Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/424

408 with science, this nineteenth century would, without doubt, be enjoying discoveries which will not be reached before the twentieth century. Thousands of precious lives shall be lost in this century, tens of thousands shall suffer discomfort, privation, sickness, poverty, ignorance, for lack of discoveries and methods which, but for this mistaken religious fight against Bacon and his compeers, would now be blessing the earth.

In 1868 and 1869, sixty thousand children died in England and in Wales of scarlet fever; probably nearly as many died in this country. Had not Bacon been hindered we should have had in our hands, by this time, the means to save two-thirds of these victims, and the same is true of typhoid, typhus, and that great class of diseases of whose physical causes Science is just beginning to get an inkling. Put together all the efforts of all the atheists who have ever lived, and they have not done so much harm to Christianity and the world as has been done by the narrow-minded, conscientious men who persecuted Roger Bacon.

Roger Bacon was vanquished. For ages the champions of science were crippled; but the "good fight" was carried on. The Church itself furnishes heroes of science. Antonio de Dominis relinquishes his archbishopric of Spalatro, investigates the phenomena of light, and dies in the clutches of the Inquisition.

Pierre de la Ramée stands up against Aristotelianism at Paris. A royal edict, sought by the Church, stopped his teaching, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew ended his life.

Somewhat later, John Baptist Porta began his investigations. Despite many absurdities, his work was most fruitful. His book on meteorology was the first in which sound ideas were broached. His researches in optics gave the world the camera obscura, and, possibly, the telescope. He encountered the same old policy of conscientious men. The society founded by him for physical research, "I Secreti," was broken up, and he was summoned to Rome and censured.

In 1624, some young chemists of Paris having taught the experimental method, and cut loose from Aristotle, the Faculty of Theology besets the Parliament of Paris, and the Parliament prohibits this new chemical teaching under penalty of death.

The war went on in Italy. In 1657 occurred the first sitting of