 
 Paris. A friend has said of him that, whether 
 they were the most precious stones and gems or 
 the most worthless specimens of ordinary min- 
 erals, it was always only their crystalline shape 
 that interested Hauy. Diamonds he studied, but 
 only in order to determine their angles ; and ap- 
 parently they had no more attraction for him 
 than any other well-defined crystal — much less, 
 indeed, than some of the more complex crystal- 
 line varieties, which attracted his interest be- 
 cause of the difficulty of the problems they pre- 
 sented. 
 
 Like many another advance in science, Haiiy's 
 first great original step in crystallography was 
 the result of what would be called a lucky acci- 
 dent. These- accidents, however, be it noted, 
 happen only to geniuses who are capable of tak- 
 ing advantage of them. How many a man had 
 seen an apple fall from a tree before this little 
 circumstance gave Newton the hint from which 
 grew, eventually, the laws of gravity! Many a 
 man, doubtless, had seen little boys tapping on 
 logs of wood, to hear how well sound was car- 
 
I78 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 ried through a solid body, without getting from 
 this any hint, such as Laennec derived from it, 
 for the invention of the stethoscope. So, too, 
 many a person before Hauy's time had seen a 
 crystal fall and break, leaving a smooth surface, 
 without deriving any hint for the explanation of 
 the origin of crystals. 
 
 According to the familiar story, Hauy was 
 one day looking over a collection of very fine 
 crystals in the house of Citizen Du Croisset, 
 Treasurer of France. He was examining an 
 especially fine specimen of calcspar, when it fell 
 from his hands and was broken. Of course the 
 visitor was much disturbed by this accident. His 
 friend, however, in order to show him that he 
 was not at all put out at the breaking of the 
 crystal, insisted on Hauy's taking it with him for 
 purposes of study, as they had both been very 
 much interested in the perfectly smooth plane of 
 the fracture. As Hauy himself says, this broken 
 portion had a peculiarly brilliant lustre, " pol- 
 ished, as it were by nature," as beautifully as the 
 outer portions of the crystal; thus demonstrat- 
 ing that in building up of so large a crystal there 
 must have been certain steps of progress, at any 
 of which, were the formation arrested, smooth 
 surfaces would be found. 
 
 On taking the crystal home, Hauy proceeded 
 further to break up the smaller fragment; and 
 he soon found that he could remove slice after 
 slice of it, until there was no trace of the orig- 
 inal prism, but in place of it a rhomboid, per- 
 
abbe hauy: father of crystallography 179 
 
 fectly similar to Iceland spar, and lying in the 
 middle of what was the original prism. This 
 fact seemed to him very important. From it he 
 began the development of a theory of crystalliza- 
 tion, using this observation as the key. Before 
 this time it had been hard for students of min- 
 eralogy to understand how it was that substances 
 of the same composition might yet have what 
 seemed to be different crystalline forms. Calc- 
 spar, for instance, might be found crystallized in 
 forms, apparently, quite at variance with one an- 
 other. 
 
 By his studies, however, Hauy was able to de- 
 termine that whenever substances of the same 
 composition crystallized, even though the exter- 
 nal form of the crystals seemed to be different, 
 all of them were found to have the same internal 
 nucleus. Whenever the mineral under observa- 
 tion was chemically different from another, then 
 the nucleus also had a distinctive character; and 
 so there came the law that all substances of the 
 same kind crystallized in the same way, notwith- 
 standing apparent differences. Indeed, one of 
 the first results of this law was the recognition 
 of the fact that when the crystalline forms of 
 two minerals were essentially different, then, no 
 matter how similar they might be, there was sure 
 to be some chemical difference. This enabled 
 Hauy to make certain prophecies with regard to 
 the composition of minerals. 
 
 A number of different kinds of crystals had 
 been classed together under the name of heavy- 
 
l80 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 spar. Some of these could not, by the splitting 
 process, be made to produce nuclei of similar 
 forms, and the angles of the crystals were quite 
 different. Haiiy insisted that, in spite of close 
 resemblances, there was an essential distinction 
 in the chemical composition of these two differ- 
 ent crystalline formations ; and before long care- 
 ful investigation showed that, while many of the 
 specimens called heavyspar contain barium, some 
 of them contain a new substance — strontium — 
 which had been very little studied heretofore. 
 This principle did not prove to be absolute in its 
 application; but the amount of truth in it at- 
 tracted attention to the subject of crystallog- 
 raphy because of the help which that science 
 would afford in the easy recognition of the gen- 
 eral chemical composition of mineral substances. 
 The most important part of Haiiy's work was 
 the annunciation of the law of symmetry. He 
 emphasized the fact that the forms of crystals are 
 not irregular or capricious, but are very constant 
 and definite, and founded on absolutely fixed and 
 ascertainable laws. He even showed that, while 
 from certain crystalline nuclei sundry secondary 
 forms may be derived, there are other forms that 
 cannot by any possibility occur. Any change of 
 crystalline form noticed in his experiments led to 
 a corresponding change along all similar parts of 
 the crystal. The angles, the edges, the" faces, 
 were modified in the same way, at the same time. 
 All these elements of mensuration within the 
 crystal Haiiy thought could be indicated by- 
 rational coefficients. 
 
abbe hauy: father of crystallography 181 
 
 Crystallography, however, did not absorb all 
 Haiiy's attention. He further demonstrated his 
 intellectual power by following out other import- 
 ant lines of investigation that had been suggested 
 by his study of crystals. It is to him more than 
 to any other, for instance, that is due the first 
 steps in our knowledge of pyro-(or thermo-) elec- 
 tricity. Mr. George Chrystal, professor of math- 
 ematics at the University of St. Andrews, in the 
 article on electricity written for the ninth edi- 
 tion of the Encyclopedia, says it was reserved 
 for the Abbe Hauy in his Treatise on Mineralogy 
 to throw a clear light on this curious branch of 
 the science of electricity. 
 
 To those who are familiar with the history of 
 the development of this science it will be no sur- 
 prise to find a clergyman playing a prominent 
 role in its development. During the days of the 
 beginning of electricity many ecclesiastics seem 
 to have been particularly interested in the curious 
 ways of electrical phenomena, and as a conse- 
 quence they are the original discoverers of some 
 of the most important early advances. Not long 
 before this, Professor Gordon, a Scotch Benedic- 
 tine monk who was teaching at the University 
 of Erfurt, constructed the first practical electrical 
 machine. Kleist, who is one of the three men to 
 whom is attributed the discovery of the prin- 
 ciple of storing and concentrating electricity, and 
 who invented the Leyden Jar, which was named 
 after the town where it was first manufactured, 
 was also a member of a Religious Order. As 
 
l82 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 we have already stated, Dirwisch, the Premon- 
 stratensian monk, set up a lightning-conductor 
 by which he obtained sparks from the clouds even 
 before our own Franklin. 
 
 Abbe Haiiy was only following a very com- 
 mon precedent, then, when he succeeded by his 
 original research in setting the science of pyro- 
 electricity firmly on its feet. It is true, others 
 before him had noted that substances like tour- 
 maline possessed electrical properties. There is 
 even some good reason for thinking that the 
 lyncurium of the ancients which, according to 
 certain of the Greek philosophers, especially The- 
 ophrastus, who seems to have made a close study 
 of the subject, attracted light bodies, was really 
 our modern tourmaline. In modern times the 
 Dutch found this mineral in Ceylon and, because 
 it attracted ashes and other light substances to 
 itself, called it aschentriker — that is, attractor of 
 ashes. Others had still further experimented 
 with this curious substance and its interesting 
 electrical phenomena. It remained for Abbe 
 Haiiy, however, to demonstrate the scientific 
 properties of tourmaline and the relations which 
 its electrical phenomena bore toward the crystal- 
 line structure of the mineral. He showed that 
 the electricity of tourmaline decreases rapidly 
 from the summits or poles toward the middle of 
 the crystal. As a matter of fact, at the middle 
 of the crystal its electrical power becomes im- 
 perceptible. 
 
 He showed also that each particle of a crystal 
 
ABBE HAUY : FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 1 83 
 
 that exhibits pyro-electricity is itself a source of 
 the same sort of electricity and exhibits polarity. 
 His experimental observations served to prove 
 also that the pyro-electric state has an important 
 connexion with the want of symmetry in the 
 crystals of the substances that exhibit this curi- 
 ous property. In tourmaline, for instance, he 
 found the vitreous charge always at the summit 
 of the crystal which had six faces, and the resin- 
 ous electricity at the summit of the crystal with 
 three faces. 
 
 His experiments soon showed him, too, that 
 there were a number of other substances, besides 
 tourmaline, which possessed this same electrical 
 property when subjected to heat in the crystalline 
 stage. Among these were the Siberian and 
 Brazilian topaz, borate of magnesia, mesotype, 
 sphene, and calamine. In all of these other pyro- 
 electrical crystals, Haiiy detected a corresponding 
 deviation from the rules of symmetry in their 
 secondary crystals to that which occurs in tour- 
 maline. In a word, after he had concluded his 
 experiments and observations there was very little 
 left for others to add to this branch of science, 
 although such distinguished men as Sir David 
 Brewster in England were among his successors 
 in the study of the peculiar phenomena of pyro- 
 electricity. 
 
 It may naturally enough be thought that, born 
 in the country, of poor parents, and compelled to 
 work for his living, Haiiy would at least have the 
 advantage of rugged health to help him in his 
 
184 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 career. He had been a delicate child, however; 
 and his physical condition never improved to 
 such an extent as to inure him to hardships of 
 any kind. One of his biographers has gone so 
 far as to say that his life was one long malady. 
 The only distraction from his almost constant 
 suffering was his studies. Yet this man lived to 
 be nearly eighty years of age, and accomplished 
 an amount of work that might well be envied 
 even by the hardiest. 
 
 In the midst of his magnificent success as a 
 scientist, Haiiy was faithful to all his obligations 
 as a priest. His name was known throughout 
 Europe, and many of the scientific societies had 
 considered that they were honoring themselves 
 by conferring titles, or degrees, upon him; but 
 he continued to be the humble, simple student 
 that he had always been. 
 
 At the beginning of the Revolution, Abbe Haiiy 
 was among the priests who refused the oath 
 which the Republican government insisted on 
 their taking, and which so many of them consid- 
 ered derogatory to their duty as churchmen. 
 Those who refused were thrown into prison, 
 Haiiy among them. He did not seem to mind 
 his incarceration much, but he was not a little 
 perturbed by the fact that the officers who made 
 the arrest insisted on taking his precious papers, 
 and that his crystals were all tossed aside and 
 many of them broken. For some time he was 
 kept in confinement with a number of other mem- 
 bers of the faculty of the University, mainly 
 
ABBE HAUY I FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 185 
 
 clergymen, in the Seminary of St. Firmin, which 
 had been turned into a temporary jail. 
 
 Hatiy did not allow his studies to be entirely 
 interrupted by his imprisonment. He succeeded 
 in obtaining permission to have his cabinets of 
 crystals brought to his cell, and he continued his 
 investigation of them. It was not long before 
 powerful friends, and especially his scientific col- 
 league, Gregory St. Hilaire, interested them- 
 selves in his case, and succeeded in obtaining his 
 liberation. When the order for his release came, 
 however, Hauy was engaged on a very interest- 
 ing problem in crystallography, and he refused 
 to interrupt his work and leave the prison. It 
 was only after considerable persuasion that he 
 consented to go the next morning. It may be 
 added that only two weeks later many from this 
 same prison were sent to the guillotine. 
 
 It is rather remarkable that the Revolutionary 
 government, after his release, did not disturb him 
 in any way. He was so much occupied with his 
 scientific pursuits that he seems to have been con- 
 sidered absolutely incapable of antagonizing the 
 government ; and, as he had no enemies, he was 
 not denounced to the Convention. This was for- 
 tunate, because it enabled him to pursue his 
 studies in peace. There was many another mem- 
 ber of the faculty of the University who had not 
 the same good fortune. Lavoisier was thrown 
 into prison, and, in spite of all the influence that 
 could be brought to bear, the great discoverer of 
 oxygen met his death by the guillotine. At least 
 
l86 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 two others of the professors in the physical de- 
 partment, Borda and De Lambre, were dis- 
 missed from their posts. Haiiy, though himself 
 a priest who had refused to take the oath, and 
 though he continued to exercise his religious 
 functions, did not hesitate to formulate petitions 
 for his imprisoned scientific friends ; yet, because 
 of his well-known gentleness of character, this 
 did not result in arousing the enmity of any mem- 
 bers of the government, or attracting such odious 
 attention as might have made his religious and 
 scientific work extremely difficult or even pre- 
 vented it entirely. 
 
 Notwithstanding the stormy times of the 
 French Revolution and the stirring events going 
 on all round him in Paris, Haiiy continued to 
 study his crystals in order to complete his obser- 
 vations ; and then he embodied his investigations 
 and his theories in his famous "Treatise on Crys- 
 tallography." This attracted attention not only 
 on account of the evident novelty of the subject, 
 but more especially because of the very thorough 
 method with which Haiiy had accomplished his 
 work. His style, says the historian of crystal- 
 lography, was " perspicuous and elegant. The 
 volume itself was noteworthy for its clear ar- 
 rangement and full illustration by figures." In 
 spite of its deficiencies, then — deficiencies which 
 must exist in any ground-breaking work — this 
 monograph has had an enduring influence. 
 Some of the most serious flaws in his theory were 
 soon brought to light because of the very stimulus 
 afforded by his investigations. 
 
ABBE HAUY I FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 1 87 
 
 As to the real value of his treatise, perhaps no 
 better estimate can be formed than that given by 
 Cuvier in his collection of historical eulogies 
 (Vol. Ill, p. 155) : " In possession of a large 
 collection, to which there flowed from all sides 
 the most varied minerals, arranged with the 
 assistance of young, enthusiastic, and progressive 
 students, it was not long before there was given 
 back to Haiiy the time which he had apparently 
 wasted over other things. In a few years he 
 raised up a wondrous monument, which brought 
 as much glory to France as it did somewhat later 
 to himself. After centuries of neglect, his coun- 
 try at one bound found itself in the first rank in 
 this department of natural science. In Haiiy's 
 book are united in the highest degree two quali- 
 ties which are seldom associated. One of these 
 is that it was founded on an original discovery 
 which had sprung entirely from the genius of its 
 author; and the other is that this discovery is 
 pursued and developed with almost unheard-of 
 persistence down even to the least important min- 
 eral variety. Everything in the work is great, 
 both as regards conception and detail, It is as 
 complete as the theory it announces." 
 
 It was not surprising, then, that, after the death 
 of Professor Dolomieu, Haiiy should be raised to 
 the chair of mineralogy and made director of 
 that department in the Paris Museum of Natural 
 History. Here he was to have new triumphs. 
 We have already said that his book was noted 
 for the elegance of its style and its perspicuity. 
 
l88 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 As the result of this absolute clearness of ideas, 
 and completeness and simplicity of expression, 
 Hauy attracted to him a large number -of pupils. 
 Moreover, all those interested in the science, 
 when they came in contact with him, were so 
 charmed by his grace and simplicity of manner 
 that they were very glad to attend his lectures 
 and to be considered as his personal friends. 
 Among his listeners were often such men as La 
 Place, Berthollet, Fourcroy, Lagrange and La- 
 voisier. 
 
 It was not long before honors of all kinds, de- 
 grees from universities and memberships in scien- 
 tific societies all over Europe, began to be heaped 
 upon Hauy. They did not, however, cause any 
 change in the manners or mode of life of the 
 simple professor of old times. Every day he 
 continued to take his little walks through the 
 city, and was very glad to have opportunity to 
 be of assistance to others. He showed strangers 
 the way to points of interest for which they in- 
 quired, whenever it was necessary, obtained en- 
 trance cards for them to the collection ; and not 
 a few of those who were thus enabled to take 
 advantage of his kindness failed to realize who 
 the distinguished man was to whom they owed 
 their opportunities. His old-fashioned clothing 
 still continued to be quite good enough for him, 
 and his modest demeanor and simple speech did 
 not betray in any way the distinguished scientist 
 he had become. 
 
 Some idea of the consideration in which the 
 
ABBE HAUY I FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 1 89 
 
 Abbe Haiiy was held by his contemporaries may 
 be gathered from the fact that several of the 
 reigning monarchs of Europe, as well as the heirs 
 apparent to many thrones, came at some time or 
 other to visit him, to see his collection, and to 
 hear the kindly old man talk on his hobby. 
 There was only one other scientist in the nine- 
 teenth century — and that was Pasteur, toward 
 the end of it — who attracted as much attention 
 from royalty. Among Haiiy' s visitors were the 
 King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria, the 
 Archduke John, as well as the Emperor of Russia 
 and his two brothers, Nicholas and Michael, the 
 first of whom succeeded his elder brother, Alex- 
 ander, to the throne, and half a century later 
 was ruling Russia during the Crimean War. 
 The Prince Royal of Denmark spent a portion of 
 each year for several years with Haiiy, being one 
 of his intimates, who was admitted to his room 
 while he was confined to his bed, and who was 
 permitted to share his personal investigations 
 and scientific studies. 
 
 His most striking characteristic was his suav- 
 ity toward all. The humblest of his students 
 was as sure to receive a kindly reception from 
 him, and to have his difficulties solved with as 
 much patience as the most distinguished profes- 
 sor in this department. It was said that he had 
 students of all classes. The attendants at the 
 normal school were invited to visit him at his 
 house, and he permitted them to learn all his 
 secrets. When they came to him for a whole 
 
190 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 day, he insisted on taking part in their games, 
 and allowed them to go home only after they had 
 taken supper with him. All of them looked upon 
 him as a personal friend, and some of them were 
 more confidential with him than with their near- 
 est relatives. Many a young man in Paris dur- 
 ing the troublous times of the Revolutionary 
 period found in the good Abbe Hauy not only 
 a kind friend, but a wise director and another 
 father. 
 
 It is said that one day, when taking his usual 
 walk, he came upon two former soldiers who 
 were just preparing to fight a duel and were on 
 their way to the dueling ground. He succeeded 
 in getting them to tell him the cause of their 
 quarrel, and after a time tempted them to come 
 with him into what I fear we should call at the 
 present day a saloon. Here, over a glass of 
 wine, he finally persuaded them to make peace 
 and seal it effectually. It is hard to reconcile 
 this absolute simplicity of character and kindness 
 of heart with what is sometimes assumed to be 
 the typical, distant, abstracted, self-centered ways 
 of the great scientist. 
 
 Few men have had so many proofs of the lofty 
 appreciation of great contemporaries. Many in- 
 cidents serve to show how much Napoleon 
 thought of the distinguished scholar who had 
 created a new department of science and attracted 
 the attention of the world to his splendid work 
 at Paris. Not long after he became emperor, 
 Napoleon named him Honorary Canon of the 
 
ABBE HAUY I FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY 191 
 
 Cathedral of Notre Dame ; and when he founded 
 the Legion of Honor, he made the Abbe one of 
 the original members. Shortly after these dig- 
 nities had been conferred upon him, it happened 
 that the Abbe fell ill ; and Napoleon, having sent 
 his own physician to him, went personally to call 
 on him in his humble quarters, saying to the 
 physician : " Remember that you must cure Abbe 
 Hauy, and restore him to us as one of the glories 
 of our reign." After Napoleon's return from 
 Elba, he told the Abbe that the latter's "Treatise 
 on Crystallography " was one of the books that 
 he had specially selected to take with him to 
 Elba, to while away the leisure that he thought 
 he would have for many years. Abbe Haiiy's 
 independence of spirit, and his unselfish devotion 
 to his native country, may be best appreciated 
 from the tradition that after the return from 
 Elba, when there was a popular vote for the con- 
 firmation of Napoleon's second usurpation, the 
 old scientist voted, No. 
 
 In spite of his constant labor at his investiga- 
 tions, his uniformly regular life enabled him to 
 maintain his health, and he lived to the ripe age 
 of over seventy-nine. Toward the end of his 
 career, he did not obtain the recognition that his 
 labors deserved. After the Restoration, he was 
 not in favor with the new authorities in France, 
 and he accordingly lost his position as professor 
 at the University. The absolute simplicity of 
 life that he had always maintained now stood 
 him in good stead; and, notwithstanding the 
 
192 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 smallness of his income, he did not have to make 
 any change in his ordinary routine. Unfortu- 
 nately, an accidental fall in his room at the be- 
 ginning of his eightieth year confined him to his 
 bed ; and then his health began to fail very seri- 
 ously. He died on the 3 June, 1822. 
 
 He had shown during his illness the same gen- 
 tleness and humility, and even enthusiasm for 
 study whenever it was possible, that had always 
 characterized him. While he was confined to his 
 bed he divided his time between prayer, attention 
 to the new edition of his works which was about 
 to appear, and his interest for the future of those 
 students who had helped him in his investiga- 
 tions. Cuvier says of him that " he was as 
 faithful to his religious duties as he was in the 
 pursuit of his studies. The profoundest specu- 
 lations with regard to weighty matters of science 
 had not kept him from the least important duty 
 which ecclesiastical regulations might require of 
 him." There is, perhaps, no life in all the his- 
 tory of science which shows so clearly how abso- 
 lutely untrue is the declaration so often made, 
 that there is essential opposition between the in- 
 tellectual disposition of the inquiring scientist 
 and those other mental qualities which are neces- 
 sary to enable the Christian to bow humbly be- 
 fore the mysteries of religion, acknowledge all 
 that is beyond understanding in what has been 
 revealed, and observe faithfully all the duties that 
 flow from such belief. 
 
VIII. 
 
 ABBOT MENDEL: A NEW OUT- 
 LOOK IN HEREDITY. 
 
THERE is grandeur in this view 
 of life, with its several powers 
 having been originally breathed by 
 the Creator into a few forms or into 
 one; and that, while this planet has 
 gone circling on according to the 
 fixed law of gravity from so simple a 
 beginning, endless forms, most beau- 
 tiful and most wonderful, have been 
 and are being evolved. — Closing sen- 
 tence of Darwin's Origin of Species. 
 
GREGOR MENDEL 
 
VIII. 
 
 ABBOT MENDEL, 1 : A NEW, OUTLOOK IN 
 HEREDITY. 
 
 SCIENTIFIC progress does not run in cycles 
 of centuries, and as a rule it bears no re- 
 lationship to the conventional arrangement of 
 years. As has been well said — for science a new 
 century begins every second. There are inter- 
 esting coincidences, however, of epoch-making 
 discoveries in science corresponding with the be- 
 ginning of definite eras in time that are at least 
 impressive from a mnemonic standpoint, if from 
 no other. 
 
 The very eve of the nineteenth century saw the 
 first definite formulation of the theory of evolu- 
 tion. Lamarck, the distinguished French biolo- 
 gist, stated a theory of development in nature 
 which, although it attracted very little attention 
 
 1 The portrait of Abbot Mendel which precedes this 
 sketch was kindly furnished by the Vicar of the 
 Augustinian Monastery of Briinn. It represents him 
 holding a fuchsia, his favorite flower, and was taken 
 in 1867, just as he was completing the researches 
 which were a generation later to make his name so 
 famous. The portrait has for this reason a very special 
 interest as a human document. We may add that the 
 sketch of Abbot Mendel which appears here was read 
 t)y the Very Rev. Klemens Janetschek, the Vicar of the 
 Monastery, who suggested one slight change in it, so 
 that it may be said to have had the revision of one 
 who knew him and his environment very well. 
 
 195 
 
I96 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 for many years after its publication, has come in 
 our day to be recognized as the most suggestive 
 advance in biology in modern times. 
 
 As we begin the twentieth century, the most 
 interesting question in biology is undoubtedly 
 that of heredity. Just at the dawn of the cen- 
 tury three distinguished scientists, working in 
 different countries, rediscovered a law with re- 
 gard to heredity which promises to be even more 
 important for the science of biology in the twen- 
 tieth century than was Lamarck's work for the 
 nineteenth century. This law, which, it is 
 thought, will do more to simplify the problems 
 of heredity than all the observations and theories 
 of nineteenth-century workers, and which has 
 already done much more to point out the methods 
 by which observation, and the lines along which 
 experimentation shall be best directed so as to 
 replace elaborate but untrustworthy scientific the- 
 orizing by definite knowledge, was discovered by 
 a member of a small religious community in the 
 little-known town of Briinn, in Austria, some 
 thirty-five years before the beginning of the pres- 
 ent century. 
 
 Considering how generally, in English-speak- 
 ing countries at least, it is supposed that the 
 training of a clergyman and particularly that of 
 a religious unfits him for any such initiative in 
 science, Father Mendel's discovery comes with all 
 the more emphatic surprise. There is no doubt, 
 however, in the minds of many of the most prom- 
 inent present-day workers in biology that his dis- 
 
ABBOT MENDEL '. NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY I97 
 
 coveries are of a ground-breaking character that 
 will furnish substantial foundation for a new de- 
 velopment of scientific knowledge with regard to 
 heredity. 
 
 Lest it should be thought that perhaps there is 
 a tendency to make Father Mendel's discovery 
 appear more important here than it really is, be- 
 cause of his station in life, it seems desirable to 
 quote some recent authoritative expressions of 
 opinion with regard to the value of his observa- 
 tions and the importance of the law he enun- 
 ciated, as well as the principle which he consid- 
 ered to be the explanation of that law. 
 
 In the February number of Harper's 
 Monthly for 1903, Professor Thomas Hunt 
 Morgan, Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr, 
 and one of the best known of our American biol- 
 ogists, whose recent work on " Regeneration " 
 has attracted favorable notice all over the world, 
 calls attention to the revolutionary character of 
 Mendel's discovery. He considers that recent 
 demonstrations of the mathematical truth of 
 Mendel's Law absolutely confirm Mendel's orig- 
 inal observations, and the movement thus in- 
 itiated, in Professor Morgan's eyes, gives the 
 final coup de grace to the theory of natural selec- 
 tion. " If," he says, " we reject Darwin's theory 
 of natural selection as an explanation of evolu- 
 tion, we have at least a new and promising out- 
 look in another direction and are in a position to 
 answer the oft-heard but unscientific query of 
 those who must cling to some dogma : if you re- 
 ject Darwin, what better have you to offer?" 
 
I98 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 Professor Edmund B. Wilson, the Director of 
 the Zoological Laboratory of Columbia Univer- 
 sity, called attention in Science (19 December, 
 1902) to the fact that studies in cytology, 
 that is to say, observations on the formation, de- 
 velopment, and maturation of cells, confirm Men- 
 del's principles of inheritance and thus furnish 
 another proof of the truth of these principles. 
 
 Two students working in Professor Wilson's 
 laboratory have obtained definite evidence in 
 favor of the cytological explanation of Mendel's 
 principles, and have thus made an important step 
 in the solution of one of the important funda- 
 mental mysteries of cell development in the very 
 early life of organisms. 
 
 In a paper read before the American Academy 
 of Arts and Sciences last year, Professor W. E. 
 Castle, of Harvard University, said with regard 
 to Mendel's Law of Heredity: — 
 
 What will doubtless rank as one of the greatest dis- 
 coveries in the study of biology, and in the study of 
 heredity, perhaps the greatest, was made by Gregor 
 Mendel, an Austrian monk, in the garden of his clois- 
 ter, some forty years ago. The discovery was an- 
 nounced in the proceedings of a fairly well-known 
 scientific society, but seems to have attracted little 
 attention, and to have been soon forgotten. The Dar- 
 winian theory then occupied the centre of the scientific 
 stage, and Mendel's brilliant discovery was all but 
 unnoticed for a third of a century. Meanwhile, the 
 discussion aroused by Weissman's germ plasm theory, 
 in particular the idea of the non-inheritance of acquired 
 characters, put the scientific public into a more re- 
 ceptive frame of mind. Mendel's law was rediscovered 
 
ABBOT MENDEL : NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY I99 
 
 independently by three different botanists, engaged in 
 the study of plant hybrids — de Vries, Correns, and 
 Tschermak, in the year 1900. It remained, however, 
 for a zoologist, Bateson, two years later, to point out 
 the full importance and the wide applicability of the 
 law. Since then the Mendelian discoveries have at- 
 tracted the attention of biologists generally. 1 
 
 Professor Bateson, whose book on Mendel's 
 " Principles of Heredity " is the best popular 
 exposition in English of Mendel's work, says 
 that an exact determination of the laws of hered- 
 ity will probably produce more change in man's 
 outlook upon the world and in his power over 
 nature than any other advance in natural knowl- 
 edge that can be clearly foreseen. No one has 
 better opportunities of pursuing such work than 
 horticulturists and stockbreeders. They are daily 
 witnesses of the phenomena of heredity. Their 
 success also depends largely on a knowledge of 
 its laws, and obviously every increase in that 
 knowledge is of direct and special importance to 
 them. 
 
 After thus insisting on the theoretic and prac- 
 tical importance of the subject, Professor Bate- 
 son says : — 
 
 As regards the Mendelian principles which it is 
 the chief aim of this introduction to present clearly 
 before the reader, it may be said that by the applica- 
 
 1 This paper was originally published in part in the 
 Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and 
 Sciences, Vol. xxxviii, No. 18, January, 1903. It may 
 be found complete in Science for 25 September, 1903. 
 
200 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 tion of those principles we are enabled to reach and 
 deal in a comprehensive manner with phenomena of a 
 fundamental nature, lying at the very root of all con- 
 ceptions not merely of the physiology of reproduction 
 and heredity, but even of the essential nature of living 
 organisms ; and I think that I use no extravagant words 
 when, in introducing Mendel's work to the notice of 
 the Royal Horticultural Society's Journal, I ventured 
 to declare that his experiments are worthy to rank 
 with those which laid the foundation of the atomic 
 laws of chemistry. 
 
 Professor L. H. Bailey, who is the Director of 
 the Horticultural Department at Cornell Univer- 
 sity and the editor of the authoritative Ency- 
 clopedia of Horticulture, was one of the first 
 of recent scientists to call attention to Mendel's 
 work. It was, we believe, because of a reference 
 to Mendel's papers by Bailey that Professor de 
 Vries was put on the track of Mendel's discov- 
 eries and found that the Austrian monk had com- 
 pletely anticipated the work at which he was then 
 engaged. In a recent issue of The Independ- 
 ent, of New York, Professor Bailey said: — 
 
 The teaching of Mendel strikes at the root of two 
 or three difficult and vital problems. It presents a new 
 conception of the proximate mechanism of heredity. 
 The hypothesis of heredity that it suggests will focus 
 our attention along new lines, and will, I believe, 
 arouse as much discussion as Weissmann's hypothesis, 
 and it is probable that it will have a wider influence. 
 Whether it expresses the actual means of heredity or 
 not, it is yet much too early to say. But the hypothesis 
 (which Father Mendel evolved in order to explain 
 the reasons for his law as he saw them) is even a 
 
ABBOT MENDEL : NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 201 
 
 greater contribution to science than the so-called Men- 
 del's Law as to the numerical results of hybridization. 
 In the general discussion of evolution Mendel's work 
 will be of the greatest value because it introduces 
 a new point of view, challenges old ideas and opinions, 
 gives us a new theory for discussion, emphasizes the 
 great importance of actual experiments for the solu- 
 tion of many questions of evolution, and then forces 
 the necessity for giving greater attention to the real 
 characters and attributes of plants and animals than 
 to the vague groups that we are in the habit of call- 
 ing species. 
 
 It is very evident that a man of whose work 
 so many authorities are agreed that it is the be- 
 ginning of a new era in biology, and especially 
 in that most interesting of all questions, heredity, 
 must be worthy of close acquaintance. Hence 
 the present sketch of his career and personality, 
 as far as they are ascertainable, for his modesty, 
 and the failure of the world to recognize his 
 worth in his lifetime, have unfortunately deprived 
 us of many details that would have been precious. 
 
 Gregor Johann Mendel was born 27 July, 
 1822, at Heinzendorf, nor far from Odrau, in 
 Austrian Silesia. He was the son of a well-to- 
 do peasant farmer, who gave him every oppor- 
 tunity of getting a good education when he was 
 young. He was educated at Olmutz, in Moravia, 
 and after graduating from the college there, at 
 the age of twenty-one, he entered as a novice 
 the Augustinian Order, beginning his novitiate 
 in 1843 m the Augustinian monastery Konigen- 
 kloster, in Altbninn. He was very successful in 
 
202 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 his theological studies, and in 1846 he was or- 
 dained priest. He seems to have made a striking 
 success as a teacher, especially of natural history 
 and physics, in the higher Realschule in Brunn. 
 He attracted the attention of his superiors, who 
 were persuaded to give him additional oppor- 
 tunities for the study of the sciences, particularly 
 of biological science, for which he had a distinct 
 liking and special talents. 
 
 Accordingly, in 1851 he went to Vienna for 
 the purpose of doing post-graduate work in the 
 natural sciences at the university there. During 
 the two years he spent at this institution he 
 attracted attention by his serious application to 
 study, but apparently without having given any 
 special evidence of the talent for original obser- 
 vation that was in him. In 1853 ne returned to 
 the monastery in Altbriinn, and at the beginning 
 of the school year became a teacher at the Real- 
 schule in Brunn. He remained in Brunn for the 
 rest of his life, dying at the comparatively early 
 age of sixty- two, in 1884. During the last six- 
 teen years of his life he held the position of 
 abbot of the monastery, the duties of which pre- 
 vented him from applying himself as he prob- 
 ably would have desired, to the further investi- 
 gation of scientific questions. 
 
 The experiments on which his great discoveries 
 were founded were carried out in the garden of 
 the monastery during the sixteen years from 
 1853 to 1868. How serious was his scientific de- 
 votion may be gathered from the fact that in 
 
ABBOT MENDEL I NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 203 
 
 establishing the law which now bears his name, 
 and which was founded on observations on peas, 
 some 10,000 plants were carefully examined, their 
 various peculiarities noted, their ancestry care- 
 fully traced, the seeds kept in definite order and 
 entirely separate, so as to be used for the study 
 of certain qualities in their descendants, and the 
 whole scheme of experimentation planned with 
 such detail that for the first time in the history 
 of studies in heredity, no extraneous and inex- 
 plicable data were allowed to enter the problem. 
 Besides his work on plants, Mendel occupied 
 himself with other observations of a scientific 
 character on two subjects which were at that 
 time attracting considerable attention. These 
 were the state and condition of the ground-water 
 — a subject which. was thought to stand at the 
 basis of hygienic principles at the time and which 
 had occupied the attention of the distinguished 
 Professor Pettenkof er and the Munich School of 
 Hygiene for many years — and weather observa- 
 tions. At that time Pettenkof er, the most widely 
 known of sanitary scientists, thought that he was 
 able to show that he curve of frequency of 
 typhoid fever in the different seasons of the year 
 depended upon the closeness with which the 
 ground-water came to the surface. Authorities 
 in hygiene generally do not now accept this sup- 
 posed law, for other factors have been found 
 which are so much more important that, if the 
 ground-water has any influence, it can be 
 neglected. Mendel's observations in the matter 
 
204^ CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 were, however, in line with the scientific ideas of 
 the time and undoubtedly must be considered of 
 value. 
 
 The other subject in which Mendel interested 
 himself was meteorology. He published in the 
 journal of the Briinn Society of Naturalists a 
 series of statistical observations with regard to 
 the weather. Besides this he organized in con- 
 nexion with the Realschule in Briinn a series of 
 observation stations in different parts of the coun- 
 try around ; and at the time when most scientists 
 considered meteorological problems to be too 
 complex for hopeful solution, Mendel seems to 
 have realized that the questions involved de- 
 pended rather on the collation of a sufficient 
 number of observations and the deduction of defi- 
 nite laws from them than on any theoretic prin- 
 ciples of a supposed science of the weather. 
 
 The man evidently had a genius for scientific 
 observations. His personal character was of the 
 highest. The fact that his fellow-monks selected 
 him as abbot of the monastery shows the consid- 
 eration in which he was held for tact and true 
 religious feeling. There are many still alive in 
 Briinn who remember him well and cannot say 
 enough of his kindly disposition, the froliche Lie- 
 benswurdigkeit (which means even more than 
 our personal magnetism), that won for him re- 
 spect and reverence from all. He is remembered, 
 not only for his successful discoveries, and not 
 alone by his friends and the fellow-members of 
 the Naturalist Society, but by practically all his 
 
ABBOT MENDEL : NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 205 
 
 contemporaries in the town ; and it is his lovable 
 personal character that seems to have most im- 
 pressed itself on them. 
 
 He was for a time the president of the Briinn 
 Society of Naturalists, while also abbot of the 
 monastery. This is, perhaps, a combination that 
 would strike English-speaking people as rather 
 curious, but seems to have been considered not 
 out of the regular course of events in Austria. 
 
 Father Mendel's introduction to his paper on 
 plant hybridization, which describes the result of 
 the experiments made by him in deducing the 
 law which he announces, is a model of simple 
 straightforwardness. It breathes the spirit of the 
 loftiest science in its clear-eyed vision of the 
 nature of the problem he had to solve, the fac- 
 tors which make up the problem, and the experi- 
 mental observations necessary to elucidate it. We 
 reproduce the introductory remarks here from 
 the translations made of them by the Royal Hor- 
 ticultural Society of England. 1 Father Mendel 
 said at the beginning of his paper as read 8 Feb- 
 ruary, 1865 : — 
 
 Experience of artificial fertilization such as is af- 
 fected with ornamental plants in order to obtain new 
 variations in color, has led to the experiments, the de- 
 
 1 The original paper was published in the " Ver- 
 handlungen des Naturforscher-Vereins," in Briinn, Ab- 
 handlungen, iv, that is, the proceedings of the year 
 1865, which were published in 1866. Copies of these 
 transactions were exchanged with all the important 
 scientific journals, especially those in connexion with 
 important societies and universities throughout Europe, 
 and the wonder is that this paper attracted so little 
 attention. 
 
206 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 tails of which I am about to discuss. The striking 
 regularity with which the same hybrid forms always 
 reappeared whenever fertilization took place between 
 the same species, induced further experiments to be 
 undertaken, the object of which was to follow up the 
 developments of the hybrid in a number of successive 
 generations of their progeny. 
 
 Those who survey the work that has been done in 
 this department up to the present time will arrive at 
 the conviction that among all the numerous experi- 
 ments made not one has been carried out to such an 
 extent and in such a way as to make it possible to 
 determine the number of different forms under which 
 the offspring of hybrids appear, or to arrange these 
 forms with certainty, according to their separate 
 generations, or to ascertain definitely their statistical 
 relations. 
 
 These three primary necessities for the solu- 
 tion of the problem of heredity — namely, first, the 
 number of different forms under which the off- 
 spring of hybrids appear ; secondly, the arrange- 
 ment of these forms, with definiteness and cer- 
 tainty, as regards their relations in the separate 
 generation; and thirdly, the statistical results of 
 the hybridization of the plants in successive gen- 
 erations, are the secret of the success of Mendel's 
 work, as has been very well said by Bateson, in 
 commenting on this paragraph in his work on 
 Mendel's " Principles of Heredity." This was 
 the first time that any one had ever realized ex- 
 actly the nature of the problems presented in 
 their naked simplicity. " To see a problem well 
 is more than half to solve it," and this proved to 
 be the case with Mendel's straightforward vision 
 of the nature of the experiments required for ad- 
 vance in our knowledge of heredity. 
 
ABBOT MENDEL I NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 207 
 
 While Mendel was beginning his experiments 
 almost absolutely under the guidance of his own 
 scientific spirit, and undertaking his series of 
 observations in the monastery garden without 
 any reference to other work in this line, he knew 
 very well what distinguished botanists were do- 
 ing in this line and was by no means presump- 
 tuously following a study of the deepest of 
 nature's problems without knowing what others 
 had accomplished in the matter in recent years. 
 In the second paragraph of his introduction he 
 quotes the men whose work in this science was 
 attracting attention, and says that to this object 
 numerous careful observers, such a Kolreuter, 
 Gartner, Herbert, Lecoq, Wichura and others, 
 had devoted a part of their lives with inexhaus- 
 tible perseverance. 
 
 To quote Mendel's own words : — 
 
 Gartner, especially in his work, "Die Bastarderzeu- 
 gung im Pflanzenreiche," 1 has recorded very valuable 
 observations; and quite recently Wichura published 
 the results of some profound observations on the 
 hybrids of the willow. That so far no generally ap- 
 plicable law governing the formation and develop- 
 ment of hybrids has been successfully formulated can 
 hardly be wondered at by anyone who is acquainted 
 with the extent of the task and can appreciate the 
 difficulties with which experiments of this class have 
 to contend. A final decision can only be arrived at 
 when we shall have before us the results of the 
 changed detailed experiments made on plants belonging 
 to the most diverse orders. It requires some courage 
 
 1 The Production of Hybrids in the Vegetable King- 
 dom. 
 
208 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 indeed to undertake a labor of such far-reaching ex- 
 tent; it appears, however, to be the only right way by 
 which we can finally reach the solution of a question 
 the importance of which can not be overestimated in 
 connexion with the history of the evolution of organic 
 forms. 
 
 The paper now presented records the results of such 
 a detailed experiment. This experiment was prac- 
 tically confined to a small plant group, and is now after 
 eight years' pursuit concluded in all essentials. Whether 
 the plan upon which the separate experiments were 
 conducted and carried out was the best suited to attain 
 the desired end is left to the friendly decision of the 
 reader. 
 
 Mendel's discoveries with regard to peas and 
 the influence of heredity on them, were founded 
 on very simple, but very interesting, observa- 
 tions. He found that if peas of different colors 
 were taken, that is to say, if, for instance, yellow- 
 colored peas were crossed with green, the result- 
 ing pea seeds were, in the great majority of 
 cases, of yellow color. If the yellow-colored 
 peas obtained from such crossing were planted 
 and allowed to be fertilized only by pollen from 
 plants raised from similar seeds, the succeeding 
 generation, however, did not give all yellow peas, 
 but a definite number of yellow and a definite 
 number of green. In other words, while there 
 might have been expected a permanence of the 
 yellow color, there was really a reversion in a 
 number of the plants apparently to the type of 
 the grandparent. Mendel tried the same experi- 
 ment with seeds of different shape. Certain peas 
 are rounded and certain others are wrinkled. 
 When these were crossed, the next generation 
 
ABBOT MENDEL '. NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 209 
 
 consisted of wrinkled peas, but the next succeed- 
 ing generation presented a definite number of 
 round peas besides the wrinkled ones, and so on 
 as before. He next bred peas with regard to 
 other single qualities, such as the color of the 
 seed coat, the inflation or constriction of the pod, 
 as to the coloring of the pod, as to the distribu- 
 tion of the flowers along the stem, as to the 
 length of the stem, finding always, no matter 
 what the quality tested, the laws of heredity he 
 had formulated always held true. 
 
 What he thus discovered he formulated some- 
 what as follows : In the case of each of the 
 crosses the hybrid character, that is, the quality 
 of the resultant seed, resembles one of the par- 
 ental forms so closely that the other escapes ob- 
 servation completely or cannot be detected with 
 certainty. This quality thus impressed on the 
 next generation, Mendel called the dominant 
 quality. As, however, the reversion of a definite 
 proportion of the peas in the third generation to 
 that quality of the original parent which did not 
 appear in the second generation was found to 
 occur, thus showing that, though it cannot be 
 detected, it is present, Mendel called it the re- 
 cessive quality. He did not find transitional 
 forms in any of his experiments, but constantly 
 observed that when plants were bred with regard 
 to two special qualities, one of those qualities be- 
 came dominant in the resultant hybrid, and the 
 other became recessive, that is, present though 
 latent and ready to produce its effects upon a 
 definite proportion of the succeeding generation. 
 
2IO CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 Remembering, then, that Mendel means by hy- 
 brid the result of the crossing of two distinct 
 species, his significant discovery has been stated 
 thus : The hybrid, whatever its own character, 
 produces ripe germ cells, which bear only the 
 pure character of one parent or the other. Thus, 
 when one parent has the character "A," in peas, 
 for example, a green color, and the other the 
 character " B," in peas once more a yellow color, 
 the hybrid will have in cases of simple dominance 
 the character "AB" or "BA," but with the second 
 quality in either case not noticeable. Whatever 
 the character of the hybrid may be, that is to 
 say, to revert to the example of the peas, whether 
 it be green or yellow, its germ cells when mature 
 will bear either the character "A" (green), or 
 the character " B " (yellow), but not both. 
 
 As Professor Castle says : " This perfectly 
 simple principle is known as the law of segrega- 
 tion, or the law of the purity of the germ cells. 
 It bids fair to prove as fundamental to a right 
 understanding of the facts of heredity as is the 
 law of definite proportions in chemistry. From 
 it follow many important consequences." 
 
 To follow this acute observer's work still fur- 
 ther — by letting the crossbreds fertilize them- 
 selves, Mendel raised a third generation. In this 
 generation were individuals which showed the 
 dominant character and also individuals which 
 presented the recessive character. Such an ob- 
 servation had of course been made in a good 
 many instances before. 
 
ABBOT MENDEL! NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 211 
 
 But Mendel noted — and this is the essence of 
 the new discovery in his observations — that in 
 this third generation the numerical proportion of 
 dominants to recessives is in the average of a 
 series of cases approximately constant — being, in 
 fact, as three to one. With almost absolute reg- 
 ularity this proportion was maintained in every 
 case of crossing of pairs of characters, quite op- 
 posed to one another, in his pea plants. In the 
 first generation, raised from his crossbreds, or, 
 as he calls them, hybrids, there were seventy-five 
 per cent dominants and twenty-five per cent re- 
 cessives. 
 
 When these plants were again self-fertilized 
 and the offspring of each plant separately sown, 
 a new surprise awaited the observer. The prog- 
 eny of the recessives remained pure recessive; 
 and in any number of subsequent generations 
 never produced the dominant type again, that is, 
 never reverted to the original parent, whose qual- 
 ities had failed to appear in the second genera- 
 tion. When the seeds obtained by self-fertiliz- 
 ing the plants with the dominant characteristics 
 were sown, it was found by the test of progeny 
 that the dominants were not all of like nature, 
 but consisted of two classes — first, some which 
 gave rise to pure dominants; and secondly, others 
 which gave a mixed offspring, composed partly 
 of recessives, partly of dominants. Once more, 
 however, the ratio of heredity asserted itself and 
 it was found that the average numerical propor- 
 tions were constant — those with pure dominant 
 
212 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 offspring being to those with mixed offspring as 
 one to two. Hence, it was seen that the seventy- 
 five per cent of dominants are not really of iden- 
 tical constitution, but consist of twenty-five per 
 cent which are pure dominants and fifty per cent 
 which are really crossbreds, though like most of 
 the crossbreds raised by crossing the two orig- 
 inal varieties, they exhibit the dominant char- 
 acter only. 
 
 These fifty crossbreds have mixed offspring; 
 these offspring again in their numerical propor- 
 tion follow the same law, namely, three domi- 
 nants to one recessive. The recessives are pure 
 like those of the last generation, but the domi- 
 nants can, by further self-fertilization and culti- 
 vation of the seeds produced, be again shown to 
 be made up of pure dominant and crossbreds in 
 the same proportion of one dominant to two 
 crossbreds. 
 
 The process of breaking up into the parent 
 forms is thus continued in each successive gen- 
 eration, the same numerical laws being followed 
 so far as observation has gone. As Mendel's ob- 
 servations have now been confirmed by workers 
 in many parts of the world, investigating many 
 different kinds of plants, it would seem that this 
 law which he discovered has a basis in the nature 
 of things and is to furnish the foundation for a 
 new and scientific theory of heredity, while at the 
 same time affording scope for the collection of 
 observations of the most valuable character with 
 a definite purpose and without any theoretic bias. 
 
ABBOT MENDEL: NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 21$ 
 
 The task of the practical breeder who seeks to 
 establish or fix a new variety produced by cross- 
 breeding in a case involving two variable char- 
 acters is simply the isolation and propagation of 
 that one in each sixteen of the second generation 
 offspring which will be pure as regards the de- 
 sired combination of characters. Mendel's dis- 
 covery, by putting the breeder in possession of 
 this information enables him to attack this prob- 
 lem systematically with confidence in the out- 
 come, whereas hitherto his work, important and 
 fascinating as it is, has consisted largely of grop- 
 ing for a treasure in the dark. The greater the 
 number of separately variable characters involved 
 in a cross, the greater will be the number of new 
 combinations obtainable; the greater too will be 
 the number of individuals which it will be neces- 
 sary to raise in order to secure all the possible 
 combinations ; and the greater again will be the 
 difficulty of isolating the pure, that is, the stable 
 forms in such as are similar to them in appear- 
 ance, but still hybrid in one or more characters. 
 
 The law of Mendel reduces to an exact science 
 the art of breeding in the case most carefully 
 studied by him, that of entire dominance. It 
 gives to the breeder a new conception of "purity." 
 No animal or plant is " pure," simply because it 
 is descended from a long line of ancestors, pos- 
 sessing a desired combination of characters ; but 
 any animal or plant is pure if it produces gametes 
 — that is, particles for conjugation of only one 
 sort — even though its grandparents may among 
 
214 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 themselves have possessed opposite characters. 
 The existence of purity can be established with 
 certainty only by suitable breeding tests, espec- 
 ially by crossing with recessives ; but it may be 
 safely assumed for any animal or plant, de- 
 scended from parents which were like each other 
 and had been shown by breeding tests to be pure. 
 This naturally leads us to what some biologists 
 have considered to be the most important part of 
 his work — the theory which he elaborated to ex- 
 plain his results, the principle which he considers 
 to be the basis of the laws he discovered. Men- 
 del suggests as following logically from the 
 results of his experiments and observations a cer- 
 tain theory of the constitution of germinal par- 
 ticles. He has put this important matter so 
 clearly himself and with such little waste of 
 words that it seems better to quote the transla- 
 tion of the passage as given by Professor Bate- 
 son, 1 than to attempt to explain it in other words* 
 Mendel says : — 
 
 The results of the previously described experiments 
 induced further experiments, the results of which ap- 
 pear fitted to afford some conclusions as regards the 
 composition of the egg and pollen-cells of hybrids. An 
 important matter for consideration is afforded in peas 
 (pisum) by the circumstance that among the progeny 
 of the hybrids constant forms appear, and that this 
 occurs, too, in all combinations of the associated char- 
 acters. So far as experience goes, we find it in every 
 
 1 Bateson : Mendel's Principles of Heredity. Cam- 
 bridge : The University Press. 1902. 
 
ABBOT MENDEL: NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 215 
 
 case confirmed that constant progeny can only be 
 formed when the egg-cells and the fertilizing pollen 
 are of like character, so that both are provided with 
 the material for creating quite similar individuals, as 
 is the case with the normal fertilization of pure 
 species. 
 
 We must therefore regard it as essential that exactly 
 similar factors are at work also in the production of 
 the constant forms in the hybrid plants. Since the 
 various constant forms are produced in one plant, or 
 even in one flower of a plant, the conclusion appears 
 logical that in the ovaries of the hybrids there are 
 formed as many sorts of egg-cells and in the anthers 
 as many sorts of pollen-cells as there are possible 
 constant combination forms, and that these egg and 
 pollen-cells agree in their internal composition with 
 those of the separate forms. 
 
 In point of fact, it is possible to demonstrate theoreti- 
 cally that this hypothesis would fully suffice to account 
 for the development of the hybrids in the separate 
 generations, if we might at the same time assume that 
 the various kinds of egg and pollen-cells were formed 
 in the hybrids on the average in equal numbers. 
 
 Bateson says in a note on this passage that 
 this last and the preceding paragraph contain the 
 essence of the Mendelian principles of heredity. 
 Mendel himself, after stating this hypothesis, 
 gives the details of a series of experiments by 
 which he was able to decide that the theoretic 
 considerations suggested were founded in the 
 nature of plants and their germinal cells. 
 
 It will, of course, be interesting to realize what 
 the bearing of Mendel's discoveries is on the 
 question of the stability of species as well as on 
 the origin of species. Professor Morgan, in his 
 
2l6 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 article on Darwinism in the " Light of Modern 
 Criticism," already quoted, says the important 
 fact (with regard to Mendel's Law) from the 
 point of view of the theory of evolution is that 
 " the new species have sprung fully armed from 
 the old ones, like Minerva from the head of 
 Jove." " From de Vries's results," he adds, " we 
 understand better how it is that we do not see 
 new forms arising, because they appear, as it 
 were, fully equipped over night. Old species are 
 not slowly changed into new ones, but a shaking 
 up of the old organization takes place and the 
 egg brings forth a new species. It is like the 
 turning of the kaleidoscope, a slight shift and 
 the new figure suddenly appears. It needs no 
 great penetration to see that this point of view is 
 entirely different from the conception of the for- 
 mation of new species by accumulating individual 
 variations, until they are carried so far that the 
 new form may be called a new species." 
 
 With regard to this question of the transfor- 
 mation of one species into another, Mendel him- 
 self, in the concluding paragraphs of his article 
 on hybridization, seems to agree with the expres- 
 sions of Morgan. He quotes Gartner's opinion 
 with apparent approval : " Gartner, by the results 
 of these transformation experiments was led to 
 oppose the opinion of those naturalists who dis- 
 pute the stability of plant species and believe in 
 a continuous evolution of vegetation. He per- 
 ceives in the complete transformation of one 
 species into another an indubitable proof that 
 
ABBOT MENDEL: NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 21J 
 
 species are fixed within limits beyond which they 
 cannot change." "Although this opinion," adds 
 Mendel, " cannot be unconditionally accepted, we 
 find, on the other hand, in Gartner's experiments 
 a noteworthy confirmation of that supposition re- 
 garding the variability of cultivated plants which 
 has already been expressed." This expression 
 of opinion is not very definite, and Bateson, in 
 what Professor Wilson of Columbia calls his 
 " recent admirable little book on Mendel's prin- 
 ciples," adds the following note that may prove 
 of service in elucidating Mendel's meaning, as 
 few men have entered so fully into the under- 
 standing of Mendel's work as Bateson, who in- 
 troduced him to the English-speaking scientific 
 public. " The argument of this paragraph ap- 
 pears to be that though the general mutability of 
 natural species might be doubtful, yet among cul- 
 tivated plants the transference of characters may 
 be accomplished and may occur by integral steps 
 [italics ours], until one species is definitely 'trans- 
 formed ' into the other." 
 
 Needless to say, this is quite different from the 
 gradual transformation of species that Darwin- 
 ism or Lamarckism assumes to take place. One 
 species becomes another per saltum in virtue of 
 some special energy infused into it, some original 
 tendency of its intrinsic nature, not because of 
 gradual modification by forces outside of the 
 organisms, nor because of the combination of in- 
 fluences they are subjected to from without and 
 within, because of tendency to evolute plus en- 
 
2l8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 vironmental forces. This throws biology back to 
 the permanency of species in themselves, though 
 successive generations may be of different spe- 
 cies, and does away with the idea of missing 
 links, since there are no gradual connecting gra- 
 dations. 
 
 A very interesting phase of Mendel's discov- 
 eries is concerned with the relative value of the 
 e gg-cell and the pollen-cell, as regards their effect 
 upon future generations. It is an old and oft- 
 discussed problem as to which of these germinal 
 particles is the more important in its influence 
 upon the transmission of parental qualities. 
 Mendel's observations would seem to decide defi- 
 nitely that, in plants and, by implication, in ani- 
 mals, since the germinal process is biogenetically 
 similar, the value of both germinal particles is 
 exactly equal. 
 
 In a note, Mendel says : — 
 
 In pisum (i. e. in peas), it is beyond doubt that, for 
 the formation of the new embryo, a perfect union of 
 the elements of both fertilizing cells must take place. 
 How could we otherwise explain that, among the off- 
 spring of the hybrids, both original types reappear in 
 equal numbers, and with all their peculiarities? If 
 the influence of the egg-cell upon the pollen-cell were 
 only external, if it fulfilled the role of a nurse only, 
 then the result of each artificial fertilization could be 
 no other than that the developed hybrid should exactly 
 resemble the pollen parent, or, at any rate, do so very 
 closely. These experiments, so far, have in no wise 
 been confirmed. An evident proof of the complete 
 union of the contents of both cells is afforded by the 
 
ABBOT MENDEL: NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 210, 
 
 experience gained on all sides, that it is immaterial as 
 regards the form of the hybrid which of the original 
 species is the seed cell, or which" the pollen parent ! 
 
 This is the first actual demonstration of the 
 equivalent value of both germinal particles as re- 
 gards their influence on transmission inheritance 
 in future generations. 
 
 It is only by simplifying the problem so that 
 all disturbing factors could be eliminated that 
 Mendel succeeded in making this demonstration. 
 Too many qualities have hitherto been considered 
 with consequent confusion as to the results ob- 
 tained. 
 
 It is of the genius of the man that he should 
 have been able to succeed in seeing the problem 
 in simple terms while it is apparently so complex, 
 and thus obtain results that are as far-reaching 
 as the problem they solve is basic in its character. 
 
 Bateson, in his work Mendel's Principles of 
 Heredity, says : — 
 
 It may seem surprising that a work of such impor- 
 tance should so long have failed to find recognition 
 and to become current in the world of science. It is 
 true that the Journal in which it appeared is scarce, 
 but this circumstance has seldom long delayed general 
 recognition. The cause is unquestionably to be found 
 in that neglect of the experimental study of the problem 
 of species which supervened on the general acceptance 
 of the Darwinian doctrine. The problem of species, 
 as Kolreuter, Gartner, Naudin, Wichura, and the hy- 
 bridists of the middle of the nineteenth century con- 
 ceived it, attracted thenceforth no workers. 
 
220 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE 
 
 The question, it was imagined, had been answered 
 and the debate ended. No one felt much interest in 
 the matter. A host of other lines of work was sud- 
 denly opened up, and in 1865 the more original in- 
 vestigators naturally found these new methods of re- 
 search more attractive than the tedious observations 
 of hybridizers, whose inquiries were supposed, more- 
 over, to have led to no definite results. 
 
 In 1868 appeared the first edition of Darwin's Ani- 
 mals and Plants, marking the very zenith of these 
 studies with regard to hybrids and the questions in 
 heredity which they illustrate, and thenceforth the de- 
 cline in the experimental investigation of evolution and 
 the problem of species have been studied. With the 
 rediscovery and confirmation of Mendel's work by de 
 Vries, Correns and Tschermak in 1900 a new era 
 begins. Had Mendel's work come into the hands of 
 Darwin it is not too much to say that the history 
 of the development of evolutionary philosophy would 
 have been very different from that which we have 
 witnessed. 
 
 That Mendel's work, appearing as it did at a mo- 
 ment when several naturalists of the first rank were 
 still occupied with these problems, should have passed 
 wholly unnoted, will always remain inexplicable, the 
 more so as the Briinn society exchanged its publi- 
 cation with most of the great academies of Europe, 
 including both the 'Royal and the Linnean societies of 
 London. 
 
 The whole history of Mendel's work, its long 
 period without effect upon scientific thought, its 
 thoroughly simple yet satisfactory character, its 
 basis in manifold observations of problems sim- 
 plified to the last degree, and its present complete 
 acceptance illustrate very well the chief defect of 
 the last two generations of workers in biology. 
 
ABBOT MENDEL : NEW OUTLOOK IN HEREDITY 221 
 
 There has been entirely too much theorizing, too 
 much effort at observations for the purpose of 
 bolstering up preconceived ideas — preaccepted 
 dogmas of science that have proved false in the 
 end — and too little straightforward observation 
 and simple reporting of the facts without trying 
 to have them fit into any theory prematurely, that 
 is until their true place was found. This will be 
 the criterion by which the latter half of nine- 
 teenth century biology will be judged; and be- 
 cause of failure here much of our supposed prog- 
 ress will have no effect on the current of biolog- 
 ical progress, but will represent only an eddy in 
 which there was no end of bustling movement 
 manifest but no real advance. 
 
 As stated very clearly by Professor Morgan at 
 the beginning of this paper, and Professor Bate- 
 son near the end, Darwin's doctrine of natural 
 selection as the main factor in evolution and its 
 practically universal premature acceptance by 
 scientific workers in biology are undoubtedly re- 
 sponsible for this. The present generation may 
 well be warned, then, not to surrender their judg- 
 ment to taking theories, but to wait in patience 
 for the facts in the case, working, not theorizing, 
 while they wait. 
 
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