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656 probability. But even if the author did not see the full truth of his deductions at the time, this has happened to many great discoverers. Professor Whewell says of Kepler, with reference to a similar instance, that it seems strange that he did not fully succeed; "but this lot of missing what afterwards seems to have been obvious, is a common one in the pursuit of truth." (History of the Inductive Sciences, vol. II, p. 56. Appleton's ed., 1859.)

– Among the Jesuit scholars of the last decades mention should have been made of the sinologist Father Angelo Zottoli, who died in the College of Zi-ka-wei, near Shanghai, November 9, 1902. In 1876, Baron von Richthofen, in his work on China, expressed his regret that the Jesuit missionaries of recent times had not succeeded in regaining the scientific prestige of the Old Society. But a few years after, in 1879, the first volumes of a work appeared which inaugurated a new period in the scientific activity of the Jesuits in China. This was Father Zottoli's Cursus Literaturae Sinicae. When the work had been completed in five volumes, it put the humble religious in the front rank of sinologists. It has been styled "a landmark in the history of Chinese philology," and received the great prize of the Académie des Inscriptions et des belles Lettres. Mr. Legge, formerly a Protestant missionary in China, and one of the foremost sinologists of our age, declares that in Father Zottoli's Cursus "the scholarship of the earlier Jesuit missionaries has revived." (In vol. XXVII of the Sacred Books of the East, Preface, p. XIII.) In Father Zottoli's school some able Jesuit sinologists were trained, who now publish their researches in a special review,