Catholic churchmen in science; sketches of the lives of Catholic ecclesiastics who were among the great founders in science

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CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN
IN SCIENCE

In §>twntt^

SKETCHES OF THE LIVES OF CATHOLIC
ECCLESIASTICS WHO WERE AMONG
THE GREAT FOUNDERS IN SCIENCE

by
JAMES J- WALSH

K.C.St.G., Litt.D., Sc.D., M.D., Ph.D., LL.D.

Director, School of Sociology and Social Service at Fordham

University, and Professor of Physiological Psychology,

Cathedral College, New York ; Fellow of the New

York Academy of Medicifie ; Life Member of the

New York Historical Society ; Member of

the American Anthropological Society ;

A.M. A.; A.A.A.S.; etc.

Essay Index Reprint Series

BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS, INC.
FREEPORT, NEW YORK

First published 1917
Reprinted 1966

^

MY UNCLE
MR. PATRICK GOLDEN

AS A SLIGHT TOKEN OF GRATITUDE

FOR MUCH THAT CAN NEVER

BE REPAID

PREFACE.

THE single rule in the choice of scientist
churchmen for this third volume of Cath-
olic Churchmen in Science is the sjime as for the
companion volumes — to present sketches of the
lives of distinguished scientific workers from
various periods of history. The Middle Ages,
the Renaissance, the eighteenth and the twentieth
century are here represented by men who in the
ecclesiastical state and under special religious
obligations found the time to do work in science
that has made their names immortal in history.
In every case their Church affiliations proved a
help, not a hindrance, to their scientific work, in
spite of the impression to the contrary that is
prevalent in many minds in our time.

I have to thank the editor of the Ave Maria
for permission to reprint the articles on " Lab-
oratories at the Vatican " and " Abbe Spallan-
zani, a Precursor of Pasteur " ; the articles on
Abbe Breuil and Father Obermaier have ap-
peared in The Ecclesiastical Review, and I am
indebted to the editor for permission to use them
in book form ; that on Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa
owes much to the chapter on this distinguished
churchman in my Old Time Makers of Medicine
and to an article on him in the Archives of
Diagnosis.

(vii)

VIU PREFACE

There has recently been question of the foun-
dation of an Institute for the Study of the His-
tory of Science. Its realization has, alas! been
delayed, as have so many other important intel-
lectual developments, by the great war which
absorbs nearly all energy and attention. I think
that very probably the articles contained in this
little volume may serve to emphasize how much
such an institution is needed. We have been so
intent in the past on the history of war and
politics that we have sadly neglected the ordered
story of man's great constructive achievements.
None of these has been more neglected than the
history of science, that is, man's thoughtful
efforts to penetrate with the human means at his
command the meaning of man's life and the uni-
verse in which he lives.

CONTENTS

PACB

Preface vii

1. Introduction : Laboratories at the Vatican

AND Papal Scientists 3

II. Roger Bacon 29

III. Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa 83

IV. Abb£ Spali.anzani : A Clerical Precursor of

Pasteur 115

V. AuBfe Breuil and the Cave-Men Artists . . 147

VI. Rev. Hugo Obermaier : The Time and Place

(IF THE Cave-Man in World IIistoky . . . 183

I.

INTRODUCTION.

TT is hard to find words to express
-'- the debt of gratitude which modern
civilization owes to the Roman Cath-
olic Church.— John Fiske, The Be-
ginnings of New England, or The
Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to
Civil and Religious Liberty.

INTRODUCTION.

LABORATORIES AT THE VATICAN AND
PAPAL SCIENTISTS.

PROFESSOR SARTON, a Belgian scholar of
distinction, driven from his home country
by war conditions there, has been engaged in
organizing in this country an institute for the
history of science. He was in Washington for
some time, in touch with the Smithsonian and
other Government scientific institutions; and
more recently has been at Harvard. Strange as
it may appear, in the midst of all the interest of
our day in science there has been comparatively
little interest in the history of science until very
recent years. The consequence has been a very
general misconception of the place of science in
the older time. Indeed, except among those who
paid particular attention to the history of science,
there has been a notion prevalent that there was
practically no development of physical science
until our time, and that the development of
science represented, as it were, a new phase in the
evolution of the human mind. Nothing could well
be less true than this ; for at all times men have
been interested in science, and at many times
they have made very significant observations and
drawn important conclusions from it.
3

4 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

A lack of knowledge of the history of science
has made men misunderstand entirely certain
phases of the relation of science to education and
to religion. There are a great many people who
seehi to think that, before the last generation or
two, the classics had constantly formed the basis
of education practically since the old classic days
themselves. Very few realize that the classics
were introduced under the name of the Human-
ities, or the New Learning, as the basis of edu-
cation only in the Renaissance time, and that this
phase of education has lasted only some four
hundred years. Before that period science was
the principal subject of attention at the univer-
sities; and indeed practically every topic taken
up in university curriculums was studied from
the scientific standpoint. This has come to be
realized very well by those who understand the
significance of what were known as the liberal
arts in the older time; for these, in spite of their
name, were really seven important phases of
education studied as sciences.

On the other hand, the failure to recognize the
fact that the medieval universities were all scien-
tific universities has been the fundamental reason
for the erroneous assertions with regard to the
attitude of the Church toward science. Just as
soon as it is understood that the old medieval in-
stitutions (founded under papal charters, fos-
tered by churchmen, usually with the chancellor
of the cathedral of the university town as the
chancellor of the university, with houses of the

INTRODUCTION

various religious Orders connected with the uni-
versity, and most of the professors ecclesiastics)
were quite literally scientific universities, then the
idea of any inherent opposition between Church
and Science at once vanishes.

Professor Sarton's work deserves, then, thor-
ough encouragement; and an institute for the
history of science which would give proper
scope for scholarship in this great field would do
more than anything else to remove misunder-
standings that are almost unpardonable because
founded on ignorance. Probably nothing would
illustrate better the necessity for an organized
knowledge of the history of science for those
who are interested in the subject than a passage
from Professor Huxley's inaugural address as
Lord Rector of the University of Aberdeen, in
which he took for his topic " Universities Actual
and Ideal." Professor Huxley was usually very
careful toi look up his authorities and to scruti-
nize the sources of his information, and seldom
made a serious slip; and yet on that occasion he
made some declarations which, when investigated
in the light of knowledge that has accumulated
as regards the history of science in more recent
years, prove to be absurdly fallacious. The fal-
lacy of the remark was all the more striking be-
cause there are several passages in that inaugural
address which I have often quoted, to show that
Professor Huxley was quite willing to acknowl-
edge, when he knew it, the good work that was
being done by the older universities.

6 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

It is said that when Professor Huxley began
the preparation of his inaugural address he
thought that the best treatment of his subject
would be a definite comparison between medieval
and modern universities — a comparison which
would, of course, prove unfavorable to the older
educational organizations, and therefore illus-
trate clearly and emphasize strongly the neces-
sity for modern modifications in university cur-
riculums which would prove more advantageous
for our age. At that time Oxford and Cam-
bridge were still conservatively clinging to the
classic curriculum as the essence of education,
and presumably were, therefore, still medieval
universities in the modern time.

To his great surprise, however. Professor
Huxley found that the teaching of the old medi-
eval universities was very different from what
he had imagined. He investigated rather care-
fully the significance of their usual curriculum,
recognized that the fundamental principles of it
were scientific, and then, after devoting some
time to the definite meaning of the trivitun and
quadrivium, the so-called " seven liberal arts,"
found that these represented very valuable ele-
ments in education. Every one of them was
studied from its scientific aspect. Professor
Huxley was charmed to find how thoroughly
scientific had been the methods of medieval uni-
versity teachers, so that he did not hesitate to
say that the work of these old institutions of
learning, " however imperfect and faulty judged

INTRODUCTION

by modern lights it may have been, brought them
face to face with all the leading aspects of the
many-sided mind of man " ; and he added : " I
doubt if the curriculum of any modern univer-
sity shows so clear and generous a comprehen-
sion of what is meant by culture as this old
triviimi and quadrivium does."

There is, however, another passage in the
same address that has always interested me even
more than this striking expression of praise from
so unexpected a source for the medieval univer-
sities. Its interest, however, is due to the fact
that in it Huxley's customary caution not to
make assertions until he had looked up his
authorities deserted him. He was caught by the
tradition of Church opposition to science, and
allowed himself to make declarations that even a
little careful study would have shown him to be
quite untrue. His address was published in the
Contemporary Review of the year in which it
was delivered, and even so glaring a contradic-
tion of history as is contained in the passage
that I shall presently quote, passed unnoticed,
and was considered by many, if not practically
all, of the readers to represent the actual truth
of the matter. It sums up in a few words what
was the impression of Huxley's generation, and
what has continued to be the impression of a
great many people who think they know some-
thing about such matters, or indeed often assume
that they know all there is to be known about
them ; and are quite unconscious of the fact that

8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

they are accepting an old-time historical tradition
founded on religious prejudice, but absolutely
devoid of any foundation in the history of things
as they actually happened.

Huxley is talking of the attitude of the Church
toward science; that is, of course, toward the
physical sciences, and does not hesitate to say
with that thoroughgoing completeness of asser-
tion always so characteristic of the man who is
dilating on a subject of which he is profoundly
ignorant : " Physical science, on the other hand,
was an irreconcilable enemy to be excluded at
all hazards. The College of Cardinals has not
distinguished itself in physics or physiology ; and
no Pope has as yet set up public laboratories in
the Vatican."

I feel sure that most of his hearers at Aber-
deen, as well as his readers in the Contemporary
Review, responded to this sally of Professor
Huxley with a good-humored smile over even
the bare idea that cardinals should ever have in-
terested themselves in physics or physiology, or
that any Pope should ever have set up public
laboratories in the Vatican. The very notion
was a good joke. I am just as sure that a great
many people in our time — indeed, I venture to
say most of those who are teaching the physical
sciences at the universities — would feel the same
way even now. And yet the direct contradictory
of both these propositions is quite literally
demonstrable of proof; for cardinals and even
Popes have distinguished themselves in physics

INTRODUCTION 9

and physiology, and the Popes during many cen-
turies set up public laboratories in the Vatican.
It is not in our time alone that such apparently
surprising events have occurred, but it was in
the long ago ; and there has actually been a defi-
nite effort on the part of the Popes not only to
keep in touch with physical science, but to foster
it, often to endow it liberally, over and over
again to honor its great workers, and to encour-
age their labors in a great many different ways.

To take the second proposition first. The
utter absurdity of it in the light of history is
susceptible of demonstration without having to
appeal to anything more than a modicum of
knowledge of history. For there have been
Papal astronomers at the Vatican — taking that
term, of course, in the generic sense in which
Professor Huxley used it of the residence of the
Popes — almost continuously for centuries. Pope
Leo XIII in his Encyclical Motu Propria, issued
some twenty-five years ago, reminded us that
" Gregory XIII ordered a tower to be erected in
a convenient part of the Vatican gardens, and to
be fitted out with the greatest and best instru-
ments of the time. There he held the meetings
of the learned men to whom the reform of the
calendar had been entrusted. The tower stands
to this day, a witness to the munificence of its
founder."

Gregory XIII's policy in this matter was pur-
sued faithfully by his successors, though the ob-
servatory founded by him fell shortly afterward

10 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

into disuse for the purpose originally intended,
not at all because of any opposition to science,
but because its place was supplied by another
Roman institution almost as directly under the
patronage of the Popes. This was the Roman
College, the great mother school of the Jesuits
at Rome.

The Jesuits had a special vow to carry out the
wishes of the Popes in all regards. As they
were the most important teaching Order of the
Qiurch, deeply interested in science as well as in
the classics — as indeed under Gregory XIII the
scientist in control of the correction of the cal-
endar, holding the charge of the Vatican Ob-
servatory, was Father Christopher Clavius, the
well-known Jesuit — it is not surprising that suc-
ceeding Popes, in order to avoid duplication of
work that would be done much more efficiently
in a single institution, allowed the Vatican Ob-
servatory to lapse, so as to give all their patron-
age to the Observatory of the Roman College,
which really, after all, was in many ways the
Papal, or at least the Roman, Observatory. The
best proof of this is that the Vatican Observa-
tory has always been restored whenever, as at
present, the Jesuits, for any reason, were not
allowed to continue their work at the Roman
College. There is a Jesuit at the head of it now.

Of course there may be people in our time
who do not think of an astronomical observatory
as a laboratory, but that is exactly what it is.
There are some for whom the word laboratory

INTRODUCTION II

means only a chemical laboratory, or at most a
chemical and physical laboratory. There is no
reason at all, however, for such a distinction,
for what is meant by a laboratory is a place
where actual scientific observations are recorded
and their significance worked out. As the Cen-
tury Dictionary says, a laboratory is " a room,
building or workshop especially fitted with suit-
able apparatus for conducting investigations in
any department of a science."

It is interesting, however, to note that this
was not the sole form of laboratory that the
Popes not only countenanced but patronized, and
often endowed. At the older universities the
two forms of laboratory work, that is, opportuni-
ties for the making of actual observations, were
in astronomy and in anatomy. The old medical
schools did their laboratory work in the dissect-
ing rooms. It might be thought by many, be-
cause of an erroneous tradition in the matter,
that surely in this department there would be
no likelihood of the Popes having a laboratory;
but, then, those who think that the Galileo case
demonstrates the utter opposition of the Popes
to science would be quite sure that there could
have been no astronomical observatory at the
Vatican, in spite of the fact that Gregory XIII's
observatory just mentioned was established some
fifty years before the condemnation of Galileo.

There is a very widespread persuasion that
the Popes and the Church were opposed to
anatomy; but there is no truth in it. On the

12 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

contrary, it is comparatively easy to show, as I
have done in my book, The Popes and Science,
that the Popes encouraged the study of anatomy
by dissection, and that the Papal University of
Rome at the Sapienza did excellent work in this
department, and successive Popes for several
centuries invited some of the most distinguished
anatomists of their time, who were also, by the
way, some of the most distinguished anatomists
of all time, to become professors of anatomy at
the Papal Medical School. This was not situated
at the Vatican of course, literally speaking, but
it was so closely in touch in every regard with
the Pope that it comes, without any far-fetched
construction or undue stretching of significance,
to represent a definite contradiction of Huxley's
expression with regard to the absence of labora-
tories under Papal patronage in their capital city.
Among those invited to teach and develop
anatomy at the Sapienza were such distinguished
anatomists as Columbus, to whom we owe the
first description of the circulation; Eustachius,
after whom the Eustachian tube is named ; Ficco-
lomini, one of the great teachers of anatomy in
his time, though his name is attached to no
special discovery; Csesalpinus, one of the most
learned men of his day, who had taught botany
at Pisa and brought the Botanic Garden there,
the first of its kind, into magnificent condition;
Varolius, after whom the Pons Varolii in the
brain is named; Malpighi, who with the highest
right of discovery, has his name attached to more

INTRODUCTION 1 3

Structures in the human body than any other;
Lancisi, a great teacher, and a fine original in-
vestigator, whose lectures not only attracted stu-
dents from all over the world, but even brought
some of the most distinguished medical men
from every country in Europe to listen to them.
All this was done at Rome in the Papal Medical
School, under the patronage of the Popes, and
the important publications issued by these men
while teaching at the Papal Medical School were
usually dedicated to the Popes.

As to the two forms of laboratory work, then,
astronomical and anatomical, that universities
took up in the older days, the Popes not only
were not in opposition to them, but showed them-
selves ready to foster and encourage them in
every way. There has been nO' laboratory of
chemistry or physics founded at the Vatican, but
then circumstances have been different in mod-
ern times, and there has been no good reason for
the Popes to take such extraordinary steps as
such foundations would imply. In the old times
their attitude toward science was all-important
for its development, and they made their dispo-
sition in its regard quite unmistakable by their
foundation of laboratories in the two sciences
which were studied in„this practical way.

When the science of meteorology began to
develop, the Popes encouraged that, and did for
it very much what they had done for anatomy
and astronomy in the older days. During the
latter half of the nineteenth century Father Sec-

14 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

chi was working at Rome. The Popes took great
interest in his work, encouraged his development
of astronomical instruments, and also of instru-
ments of various kinds for the automatic obser-
vation of the weather, and enabled him to ac-
complish much in this way.

All over the world Jesuits have been deeply
interested in the development of the science of
meteorology, and have installed instruments so
that there might be larger numbers of observa-
tions to collate. The Jesuits in the Philippine
Islands reduced these observations to such terms
as gave them definite practical results in their
ability to foretell storms probably better than
others. The sudden severe storms of the Philip-
pine regions had been extremely destructive of
life and property, particularly at sea, and the
Jesuit developments in meteorology showed that
these storms were by no means so sudden as had
been thought, but gave due warnings of their
coming. Almost needless to say, without the
positive encouragement of the Popes such experi-
mentation would not have been allowed to con-
tinue in the Order which makes its special vow
of obedience to the Pope, and whose general
policy is made to conform so strictly to Papal
wishes.

As with regard to meteorology, so, too, seis-
mology, the science of the phenomena related to
earthquakes and terrestrial tremors of all kinds,
has been mainly developed by the Jesuits with
the encouragement and even the patronage of the

INTRODUCTION IS

Popes. Jesuits from distant missionary coun-
tries on visits to the Vatican have been asked
about their work, stimulated to go on with it;
and presents have been made by the Popes them-
selves as well as by members of the Curia, especi-
ally cardinals who wanted to show their interest
in this important subject. Huxley's slurring
remark, well calculated to raise a laugh, is really
an example of ignorance; though, of course, it
is rather a question of failure to estimate prop-
erly the significance of the factors of the Papal
policy expressed in a number of ways. There is
an old English maxim, " Laugh and show your
ignorance," that is quite literally exemplified in
expressions of this kind.

The other expression of Huxley, " The Col-
lege of Cardinals has not distinguished itself in
physics or physiology," might well be thought to
be less susceptible of direct contradiction than
the relation of the Vatican to laboratories; and
yet I may say at once that only a little knowledge
of the actual details of the history of science in
the older times is needed to show that that, too,
is an absurdly ignorant remark. Of course car-
dinals are ecclesiastics; that is, men devoted to
Church work, and therefore it cannot be ex-
pected that many of them, whose lives are per-
force occupied with interests very widely diverse
from physical science, and above all from physics
and physiology, should make distinguished con-
tributions to these sciences. And yet it is not
difficult to name some cardinals, and at least one

l6 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

Pope, whose names are associated directly with
advances in these sciences. These facts will
serve to show clearly that it was not because of
any opposition on the part of the Church to
physical science that many of its highest digni-
taries did not reach distinction in these depart-
ments of science, but only because they were
occupied with other interests — and even in spite
of that preoccupation more than one or two of
the cardinals did work that has given them im-
perishable distinction in the history of science.

Probably the most distinguished contributor to
physics and physiology among the cardinals was
the great Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who was
so close to the Popes during the fifteenth century
and whose works are full of extremely interest-
ing original observation with regard to subjects
related to both physics and physiology. He has
a distinct place in the history of medicine; for,
as I pointed out in my Old Time Makers of
Medicine, he was the first to suggest exact
methods of diagnosis for medicine. The count-
ing of the pulse rate, and the noting of its rela-
tion to the patient's condition, seem very obvious
things now ; but in his day it was a real scientific
innovation. Besides, he taught that specific grav-
ity as a principle for comparative estimation of
the fluids of the body might serve to give a scien-
tific basis to diagnosis which it did not possess
before. In describing this suggestion of Car-
dinal Cusa in medical journals I have called it
jrhe earliest allusion to accurate methods for

INTRODUCTION 1 7

the diagnosis of disease in the history of
medicine, which it is. The whole story is very
interesting, and the Cardinal's book De Docta
Ignorantia, that is " On Learned Ignorance," in
which he points out how many things there are
which people think they know, but which they
really do not know at all, represents an accurate
scientific point of view usually supposed to be
modern.

Any one who wants to realize how very dif-
ferent from the attitude of opposition to science
was the position of the Popes and the Church,
should read the story of Father Kircher, S.J. It
is to be found in the first volume of Catholic
Churchmen in Science, and makes very clear
how generously scientific activities were encour-
aged in Rome. There is scarcely any mode of
physical science that Father Kircher did not
pursue with enthusiasm, and his great books are
marvels both of printing and illustration and
landmarks in the history of science. Brother
Potamian, in his catalogue of the Latimer Clark
Library of the Institute of American Engineers,
calls particular attention to the fact that electro-
magnetismos is the astonishing title which Father
Kircher gave to a chapter of his book Magnes,
sive de Arte Magnetica, — " The Magnet; or. On
Magnetic Art," which was published in 1641.

There is scarcely a phase of ordinary physical
science on which Kircher did not wriie a text-
book, and these text-books were not little
manuals, but huge tomes usually magnificently

l8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

illustrated, so that they are now among the bib-
liographic treasures of the world in the history
of science. Besides the book on magnetism
already mentioned, three years later there ap-
peared a book on light and shade, Ars Magna
Lucis et Umbrae; and five years later a book on
acoustics, Musurgia Universalis, with the sub-
title, Ars Harmoniae et Discordiae, " The Uni-
versal Science of Music and the Art of Harmony
and Discord " ; and later there was a book on
astronomy called Iter Celeste, " The Celestial
Way " ; and then one on geology, metallurgy and
mineralogy called Mundus Suhterraneus, which
was often referred to as the author's greatest
book, and was translated into a number of mod-
ern languages, including English, though in the
seventeenth century Englishmen were loath
enough to draw their inspiration from Jesuit
writers even on such indifferent subjects as
science.

Curiously enough, one of his books was called
Physiologia Experimentalis, which might be
translated " Experimental Physiology,'' though it
was really a text-book of experimental physics.
It contained all the experimental parts, and
especially the demonstrations in chemistry,
physics, music, magnetism, and mechanics, as
well as acoustics and optics drawn from his
larger works on these phases of science. This
book of Father Kircher's formed the ground-
work of most text-books of science for a full
century after his time, and it was freely drawn

INTRODUCTION I9

upon for matter and illustrations in many coun-
tries.

All of these books were published not only
without opposition on the part of the Pope, but
with the greatest possible encouragement. Father
Kircher was making Rome a center of interest
for the physical science of the world, and was
at the same time the personal friend of many
successive Popes, often admitted to private
audiences, and asked to explain his most recent
discoveries and demonstrate his experiments.

Above all, Father Kircher was active in an-
other field of physical science which I feel sure
Professor Huxley would have thoroughly com-
mended had he known it, or rather had he
thought of it at the moment vyhen he was mak-
ing his scoffing observation. Father Kircher is
deservedly looked up to as the originator of the
modern museum movement. He gathered to-
gether a whole host of curios of many kinds in
his famous museum, called after him the Museo
Kircheriano, or more simply The Kircherianum.
He aroused the lively interest of Jesuit mission-
aries all over the world, and they sent him curi-
ous specimens of many kinds illustrating anthro-
pology, ethnology, zoology, folklore, and other
phases of natural history and science, usually
considered to be much more modern in origin
than his time ; and he gathered all these together
so as to provide material for study. The Popes,
when they received curiosities from distant mis-

20 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

sionaries, sometimes deposited them with Father
Kircher, or willed them to his collection after
their death; and this museum is, I think, the
pioneer in its line, in the history of the world.

Strange as it may seem to some, there is at
least one philosopher-physician among the Popes,
though there are of course many more great theo-
logians (and theology is a science), many distin-
guished philosophers, and many illustrious schol-
ars. The philosopher-physician was John XXI,
who had been known before his election as Pope
as Peter of Spain and who had been a professor
in several universities before he was made a
bishop, and eventually raised to the Papal See.
Curiously enough, he is the only Pope whom
Dante speaks of as in Paradise, placing him be-
side other such distinguished scholars as Saints
Bonaventure, Augustine, Chrysostom, Anselm,
along with Abbot Joachim and Hugh of St. Vic-
tor. The poet calls Pope John XXI

him of Spain
Who through twelve volumes full of light descants.

The fame of this Pope must have been still
fresh in the minds of Dante's generation; for
Peter of Spain was born, according to the best
ascertainable record, in the second decade of the
thirteenth century, living to be past 70 years of
age; and as Dante himself was born in 1265,
they must have been for a time contemporaries.
Peter made his medical and scientific studies at
the University of Paris, and in a letter in later

INTRODUCTION 21

life he confesses that he retains a special affec-
tion for Paris, because " within its dwellings he
had been brought up from early years and ap-
plied himself to various sciences, finding the
opportunities provided for education most favor-
able. After the deep draughts of knowledge
there obtained, as far as the God of majesty, the
Giver of true wisdom, permitted him to take its
opportunities, he does not think that he will be
ever able to forget how much he owes to this
mother of study."

When he was about thirty-five years of age
Peter received an invitation to the chair of
physics, as medicine was then called, at the Uni-
versity of Siena. While here he wrote a text-
book on eye diseases. Thence he returned to his
native country, Portugal, where he became the
administrative head of the schools which existed
there under the Archbishop of Lisbon. His ad-
ministrative ability in this position led to his
selection, after the death of the incumbent of the
See, as Archbishop of Lisbon. A physician arch-
bishop was not such an anomaly then as he would
be now, for many ecclesiastics of that time prac-
tised both medicine and surgery and became dis-
tinguished in this profession.^

One of the greatest of the surgeons of the
thirteenth century, whose text-book has been
preserved for us, was Bishop Theodoric, an
Italian. He wrote on the use of anesthetics as

1 See Catholic Churchmen in Science, Series II, for
his life.

22 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

well as on many modes of operation that are sup-
posed to be quite modern. Monks, and members
of religious Orders generally, were forbidden to
practise medicine and surgery, and this prohibi-
tion is sometimes asserted, but erroneously, to
have applied to all clergymen. There is abun-
dant evidence that the secular clergy were quite
free, under certain circumstances at least, to con-
tinue the practice of both medicine and surgery.

John, the physician. Archbishop of Lisbon,
rose subsequently to hold other high positions in
the Church, becoming a Cardinal and finally
Pope. What is interesting for us here, because
of Huxley's contemptuous sneer as to physiology
at the Vatican, is that his little book on eye dis-
eases also discusses the anatomy and the physi-
ology of the eye according to the ideas which
were prevalent at that time. His work shows
that he was familiar with the writings of his age,
and it has attracted a good deal of attention from
modern ophthalmologists.

Pope John XXI was not the only Pope distin-
guished in science, for, some two centuries be-
fore him, Pope Sylvester H had been the famous
physicist and physical scientist of his time. He
became well known for his inventions for teach-
ing and demonstration purposes. He lectured on
astronomy at Rheims ; and in order to make his
lectures clearer, he constructed elaborate globes
of the terrestrial and celestial spheres, on which
the courses of the planets were marked. He in-
geniously fitted up an abacus for demonstrations

INTRODUCTION 23

in arithmetic and geometrical processes ; and the
development of demonstrations in teaching were
evidently his forte. His mathematical apparatus
is said to have had twenty-seven divisions and a
thousand counters of horn. There are some
speculations on light from him, and he was very
much interested not only in music but the scien-
tific aspects of sound. William of Malmesbury
has incorporated into his chronicle a description
of a great complex musical instrument, which
was still to be seen at Rheims in his day and
which was attributed to Gerbert's inventive and
mechanical ability. A contemporary declares
that Gerbert made a clock, or sundial, at Magde-
burg which measured the hours exactly, and that
it was soon imitated throughout Europe.

What particularly takes the point out of Pro-
fessor Huxley's passing jest on the supposed
utter impossibility of the Popes having ever had
laboratories at the Vatican, or the cardinals
doing anything for physiology, is the fact that
one of the most noteworthy features in the lives
of not a few but very many Popes is their friend-
Ship for distinguished scientific workers of their
generations. I have already mentioned Cardinal
Nicholas of Cusa, probably the greatest scientific
genius of his day, and his intimate relations not
alone to one but to three or four Popes of his
time. In the thirteenth century the men most
highly honored at Rome were Albertus Magnus,
Thomas Aquinas, and others whose works con-
tained many significant references to physical

24 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

science, who discussed seriously the philosophic
problems that underlie scientific principles, and
who gathered together all the information that
could be secured. In this regard it must not be
forgotten that we owe to Roger Bacon great
books, the contents of which would have seemed
utterly beyond comprehension or imagination as
having been compiled in his time, did we not
actually possess them. That possession is due to
the friendship of Cardinal Foulques, who was
afterward Pope Clement, for Roger Bacon. In
similar fashion we probably owe most of the
precious writing of Constantine Africanus to the
persuasion of Abbot Desiderius, who was after-
ward Pope Victor III, and who continued while
Pope to encourage Constantine in his writing.

In the latest edition of my volume on The
Popes and Science I have devoted a special Ap-
pendix of nearly fifty pages of rather small type
to the story of the Papal physicians. There is
no set of men whose names are connected to-
gether by any bond in the history of medicine
who are as distinguished as these Papal physi-
cians. Many of them are famous for distin-
guished original work. All of them had done
some at least of the work to which they owe their
fame before being invited to Rome to continue
it there. It was because of their reputation as
great original scientists that they were invited to
Rome to become the Papal physicians. I know
nothing in the whole history of science which
makes it so clear that, far from opposing science

INTRODUCTION 25

in any way, the Popes wanted to encourage and
patronize it to the best of their ability, as the
fact that when they wished to appoint a Papal
physician they chose one who was famous in the
scientific world, and gave him the prestige of
this position, which assured him a place in the
Christian world higher than any that could be
secured in any other way.

It is easy to remember what confidential rela-
tions existed between the Popes and their physi-
cians. We can judge of them very well from
the relations between educated men and their
physicians at the present day. In the older time
physicians were even less likely to be narrow in
their interest in science than they are at present ;
and, as a matter of fact, many of the Papal
physicians made important contributions to the
sciences related to medicine, and not a few of
them were distinguished pioneers in the biolog-
ical sciences. Nothing could have been better
calculated to maintain a favorable attitude toward
science and its advances on the part of the
Popes than the presence in so influential a posi-
tion close to them, of representative physicians
who had been honored by their fellows in many
ways and had done distinctly original scientific
work.

Between the appointment of Papal physicians
and the maintenance of Papal astronomers, the
Popes certainly did all they could to keep prop-
erly in touch with physical science and even to
maintain laboratories at least in anatomy and

26 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

astronomy, and to encourage in every way the
development of these tvi^o important sciences
Under these sciences in the older days were in-
cluded, on the one hand, not a little of physics
and mathematics, and on the other a great deal
of physiology, and by its medical relations much
of chemistry and the related sciences. Only pro-
found ignorance of this could possibly have per-
mitted Mr. Huxley to indulge his humor, at the
expense of the Popes as he thought, though it
was really at his own expense ; for his expres-
sions make it very clear that this phase of knowl-
edge had never come to him, and that he too,
like so many others, was being led astray by the
Protestant prejudice with regard to the attitude
of the Popes toward science. It was Huxley
himself who wrote home from Rome to St
George Mivart, the English biologist, that he had
been looking into the Galileo case and found
" that the Pope and the cardinals had rather the
best of it." What he meant was that the ordi-
nary impression with regard to the Galileo case
was founded on a misconception of the real
nature of that celebrated case.

In spite of this recognition of the role that
prejudgment plays in such cases, Huxley, as we
have seen, allowed himself to be led astray by a
similar misunderstanding with regard to the gen-
eral policy of the Church toward science. The
Galileo case, even if it were what many people
imagine it to have been, an attempt to throttle
science — which of course it was not — is the

INTRODUCTION 2."]

single example of that kind of activity that most
people know anything about; and, as Cardinal
Newman remarked, if this is the single exception
in a policy of 600 years, then it is surely the ex-
ception which proves that the very opposite was
the rule.

Even Huxley, however, in spite of his rather
careful investigation of such disputed points in
general, did not have available sufficient details
of the knowledge of the history of science to ap-
preciate the real place of the Popes with regard
to it. They were literally patrons of science, just
as much as they were of art and education and
literature, even to the extent of making founda-
tions for astronomical observatories and anatom-
ical laboratories in their capital city when there
was ever so much more need for patronage than
there is at the present time. When these were
the only two kinds of laboratories organized in
science, both of them were to be found at Rome
under Papal patronage, and in both some of the
best work of the world was being done.

Manifestly, then, there is a place for an insti-
tute of the history of science, and its collections
and the investigations that it will initiate and
encourage cannot fail to do a great deal to re-
move erroneous impressions, above all with re-
gard to the relations of science to education and
religion. What we need is more knowledge, and
then prejudice will disappear. Modern scientific
history, by replacing vague impressions with ex-
act documentary details and altering undocu-

28 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

merited convictions into reasonable open-minded
ness, has done an immense amount already to
clear up historical fallacies with regard to the
Church. The history of science carefully written
would be of enormous weight in removing all
sorts of prejudices which have accumulated since
the Reformation; for the one idea of the Re-
formers and their successors has been to make
people believe that until the sixteenth century
there was nothing at all worth while being done
in the intellectual order, and that, above all, men
were not free to think for themselves.

II.

ROGER BACON.

'TpHE Encyclopedia and Novum Or-
■*■ ganon of the thirteenth century, a
work equally wonderful with regard
to its general scheme and to the
special treatises with which the out-
lines of the plans are filled up. —
Wheweli,, on Roger Bacon's Opus
Majus.

'T'HEN Aquinas summed up in his
-*■ profound speculations the sub-
stance of Catholic Theology, and while
themorning twilight of modern science
might be discerned in the treatises of
Roger Bacon, while wandering min-
strelsy revealed the treasures of mod-
ern speech, soon to be wrought under
the hands of Dante and Chaucer into
forms of exquisite beauty, the sacred
fervor of the apostolic ages found
itself renewed in the tender and mystic
piety of St. Francis of Assisi. It was
a wonderful time, but after all less
memorable as the culmination of
medieval Empire and medieval
Church than as the dawning of the
new era in which we live to-day. —
John Fiske, The Beginnings of
New England, or The Puritan The-
ocracy in its Relations to Civil and
Religious Liberty.

II.

ROGER BACON.

THE last international function in the acad-
emic world to attract the attention of the
civilized countries before the great war of 1914
separated civilization into elements so bitterly
discordant as to make even the thought of a re-
union of university men of the different coun-
tries of Europe quite out of the question for
years perhaps, was the celebration at Oxford
University in England in June, 1914, of the seven
hundredth anniversary of the birth of Roger
Bacon. According to a reasonably well-founded
tradition the Doctor Mirabilis, as he has been
called, " the wonderful teacher " (for doctor had
not lost its pristine significance), was born in
June, 1214. Seven hundred years is a long time
for a man to be so remembered that his birthday
is celebrated even by his fellow-countrymen, but
such a celebration has even greater significance
when it attracts international attention. Usually
the men whose memory is thus recalled centuries
after their death, have made significant achieve-
ments in war or politics, achievements that per-
manently affect the status of a nation and so
readily suggest anniversary celebrations.

Very seldom indeed is it that intellectual
accomplishments are deemed worthy of recog-
nition of this kind hundreds of years afterward.
.31

32 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

It is all the more striking, then, that the name
and fame of a medieval scholar should have been
thus gloriously honored by the university author-
ities of the world seven centuries after his time
and that his work should be so emphatically re-
called to public attention. It is, above all, an
index of that newer, truer knowledge of the
medieval period which has been coming to us for
the past two or three generations and which has
culminated now in the very general recognition,
that the later centuries of what used to be called
the benighted Middle Ages, or even the Dark
Ages, were among the most wonderful in the
history of the race and that particularly the thir-
teenth century, which Roger Bacon's life so
largely represents for us (for he was born in
the first part of its second decade and lived into
its last), is one of the supreme periods in the
history of humanity.

Lest it should seem a subject for special sur-
prise that a medieval scholar, a university man
of that thirteenth century, should have been the
subject of such a celebration in our time, it prob-
ably deserves to be recalled here that the only
scholar in all history with whose name the ad-
jective " great " has come to be so associated
now that it is the ordinary impression that it is
a part of his name, was a contemporary of Roger
Bacon's. This was, of course, Albertus Magnus,
whose family name, Albert of Bollstadt, has been
lost sight of entirely in the appellation magnus
conferred on him by the generation that imme-

ROGER BACON 33

diately followed him. Albert and Roger Bacon
met on more than one occasion and knew each
other's works very well, though mainly to dis-
agree on many important questions. They were
quite as much opposed in habit of mind and
philosophic viewpoint as any two schools of rival
thought in our time. In spite of this difference
of opinion, both of them are deservedly in honor,
for both had certain ways of looking at things
that will ever attract human attention.

Probably the greatest surprise with regard to
the recent celebration of the anniversary of the
birth of Roger Bacon is that it was arranged by
the Royal Society of England, an organization
strictly scientific in its aims, and that it attracted
the particular attention almost entirely of the
scientists of the world. It is because Roger
Bacon anticipated many things in what we are
pleased to call modern physical science that his
septicentenary was enthusiastically celebrated.
We have become very much interested in science
during the past three generations, but until quite
recently in our own generation there was a very
prevalent impression that no development of
science worth while talking about had taken
place before the last century or two, and above
all that no scientific thinkers or workers worth
while recalling had lived until almost our own
time. At last, however, we are waking up to the
realities of the history of science and have come
to recognize the fact that a great many of the
underlying fundamental and most significant

34 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

ideas in it were in the minds of men generations
before our time. This was indeed the real mean-
ing of the international celebration of the seven
hundredth anniversary of the birth of Roger
Bacon.

The same ignoring of other modes of achieve-
ment in mankind before our time has been very
common in the last few generations, and it is as
a ground for hope that there may be further
awakening to our ignorance of many wonderful
things in the past, that the celebration of the
Bacon centenary has its most promising interest.
The fact of the matter is that it is only as our
own interests develop that we come to recog-
nize the significance of interest in the older time.
When we had no architecture, no arts, no crafts
to speak of, and when our books were cheap
and vile (vile in Latin means for sale), we could
not appreciate many of their interests in the
Middle Ages, when they were devoting them-
selves to the making of beautiful buildings,
charming arts and crafts work and handsome
books. When we had no agricultural schools, we
could not appreciate that the monasteries were
agricultural schools and were doing fine work
for drainage, irrigation, and the improvement of
agriculture in every way. Our knowledge of the
Middle Ages is growing, but above all our own
development in other ways is gradually coming
back to the level of the medieval period, and so
we are coming to appreciate better the work of
its scholars.

ROGER BACON 35

So it is with these medieval scholars like Roger
Bacon. The last three or four generations of
mankind have wakened up to the scientific ideas
that occupied the generation to which Roger
Bacon, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas
belonged, after a long period during which there
was a stagnation of scientific ideas. A great
many people seem inclined to think that all higher
education before our time was founded on the
classics. But they forget that the classics as the
basis of education came in only with the New
Learning in the Renaissance time, and that the
old medieval universities were really scientific
universities. It was no less a protagonist of
modern science than Thomas Huxley who in his
address as the Rector of Aberdeen University
some thirty years ago, reviewing early days of
university teaching at Aberdeen, did not hesitate
to declare that the so-called seven liberal arts as
taught in the old universities were viewed really
from a scientific standpoint and that they pro-
vided " a better instrument for the development
of the many-sided mind of man than the curric-
ulum of any modern university." '

Bacon's Eclipse.

Perhaps the most interesting feature with re-
gard to the present-day reawakening of high
estimation for Roger Bacon is to be found in the

1 See Chapter on Laboratories at the Vatican, for
quotation.

36 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

fact that while there are many references to
Bacon in our English literature, practically all of
them after the end of the Middle Ages are in a
spirit of supreme depreciation. Oxford, which
now turns to honor her son, was the leader in
these. Bacon's name became a byword. The
brazen nose of Brasenose College was said to be
Bacon's head. Many the joke there was about it.
It was much worse than what we could call a
" bone head " ; it was a head of bronze into
which no idea could be made to penetrate. Even
as late as 1818 Lord Byron has some contemp-
tuous references to Friar Bacon's brazen head,
though these were probably only a reecho of the
literary traditions of the Elizabethan time when
Bacon was looked upon as a conceited ass or else
an impudent imposter.

All this only proves now to have been just a
question of a genius misunderstood. It is a dan-
gerous thing for a man to be ahead of his time,
though what is usually forgotten is that it is just
as dangerous for a man to be behind his time.
The truth of the matter is that at moments when
ideas are taken seriously and mankind is in the
midst of a critical period, it is dangerous to dis-
agree with one's fellows. We thought that men
had outlived this, or had been educated beyond
it, until this war showed us that men reason no
more now than at any other time. They adopt
certain views and then are prone to assume that
anyone who disagrees with them cannot be quite
sincere. Roger Bacon was a genius and thought

ROGER BACON 37

for himself, and disagreed with a great many in
his own generation, so that it was no wonder that
he proved an excellent exemplification of one of
Dean Swift's famous expressions. The satiric
Dean of St. Patrick's said, " When a true genius
appears in the world, you may know him by
this sign — that all the asses are in confederacy
against him." The confederacy against Bacon
was not so much noted in his own time as in
the centuries after the Middle Ages, and it con-
tinued until the world caught up with the ideas
which the medieval friar had advanced and by
which he had anticipated modern thought.

It is not really a source of surprise then, or
should not be, that the modern scientific world
should go back seven hundred years to celebrate
the birthday of a great man of the medieval
period, but what is surprising is that it should
have taken so long for the modern world to wake
up to the fact that these old-time scholars were
working at the same problems as the most mod-
ern of scientists, and were occupied even with
the practical application of scientific principles to
human utilities quite as we are. Bacon, for in-
stance, discussing gunpowder and explosives
generally, very calmly suggested that a time
would come when carriages would run over the
land without horses or men pulling them, and
boats over the sea without oars or sails. His
idea was that sometime man would harness ex-
plosives; and when it is recalled that the two
great sources of energy for locomotion on land

38 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

and sea, steam and gasoline, are both of explo-
sive nature, it would be easy to understand how
acute was Bacon's provision. He also suggested
that men might make flying machines, and was
quite sure that the problem of aviation would
some time be solved and would not prove very
difficult. As a matter of fact, as he so clearly
anticipated, just as soon as we had harnessed
explosives, locomotion on sea and land and in
the air became an easy problem.

For us here in America the story of Roger
Bacon must ever be of special interest because
of the fact that it was a passage from one of
Bacon's works, the Opus Majus, which above all
influenced Columbus to come to the conclusion
that land could be reached by sailing westward.
Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly made a quotation from
Bacon's chapter on Geography in the Opus Majus
in his work, the Imago Mundi. Columbus was
so impressed by these expressions from Bacon
that, after making a commentary on them, he
quoted them in a letter that he wrote to Ferdi-
nand and Isabella, making clear to them the fact
that his notion of sailing westward was not a
novel chimeric scheme, but that some at least of
the best scientific thought of the world for two
or three centuries had been converging on this
westward exploration ; and he urged this as an ad-
ditional motive for them to patronize it. Bacon's
Opus Majus, therefore, as the source of inspira-
tion for Columbus was an important factor for
the discovery of America, and if Columbus is to

ROGER BACON 39

be considered, as of course he ought to be, as the
father of the great idea that led to the discovery
of America, then Roger Bacon must be looked
up to as a direct progenitor of that same genial
idea.

A good many historians of education have
been very much inclined to laugh at the high-
sounding titles, given in almost absurd flattery it
would seem, which the medieval scholars con-
ferred on their masters. Doctor angelicus, miri-
ficus, subtilis, accuratissimus, and so on, repre-
sent for them only refined flattery and lofty com-
pliment, doing much more credit to the heart of
the students of the Middle Ages than to their
minds. Not a few presumably well-informed
people might be of the opinion that the ignorance
of the students was so profound that anything
more than ordinary knowledge on the part of
their masters must have seemed wonderful to
them. After recalling even a little of the influ-
ence that Bacon had on the greatest minds of the
subsequent centuries, and then the highly com-
plimentary renewal of interest in him which has
taken place in our own time, one comes to appre-
ciate more and more how eminently suitable for
him was the name Doctor Mirabilis, under which
he was known and which he surely merited
highly, if any teacher ever did. If his case is to
be taken as evidence for others, then these titles
of the Middle Ages so far from being idle flat-
tery given to favorite professors must have been
amply deserved,

40 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

The story of the man of this prophetic vision,
who on strictly intellectual grounds foresaw long
subsequent scientific interests, and his career as
a scholar of the most varied liberal interests, are
among the very precious chapters in the history
of the human intellect. It is quite impossible to
tell it all in the limitations of our space, but at
least some of the most important headings may
be discussed briefly, especially in their relation
to present-day life and thought.

An Old-Time Academic Career.

Roger Bacon was probably born near Ilchester,
though not in Somersetshire, in which Ilchester
is located, but across the line in neighboring Dor-
setshire. He was a younger son of a noble
family of which there was a number of branches
in England and Normandy. His elder brother,
whom he describes as " my rich brother," suc-
ceeded to the estates. There was another brother
whom Bacon describes as " a scholar." There
was a famous Robert Bacon, a well-known
teacher among the Dominicans, who died in 1245
and who is said to have been Bacon's uncle.
Bacon went to Oxford about 1226, when he was
twelve years of age, and continued to live either
at Oxford or at Paris for the next forty years.
In 1267 Bacon declared, " I have always been
studious, and except for two of those (past)
forty years I have always been in studio." This
last phrase probably does not mean merely en-
gaged at study but " at a university," for the

ROGER BACON 4I

usual title in the thirteenth century for what we
call a university was studium generate.

His university life for these forty years was
passed between study and lecturing. He lectured
both at Oxford and at Paris, and attracted great
attention and made many favorite pupils. He
wrote a number of elementary treatises for stu-
dents, so that, as he says himself, " men used to
wonder before I became a friar that I lived,
owing to my excessive labors." They could not
understand where he got the time, but above all
they were sure that he would break down his
health by his constant application. In the light
of this it is rather interesting to realize that in
spite of a life of the most strenuous intellectual
activity he probably lived to be over eighty years
of age, intellectually capable and active until the
very end.

Undoubtedly he owed the maintenance of his
intellectual vigor to the breadth and variety of
his mental interests. Probably no one in his
time in the west of Europe knew so many lan-
guages and knew them so well ; he was the great-
est mathematical thinker of his time ; he was a
tireless experimenter in what we call physics and
chemistry; he was a writer on many subjects, in-
cluding philosophy and theology, as well as
Hebrew and Greek grammar; and with all, he
was a professor whose students valued him
highly. All this intense occupation of mind, far
from shortening his life, left him vigorous men-
tally and physically until the very end. We have

42 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

had many similar examples in recent years of
men of extremely varied intellectual interests so
intensely busied that all their friends were sure
that they would shorten their lives, yet living on
to four-score years or more of the most precious
activity.

This academic career of Bacon's for forty
years gives a better idea of medieval university
life than many a volume of the history of educa-
tion can furnish. There are many reasonably
well-informed people who seem to think that
the development of graduate or so-called post-
graduate work at our universities in the modern
time represents a new phase of evolution in edu-
cation. As a matter of fact, as was emphatically
pointed out by Mark Pattison, when as the
rector of Lincoln College he made his " Sugges-
tions for Academical Organization with Especial
Reference to Oxford," the colleges of the medi-
eval universities were " in their origin, endow-
ments, not for the elements of a general liberal
education, but for the prolonged study of special
and professional faculties by men of riper age.
The universities as a whole embraced both these
objects. The colleges, while they incidentally
aided in elementary education, were specially de-
voted to the highest learning." He says further :
" Unfortunately the colleges no longer promote
the researches of science or direct professional
study. Elementary teaching of youth under
twenty is now the only function performed by

ROGER BACON 43

the university and almost the only object of col-
lege endowments."

It is easy to understand from Bacon's career
how true it is that, as Mr. Pattison said, the col-
leges of the Middle Ages " were homes for the
life study of the highest and most abstruse parts
of knowledge. They have become boarding
schools in which the elements of the learned lan-
guages are taught to youths." No wonder that
the commissioners who reported on the Univer-
sity of Oxford in 1850 wrote: "It is generally
acknowledged that both Oxford and the country
at large suffer greatly from the absence of a
body of learned men, devoting their lives to the
cultivation of science and to the direction of
academical education. " The fact that so few
books of profound research emanate from the
University of Oxford materially impairs its
character as a seat of learning and consequently
its hold on the respect of the nation."

Things were very different in the Oxford of
the middle of the thirteenth century from this
mid-nineteenth century condition; and it is a
curious reflection on modern progress in educa-
tion that just in proportion as Oxford and our
modern universities generally have improved,
they have approached more nearly to the ideals
and methods of the medieval century.

At Oxford in his younger years Bacon was
very deeply influenced by his masters there, and
it is not surprising that this was so as soon as we
know the name of the masters, Among them

44 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

were such men as Edmund Rich, subsequently
Archbishop of Canterbury, and Robert Grosse-
teste, afterward the Bishop of Lincohi. Robert,
whose other name, as we know him, was only a
nickname " great head " because of the size of
his head, with an innuendo as to how much it
contained, was the Chancellor of Oxford and
the first Rector of the Franciscan College there
in Bacon's student days. Though born of poor
parents and without any advantages of birth or
person, Robert became unquestionably " the first
English scholar of the age ". Two other distin-
guished members of the faculty at Oxford of
this time, also teachers of Bacon, were only less
well .known, Richard Fitzacre and Adam Marsh.
The latter, known also as Adam de Marisco, bore
the title, " the illustrious doctor". Bacon, by no
means prone to overpraise, and certainly never
guilty of flattering the members of his own
Order, to which Adam belonged, declared him
" a man perfect in knowledge, divine and
human ".

The Franciscan Friar.

After great success as a teacher. Bacon at the
rather mature age of thirty-five, or perhaps even
older, joined the Franciscans. Modern writers
have expressed surprise that Bacon should thus
bury himself in a religious order; but surely, if
anyone knew what he was doing, it was this uni-
versity man who for twenty years had been in
contact with all the great scholars of the time.

ROGER BACON 45

The more one knows of the intellectual life of
the period the easier it is to understand how men
deeply interested in the life of the spirit, whether
purely mental or strictly spiritual, turned very
naturally to the religious orders. Here was
peace and freedom from the strenuous life of
the time — just as strenuous and busy as the
world has been at any time ; and above all, here
was the opportunity for association with distin-
guished scholars who as teachers and students
brought emulation and inspiration and stimula-
tion into life. The distinguished Franciscans
among his teachers serve to make it quite clear
why Bacon should have joined that order at the
height of his reputation as a university lecturer.
His entrance into the Franciscan friary seems
not to have interfered with Bacon's university
life, and apparently he was afforded abundant
opportunities for the pursuit of knowledge. In
the Opus Tertium in 1267 he said : " During
the twenty years in which I have labored, speci-
ally in the study of wisdom, after abandoning
the usual methods, I have spent more than 2000
librae on books not easily to be secured and vari-
ous experiments and languages and instruments
and mathematical tables." A libra parisien-
sium was, according to Bacon himself, only
equivalent to a third of a pound sterling. This
would amount to some $3,500 in our money;
but according to the value of money at that
time would probably be ten times that amount.
This is a very large sum of money to spend on

46 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

investigation and research, and it probably in-
cludes Bacon's private means before he became a
Franciscan and then various sums given to him
afterward by enthusiastic students and their
relatives vjfhich he was allowed to expend for
academic purposes. Probably nothing shows
better the deep interest of the time in scholar-
ship and intellectual development than this lib-
eral expenditure for it.

The prophecies of his friends that he would
break down under the strain of the immense
amount of labor he was undertaking were ful-
filled, though the breakdown is sometimes said
to have been due as much to the privations and
mortifications of his religious life as to his devo-
tion to intellectual labor. For some ten years,
from about 1256 to 1266, he had, " owing to
many infirmities ", to withdraw from taking any
public part in university aiifairs. Biographers,
anxious to find evidence for the intolerance of
the Church authorities at this time, have declared
that Bacon was imprisoned during this period, or
that he was forbidden to teach at the univer-
sities. There is not the slightest foundation for
any such declaration.

So far from being out of touch with the intel-
lectual life of the time during his illness, he
seems to have had, if possible, even a wider in-
terest than before. Professor Little, Lecturer
on Palaeography in the University of Manches-
ter, England, who wrote the Introduction to the
Commemoration Essays for the celebration of

ROGER BACON 47

the seventh centenary of Bacon's birth/ has a
para,graph with regard to Bacon's activities dur-
ing this period of withdrawal from university
duties because of his health, which shows better
than anything else how busy a man Bacon
could be.

We have a glimpse of him in Paris during this period
listening to a tale of magic. He seems to have been in
the habit of supplying new masters of arts at their in-
ception or inaugural disputation with problems in geo-
metry which none of their hearers could solve. He
was mainly occupied in investigations and experiments
in physics, especially optics, in making lenses, in con-
structing astronomical tables, and elaborating his theory
of the propagation of force. He devoted his leisure
to instructing boys in mathematics, sciences, and lan-
guages : one of them, John, who came to him poor and
eager to learn, about 1260, at the age of fifteen, he sup-
ported through alms begged from friends and instructed
gratis for the love of Cod and afterward employed as
his messenger to the pope. He kept himself thoroughly
informed on what, was going on in the world, and uses
contemporary political and social events to illustrate his
points. The Children's Crusade and the Revolt of the
Pastoureaux afford him instances of " fascination "
The quarrels between Henry HI and the barons in
England, the relations of the EngUsh and French
kings, the struggle between Empire and Papacy and
final overthrow of the Hohenstaufen by Charles of
Anjou, the Crusades of St. Louis, the agitation of Wil-
liam of St, Amour in the University of Paris, are

2 Roger Bacon, Essays Contributed by Various Writ-
ers on the occasion of the Commemoration of the
Seventh Centenary of his Birth; collected and edited
by A. G. Little, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1914.

48 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

among the subjects he alludes to. He draws attention
to the cruelties of the Teutonic knights ■and points out
how fatal these were to the efiforts of the friars to con-
vert the heathen Slavs to Christianity. He knew of
the great German Friar Berthold of Regensburg. The
magnificent work he is doing in preaching is of more
value than that of almost all the other friars together.
He was profoundly interested in the discoveries of the
great travelers of the time, especially William de
Rubruk. " I have perused his book dihgently and con-
ferred with the author, and with many others who
have investigated the geography of the East and South.''
In speaking of mechanical discoveries : " I have not
seen a flying machine," he says in one place, " and I do
not know anyone who has seen one ; but I know a wise
man who has thought out the principle of the thing."

Bacon the Writer.

It was just at the end of this period of retire-
ment that, fortunately for posterity, Bacon's
great opportunity to write his books came. In
1265 Guy de Foulques, Archbishop of Narbonne,
was elected Pope and took the title of Clement
IV. He probably had met Bacon in Paris.
There is some question whether they had not
also met in England. In March, 1266, the Pope
heard from Sir William Boncquor, a special
envoy sent by Henry III, of some of the won-
derful work that Bacon was engaged at. In
June of that year the Pope wrote to Bacon bid-
ding him send a fair copy of the works of which
he had heard, for Papal perusal. Apparently his
Holiness was not quite sure whether he wouli
be able to approve everything in them, and so he
advised their being sent " secretly but without

ROGER BACON 49

delay ", and added that they were to be sent
" notwithstanding any constitution of the Fran-
ciscan Order to the contrary ".

Apparently the Pope thought the works were
already written. Bacon thought this was an op-
portunity to set forth his ideas as to the whole
realm of knowledge; but, finding his first project
too elaborate, he settled down to write the Opus
Majus, which was later supplemented by the
Opus Minus and the Opus Tertium.

In the meantime he explained to the Pope the
reasons for the delay. Besides his poor health,
there was the want of money, for parchment was
not cheap, and his vow of poverty was in the
way; also there was lack of assistance, and it
was very difficult to find competent and trust-
worthy copyists. A matter a little difficult to
understand was that his superiors were putting
obstacles in the way, though of course the Pope
had asked that the work be done secretly, doubt-
less so as to avoid the appearance of approbation
for everything that was written before it had
actually been read by the authorities. One reason
for the delay is extremely interesting, because
it tells us of Bacon's habits of composition. He
said, "Anything difficult I have to write four or
five times before I get what I want ". We hear
much of uncritical ways in the medieval period,
but manifestly Bacon might be compared to our
own Cardinal Newman in his striving after the
exact word and the supreme mode of expressing
his ideas. Eventually the books were finished

50 CATHOLIC CPIURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

and dispatched to the Pope. That is how we
come to have any authentic account of a great
deal of Bacon's thinking.

Physical Science.

Bacon's most important contribution to science
in his time was undoubtedly his cultivation of
the science of optics. The fifth part of the Opus
Ma jus is entirely devoted to this subject. As
Little says in the Introduction to the Bacon
Essays, " One can readily understand how this
should be for Bacon the very type of physical
science. It is exactly conformed to mathematical
law. In fact, one may say that his grand idea
of all physical science as mathematical in nature
was simply an inference from what was so pal-
pable in optics." This contains a discussion not
only of the theory of lenses, to which is added a
treatise on burning glasses and of the construc-
tion and properties of mirrors, but also an
attempt to explain the psychology of perception
and something of the anatomy and physiology of
the eye. Bacon was never less than complete in
his outlook upon the subject, though there might
be imperfections in his knowledge of details.
What interested him particularly were the laws
of reflection and refraction. When laws could
be deduced, then the great scientific mind of
Bacon was satisfied.

Undoubtedly Bacon's greatest scientific dis-
covery is his declaration that light travels with
an appreciable velocity. In his Opus Majus he

ROGER BACON 5 1

declared that all the authors, including Aristotle,
hold that the propagation of light is instantan-
eous. This is not a surprising opinion, seeing
that light travels at the rate of 185,000 miles a
second, and that therefore with our human limi-
tations of vision this is practically instantaneous.
It was not until Romer pointed out that the sun's
light, after an eclipse, takes an appreciable time
to reach us, that we had the demonstration that
light travels with a definite velocity. In spite of
the difficulty of the determination, which
amounted almost to an impossibility in his time,
Roger Bacon set it down very definitely that
light propagation takes a short but measurable
interval of time. Humboldt in his Cosmos has
attributed to Francis Bacon this discovery, but
the English Chancellor in this, as in many other
ideas, was long anticipated by his namesake of
the thirteenth century.

Usually it is thought that, while some of the
principles of physics were anticipated in the
later Middle Ages, chemistry was as yet lost in
the mists of alchemy. Mr. Patterson Muir, in
his essay " Roger Bacon : His Relations to Al-
chemy and Chemistry ", published in the volume
of Commemoration Essays, does not hesitate to
say that it is only just to class Roger Bacon as a
chemist rather than as an alchemist. The reason
for this is that Bacon insisted on the knowledge
that could be secured of the substances all round
us by direct experimental methods and analytical
observations. He dwells on the necessity to the

52 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

alchemist of a practical acquaintance with the
methods of distilling, calcining, separating, and
the like. He unhesitatingly recommended the
employment of these methods as the only way to
accurate and fruitful knowledge of the changes
of material things. Instead of discussing theo-
retically matter and form, he thought that the
way to know something about matter was to
analyze it as far as possible and note the changes
that took place in it.

While much of what Bacon has to say with
regard to what we now know as chemistry in his
De arte chymiae cannot but seem quite absurd to
the reader of our time familiar with modern
chemistry, one very curious fact deserves to be
noted. Many of his ideas would have seemed
ever so much more absurd a generation ago than
they do at the present time. Bacon regarded
silver, for instance, as a kind of lead burdened
by imperfections. He thought that it would be
quite possible to obtain gold from other metals
by removing the infirmities, that is, curing the
sicknesses of certain other metals. Some of our
physical chemists have come to think it very
possible that silver may be only a development
of lead in some as yet not comprehended radiant
energy process and that gold may bear the same
relation to copper. An American chemist said
not long since that he would like very much to
have the opportunity, after having removed all
the silver from a quantity of lead ore, to come
back years afterward in order to determine

ROGER BACON 53

whether in the meantime some further silver had
not developed in what had been argentiferous
material. With that idea Bacon would have been
entirely in sympathy.

The Invention of Gunpowder.

The question as to whether Bacon was the
discoverer of gunpowder or not, about which
there has been so much dispute, was discussed in
the volume of Commemoration Essays by Lieu-
tenant Colonel H. W. L. Hime, an English
authority on the history of military afifairs. He
is quite sure that gunpowder was a discovery of
Bacon's. He would prefer not to call it an in-
vention, for he thinks that it was " discovered
accidentally by Bacon; just as the structure of
crystals was discovered accidentally by Haiiy,
the polarization of light by Malus, galvanism by
Galvani, and the decomposition of water by
Nicholson ". He dismisses supposed anticipa-
tions of this discovery of Bacon's as follows :

The famous Greek fire was not an explosive, but an
incendiary mixture. The claims to the invention of
gunpowder which have been made for the Arabs and
Hindus collapse when critically examined. The inven-
tion has always been disavowed on the part of their
countrymen by sober Chinese historians, though in
despite of them a claim was raised in the eighteenth
century by some Jesuit missionaries who unwittingly
confounded explosives and incendiary mixtures.

One of the most important ingredients of gun-
powder, saltpeter, was unknown until shortly be-

54 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

fore the middle of the thirteenth century; but
many of its explosive qualities attracted attention
about that time. While Bacon was experiment-
ing with some incendiary composition containing
saltpeter, charcoal, and sulphur, the mixture sud-
denly exploded, shattering the glass and scatter-
ing the brazen apparatus that lay near. Bacon's
description of the material of his compound is
very cryptic. There seems to be no doubt that
he used a cipher in giving in his writings the de-
tails of it. Colonel Hime thinks that he did this
because he was afraid that, if it became known,
he would be accused of magic, and has much to
say about the Inquisition. The dear Colonel
evidently has a bugaboo about the Inquisition,
though there is no reason at all for thinking that
that ecclesiastical institution interfered in such
matters. What is much more in accordance with
Bacon's well-known reticence is that, having be-
come accidentally possessed of a dangerous
secret and wanting to record it, he did so in a
manner that would prevent those who might use
such a secret for wrong purposes from taking
advantage of it, yet in such a way as to make a
permanent record of his own experiences.

Experimental Science.

Bacon has many expressions which indicate
that in science authority can mean very little and
experiment must be the source of knowledge.
In the chapter of the Opus Majus entitled
" Scientia Experimentalis ", Bacon insists that,

ROGER BACON 55

" without experiment nothing can be adequately
known. An argument proves theoretically but it
does not give the certitude necessary to remove
all doubt; nor will the mind repose in the clear
view of truth unless it finds it by way of experi-
ment.'' In his Opus Tertium he went even far-
ther and suggested emphatically that "the strong-
est arguments prove nothing so long as the con-
clusions are not verified by experience. Experi-
mental science is the queen of sciences and the
goal of all speculation." Usually these expres-
sions are set down as absolutely peculiar to
Bacon at this time, and above all as not being
held by the great teachers of the period. They
are supposed to be portions of Bacon's own con-
clusions, for which indeed it is sometimes said
that he eventually came into disfavor and even
had to spend years in prison toward the end of
his life.

As a matter of fact, however, the other great
university teachers of the thirteenth century had
reached similar conclusions. Even Albertus
Magnus, whom Bacon so bitterly criticized and
to whom the great scholar had once replied that
some people wrote nothing themselves but criti-
cized others much, an expression that is often
used in the modern time without any thought of
the necessity for using quotation marks for it,
and referring it to a thirteenth century teacher,
often used expressions very similar to these of
Bacon. In Albert's tenth book, wherein he cata-
logues and describes all the trees, plants, and

56 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

herbs known in his time, he observes: "All that
is here set down is the result of our own experi-
ence or has been borrowed from authors whom
we know to have written what their personal
experience has confirmed; for in these matters
experience alone can bring certainty — experi-
mentum solum certificat in talibus ". Albertus
Magnus was a thoroughgoing experimentalist in
the best modern sense of the term. He says in
the second book of his treatise On Minerals,
" The aim of natural science is not simply to
accept the statements of others, but to investi-
gate the causes that were at work in nature for
themselves."

In like manner much is now made, especially
in connexion with the celebration of the septi-
centenary, of Bacon's deprecation of appeals to
Aristotle, as if the ipse dixit of any master could
settle scientific questions. Albert in his treatise
On Physics was quite as absolute as Bacon ever
was, for he said, " Whoever believes that Aris-
totle was a God, must also believe that he never
erred; but if one believe that Aristotle was a
man, then doubtless he was liable to err just as
we are." ^ In fact, as is pointed out by the Cath-
olic Encyclopedia in the article on Albertus
Magnus, Albert devotes a lengthy chapter in his
Summa Theologiae to what he calls " the errors
of Aristotle ".

5 Physica, lib. viii, tr. i, xiv.

ROGER BACON 57

This does not lessen the merit of Bacon's in-
dependence of thought, but it serves to show
how grievously modern commentators err who
insist that Bacon was either the first to throw
off the shackles of authority or the only one to
do so, and that his persecution must be referred
to this. Saint Thomas x\quinas was quite as
ready to seek truth for itself apart from author-
ity as either Albert or Roger Bacon, and so are
other great teachers of this period. Indeed it
has been well said that there probably never was
a time when, within the Christian Church and
the schools under its immediate authority, there
was so much liberty of thought and even of spec-
ulation as well as of teaching, as during the
thirteenth century.

Bacon was not the first, but was more com-
plete in his exposition of the reasons for human
ignorance, as being largely dependent on trust
in authority, than his contemporaries. His fam-
ous four grounds for the failure of progress in
genuine knowledge among the Latins are true
not only for his own time, but for all time.
These offendicula or stumbling-blocks on the
road to knowledge, as Bacon so aptly calls them,
are (i) dependence on authority, (2) yielding
to established custom, (3) allowing weight to
popular feeling, and (4) concealment of real
ignorance with pretence of knowledge. It is
worth while having them in the original Latin,
for they provide an excellent example of Bacon's
discriminating use of words : " I f ragilis et in-

58 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

dignae auctoritatis exemplum; II consuetudinis
diuturnitas; III vulgi sensus imperiti; IV pro-
priae ignorantiae occultatio cum ostentatione
sapientiae apparentis ".

While Bacon thoroughly despised the opinion
of the crowd, even going to the extent of declar-
ing that " whatever seems true to the many must
necessarily be false ", he did not hesitate to em-
phasize the fact that many of their teachers de-
served even more of contempt. He said em-
phatically that " the common people are not
guilty of the fourth fault, concealment of ignor-
ance and assumption of knowledge; that is the
peculiar property of the learned professors ".
He suggests in a very striking expression that
authority may compel belief, but cannot enlighten
the understanding ; in his own words, " credimus
auctoritati, sed non propter eam intelligimus ".
He even ventured to add that, while all honor
should be paid to the ancients, those who come
later in time having the advantage of the studies
of those who went before them, are really often
in a position to see more clearly than their prede-
cessors. He has put the thought into the sum-
marized Latin form, " Quanto juniores, tanto
perspicaciores — the younger men are, the more
acute they are ". By younger he meant the more
recent in time they are.

Friar Bacon and Mathematics.

I suppose that almost the last thing that could
possibly be imagined by most people with regard

ROGER BACON 59

to a medieval friar, no matter how scholarly he
might be, would be that he should set up mathe-
matics as the great criterion and absolutely in-
dispensable auxiliary of science. This was, how-
ever, exactly what Roger Bacon did. He did
not hesitate to say in the Opus Majus: " For he
who knows not mathematics cannot know any
other sciences ; what is more, he cannot discover
his own ignorance or find its proper remedies ".
He constantly extolls mathematics as the key to
all the other sciences. Bacon even went so far
as to insist on the value of mathematics as a sub-
ject for education eminently developmental of
the mind. He dwelt on it as a culture subject, in
our phrase, and insisted that no educated man
ought to be unfamiliar with the basic principles
of mathematical science, in order that he might
be able to understand the accuracy of scientific
work. Even though there might be no particular
use for it in life, the subject ought to be studied.
In our time it has come to be realized more
and more that Bacon's expressions with regard
to mathematics being so necessary for any true
development of science, are quite literally true.
Without mathematics many of our great ad-
vances in modern science would have been lost.
Poincare, the great French mathematician who
died prematurely during that seven-hundredth
anniversary of Bacon's birth in 1914, once de-
clared : " If we had not cultivated the exact
sciences for themselves, we should not have cre-
ated mathematics the instrument, and the day

6o CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

the call came from the physicist we should have
been helpless." More than fifteen years ago the
English mathematician and physical scientist,
Professor Kingdon Clifford, did not hesitate to
say : " No advance seems likely in molecular
physics until more mathematics is invented." It
is only after reading expressions of this kind
from the mouths of our greatest modern mathe-
maticians that the prophetic wisdom of Bacon's
opinions to the same effect, proclaimed nearly
seven hundred years ago, can be properly appre-
ciated.

The one tangible result of Bacon's own work
in mathematics is his extremely close approxi-
mation to the actual correction needed in the
Julian calendar. In the Opus Majus in 1267 he
tried to make it clear to Pope Clement IV that
the length of the year of the Julian calendar is
too great by one day in 125 years. This is a very
startling declaration at that time, for the best
known calculations of a few years before, the
Tables of Alphonso, asserted that the error was
one day in a little over 134 years. We do not
know how Roger Bacon reached his much closer
approximation to the actual error than any
known to have been suggested before his time.
The fact, however, that he did so is the best
possible tribute to his personal powers as a
mathematician. He not only recognized their
value in theory, but he was capable of practising
them to a more accurate degree on the most im-

ROGER BACON 6l

portant problem then before mathematicians
than any man up to his time.

As to Roger Bacon's place in mathematical
history, the only way to give an authoritative
opinion on it is to quote Professor David Eugene
Smith's (of Columbia) concluding paragraph on
the subject in the Commemoration Essays, in
which he answers the question as to whether
Bacon deserved the title sometimes given him of
doctissimus mathematicus or not. As Professor
Smith is a recognized authority on the history of
mathematics, his opinion has compelling weight.

No one in his generation, few men in any generation,
certainly no man in medieval England, showed such
sympathy with mathematics, such familiarity with the
standard authors available, such clear perception of
the possible applications of the science, and such con-
viction of the value of the subject in a liberal education.
Jordanus was his superior in detail, but was relatrvely
a pigmy in general power; Albertus Magnus seemed
to accomplish more in physics and chemistry, but
Roger Bacon gave a formula which freed intellect from
brute force — the formula for gunpowder. Alexandre
de Villedieu and Bartolomeo de Parma were better
known in astronomy; but it was Bacon's computations
which gave to the Middle Ages the best calendar as yet
devised, and which led him to set forth with perfect
assurance the possibility of circumnavigating the globe.
It is not for his treatises nor for his discoveries in
the realm of pure mathematics, but for his appreciation
of the science, for his knowledge of what the world
had done, and for his vision of what the future had
in store, that for seven centuries he has borne with
justice the title of doctissimus mathematicus, a title

62 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

by which he may rightly be known even in our own time
and in the centuries to come.

Medical Excursions.

Bacon's writings with regard to medicine are
very interesting to our generation, because his
passion for exactness, the same that made him
so devoted to mathematics, led him to try to
make physicians see that they should reduce their
treatment of patients to an exact science. In a
fragment of his De Graduacione Medicinarum
he insists, practically in Plato's words in the
Philebus, that " Arithmetic, mensuration, and
weighing being taken from any art, the rest will
be only conjecture ". Bacon realized that the
dependence on the patient's feelings, to which the
physician was subjected, made accurate diagnosis
and still more accurate treatment extremely diffi-
cult ; but he indicated that this was the line along
which real scientific advance in medicine might
be expected. Two centuries later, as I have
pointed out in my Old Time Makers of Medi-
cine, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa not only em-
phatically made the same suggestion, but he went
further and indicated just how something might
be done in a practical way. His basic idea in the
matter, as may be seen from the sketch of him in
this present volume, was that the comparative
weights of blood and other fluids in the body at
various times in life and under varying condi-
tions of health would furnish significant infor-
mation to physicians, as of course they have.

ROGER BACON 6^

Physicians are slow to give up theories that
seem to explain so much, for minutiae of infor-
mation which at all times seem at first to mean
so little. The medical profession has always
been conservative, and necessarily so, since
human lives are the subjects of their experiences.
It is not surprising, however, that Bacon, looking
over the field of medicine in his time and recog-
nizing its lack of foundation on experiment,
should have been tempted to write his De
erroribus medicoruni, On the Errors of Physi-
cians. Dr. Withington, the English authority on
the history of medicine, who wrote the article on
Roger Bacon and Medicine for the Oxford Com-
memoration Essays volume, declares this to be
" perhaps the most interesting originally typical
and Baconian of the Friar's Medical Treatises ".

Bacon criticizes rather severely the physicians
of his time for not basing their practice on ex-
perience. He begins by saying that there are
thirty-six great and radical defects in the medi-
cine of the time, but with infinite ramifications.
After describing seven of these defects, however,
he confesses his inability to go on because he has
not the experience that would enable him to ob-
tain certitude. Curiously enough, while insisting
so much on experience, he himself depends very
much on the Arabs, and probably nothing shows
so well how little the Arabs brought either to
science or to medicine than the fact that Bacon's
dependence on them, because the great Greek
authors whom the Arabs were supposed to rep-

64 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

resent were not available for him, led him into
many rather serious fallacies. Above all, he
spoke of Avicenna as dux et princeps philoso-
phorum, makes him his chief guide in medical
matters, quoting him as frequently as all other
authors combined. When the history of medi-
cine began to develop under Haller in the
eighteenth century, Haller did not hesitate to
characterize the great Arab philosopher's work,
in so far as it touched medicine, as " methodica
inanitas ", which I suppose might be translated
as " inanity with a method in it ". The expres-
sion is perhaps too strong, but it is ever so much
nearer truth than Bacon's inordinate praise.

By the irony of fate Bacon allowed himself
to be carried away by the very human tendency
of respect for authority into over-dependence on
this Arab master in medicine. Sometimes even
here, however, his genius of intuition leads him
right. He has emphasized from Avicenna the
description of the patient who was cured of con-
sumption by using large amounts of sugar.
Sugar is one of the dietetic elements which we
have come to recognize in modern time as val-
uable for the increased nutrition, which is the
most important part of the treatment of tuber-
culosis.

The favorite idea of Bacon's was that health
was quite as contagious as disease. This is some-
times thought to be a very modern suggestion.
Bacon seems to have believed quite literally in it.
He actually thought that the old received new

ROGER BACON 65

stores of health and strength by associating inti-
mately with the young. He describes a fumus
juventutis, that is, a certain exhalation of youth,
as it were, which, entering into the bodies of the
old, by its very contact puts new life in them.
Curiously enough, as pointed out by Withington
in the Commemoration Essays, Sydenham, who
in the late seventeenth century wrote so well on
medicine that he has been given the title of the
English Hippocrates, emphasized the same idea,
though evidently rather hesitant as to its prac-
tical applications. A good many physicians in
our time have pointed out that there is nothing
which so serves to keep the old young as inti-
mate association with young folks. There is a
sort of instinct in the matter which often makes
the grandfather a more sympathetic companion
to the growing boy than his own father.

Bacon was as much interested in the question
of the retardation of old age as any of the mod-
ern scientists. There is a monograph from him,
De retardandis senectutis accidentibus, " On the
Putting Off of the Accidents of Old Age"
which is written quite in the temper of Metchni-
koff's book of a similar character in our time.
Of course most people would be quite sure that
anything that Bacon might have to say on the
matter would be of very little significance, while
Metchnikoff's ideas would be worthy of deep
consideratiton. However that may be, for there
are some skeptical spirits in our time who are
not quite sure that Metchnikoflf's ideas, especi-

66 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

ally those with regard to sour milk, though given
such wide publicity by moneyed interests en-
gaged in the manufacture of a particular brand
of sour milk, are of any very great value, one
thing is certain, namely, that Bacon very prob-
ably lived to be well beyond eighty years of age,
while Metchnikoff died before he was seventy.
At least, Bacon's practice of the rules necessary
to secure long life would seem to have been more
successful than his modern scientific colleague,
who presumably knew so much more about it.
Bacon probably outlived also most of those who
so sedulously, under Metchnikoff's direction,
swallowed the bacillus hulgaricus of the only
genuine Balkan sour milk and its products in our
time for the purpose of reaching old age.

The thirteenth-century scholar appreciated cor-
dially the influence of the mind on the body and
even states very clearly his conclusions, evidently
obtained from personal observations of various
kinds in this matter. It is so often presumed
that it is only in comparatively recent years that
men have come properly to appreciate the signifi-
cance of mental influence in the cure of disease,
that a paragraph from Bacon on the subject be-
comes very interesting reading.

Fiarures and charmes * may sometimes be used by
phy.=iciaTis with good effects ; not from any prevalency

* Bv Peiire. Bacon meant an astrological calculation
of any kind and by charme he meant anything popu-
larly supposed to have magical influence.

ROGER BACON 67

in them, hut that the raising of the soul is of great
efficacy in the curing of the body, and raising it from
infirmity to health by joy and confidence may be done
by charmes ; for they make the patient receive the
medicine wth greater confidence and desire, in exciting
courage, more liberal belief, hope and pleasure.

Even the most fervid of psychotherapeutists in
the modern time would be quite satisfied with
that expression.

Utility in Education.

How little human ways of looking at things
change even in what may seem comparatively so
long a period as seven hundred years, can be
readily seen from some quotations from Roger
Bacon on the subject of education. If there is
any subject in which men should be making defi-
nite intellectual progress, surely it is that in
which they are consciously occupying themselves
with the problem of making the rising generation
more intelligent than its predecessor, and yet we
have been treated in recent years to arguments
pro and con about education, strangely reminis-
cent of Bacon's expressions on the subject. In
our time there has been a recrudescence of the
view that the great underlying question is the
utilitarian element in educational systems. Of
what use is a particular subject or phase or
method of education? What is it worth for life,
and for the making of a living? In the fourth
chapter of his Opus Tertium, Bacon has a series
of expressions with regard to education along

68 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

these lines which make it very clear that what
a great many people say at the present time,
quite confident while they say it that they are
expressing a new idea that has come to the
world as a consequence of our noteworthy prog-
ress in recent years, is after all only a repetition
of some of the oldest phrases that we know in
educational controversy.

Bacon, for instance, says : " But because men
are ignorant of the primal utilities of philosophy,
therefore they despise many magnificent and
most beautiful forms of knowledge, and ask,
' What is this or that science worth ?' ridiculing
it and insisting that they shall not learn it."
There is another expression, which makes Pro-
fessor David Smith in his article on " The Place
of Roger Bacon in the History of Mathematics ",
in the Bacon Commemoration Essays, say :
" How history repeats itself !" Bacon wrote :
" For students in these days when it is said to
them that they ought to know optics or geometry
or languages or a number of other things, ask in
derision, 'What arc all these worth?' They
assert that they are quite useless, and they do not
wish to hear any discourse as to the true mean-
ing of utility, and as a consequence they neglect
and despise sciences of which they know noth-
ing."

We are in the midst of a renewal of the con-
troversy over the value of the classics and the
sciences as basic elements in education, and some
of those in favor of science who arc loudest in

ROGER BACON 69

their public expressions seem to think that in
utility they have discovered a new touchstone of
values in education. It might be worth their
while to go back and read the fourth book of
Roger Bacon's Opus Tertium, so as to help their
historic background.

Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon.

Inevitably, even though comparisons may be
odious, a comparison between Roger Bacon and
his namesake, Francis Bacon, suggests itself.
The fate of the two men was very different in
the generations that succeeded them. Francis
Bacon came to be looked upon by many as one
of the greatest intellectual geniuses that the
world has ever known, and not a few hailed him
as the father of modern inductive science. Roger
Bacon, on the other hand, came, within a few
generations after his death, into the bitterest of
contempt and was looked upon as a typical ex-
ample of the supremely foolish conceit of knowl-
edge without any real basis for it which was at
least supposed to be characteristic of the Middle
Ages. His name became a popular subject of
satire, a favorite symbol of utter pretentiousness
and lack of true knowledge. This continued for
nearly six centuries before the whirligig of time
began to bring in its revenge.

Now for some generations Francis Bacon has
been gradually losing in prestige until it is rather
generally considered that he was a much-over-
rated man, who came at a period of transition in

70 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEK IN SCIENCE

the world's history and who formulated certain
ideas that had been expressed by geniuses of the
time just before his own, especially such men as
Bernardino Telesio, the Italian philosopher, of
whom it has been said that his work " marks the
fundamental revolution in scientific thought by
which we pass over from the ancient to the mod-
ern methods ". His work was done nearly lOO
years before that of Francis Bacon. Perhaps
the best evidence for the limitations of Francis
Bacon's mind is to be found in the fact that he
refused to accept the Copernican theory nearly a
century after Copernicus's death, because he
thought that the old Ptolemaic theory solved the
difficulties better.

While Francis Bacon's sun has been setting,
Roger Bacon's fame has been growing ever more
and more. Indeed it was only the lack of knowl-
edge of the work done on the Continent that
gave Francis Bacon the place he holds in English
literature. In all that concerns the inductive
method in science he had long been anticipated
by the medieval Roger Bacon. Even English
authorities in the history of science began to
acknowledge this rather freely a generation ago,
and now it is very generally recognized by all
who know whereof they speak.

Huxley once said, " To hear people talk about
the great Chancellor — and a very great man he
certainly was- — one would think that it was he
who had invented science and that there was no
such thing as sound reasoning before the time of

ROGER BACON 7 1

Queen Elizabeth." Even Professor Draper here
in America, so often utterly ignorant of the his-
tory of science before our time as he showed
himself, could not find anything good to say of
Francis Bacon. " The more closely we examine
the writings of Lord Bacon," he said in his In-
tellectual Development of Europe, " the more
unworthy does he seem to have been of the great
reputation that has been awarded to him. . . .
This boasted founder of a new philosophy could
not comprehend and would not accept the great-
est of all scientific discoveries when it was plainly
set before his eyes." Draper refers, of course,
to Francis Bacon's rejection of Copernicanism,
though he might have referred also to his con-
temptuous depreciation of the work of Gilbert of
Colchester, the great physician-founder in elec-
trical science who was elected the President of
the Royal College of Physicians in England for
the year 1600, and whose work De magnete is one
of the most significant early contributions to
modern experimental science.

In the memorial volume of Essays on Roger
Bacon there is a story of one of the eminent edi-
tors of the works of Francis Bacon over half a
century ago in England being attracted to the
works of the medieval namesake of the more
modern English scientist and Lord Chancellor
by the name. To his surprise he found the older
Bacon of the Middle Ages so interesting for him-
self that he went on and read his works for their
own sake. After doing so, he said to Dr. Whe-

y2 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

well who was just then writing his work on The
Philosophy of Discovery, " I have - lately been
reading some of Roger Bacon's writings and I
am inclined to think that he may have been even
a greater man than our Francis Bacon." Whe-
well's own opinion of Bacon, as expressed in his
History of the Inductive Sciences, though he con-
fessed that he knew him from the Opus Majus
alone, is summed up in his description of that
work as " the Encyclopedia and the Novum Or-
ganon of the thirteenth century ". He felt that
the modern Bacon had been anticipated by his
medieval namesake.

Bridges, the learned English editor of Bacon's
works, has suggested a contrast between Roger
Bacon and Francis Bacon that is very striking
and all the more significant for us because in all
that is solid and serious in intellectual values it
favors the medieval rather than the modern
scientist.

Between the fiery Franciscan doubly pledged by
science and by religion to a life of poverty, impatient
of prejudce, intolerant of dulness, reckless of personal
fame or advancement, and the wise man of the world,
richly endowed with every literary gift, hampered in
his philosophic activity by a throng of dubious ambi-
tions, there is but little in common. In wealth of
werds, in brilliancy of imagination Francis Bacon was
immeasurably superior, but Roger Bacon had the
sounder estimate and the firmer grasp of that com-
bination of deductive with inductive method which
marks the scientific discipline. Finally, Francis Bacon

ROGER BACON

was of his time; with Roger Bacon it was far
otherwise.

Modern Appreciation.

Undoubtedly the most interesting phase of the
recent renewal of interest in Roger Bacon lies
in the fact that men of so many different kinds
of scholarship and culture, Jew and Gentile and
Christian, philosopher and scientist, physician
and philologist, have found so much to admire in
him. For the better part of a century now he
has been coming back into his own proper meed
of appreciation. It is quite easy to find tributes
to him in every language in Europe, and the
volume of Commemoration Essays was actually
printed in three languages — French, German, and
English. A collection of books on Roger Bacon
written during the past two generations would
now probably occupy even more than " a five-
foot shelf ".

Victor Cousin, about the middle of the nine-
teenth century came to appreciate very thor-
oughly something at least of Bacon's wonderful
genius. He suggested that it would be a worthy
work of scholarship for an English fellow-
countryman of Oxford or Cambridge to write a
sketch of Bacon giving his place in relation to
his time. England was not interested in the
Middle Ages at that moment. Her scholars were
mainly occupied with the early centuries of Chris-
tianity, and the Oxford Movement was under
way. It was a French pupil of Cousin himself,

74 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

who took Up the suggestion of his master and
gave us the first important modern account of
the great medieval philosopher-scientist. '■

Cousin's suggestion to English scholarship did
not bear fruit until well on toward the end of
the nineteenth century, when Dr. Bridges wrote
his sketch of Bacon's life and edited the Opus
Majus. The motive that prompted him to do so
is clearly stated at the beginning of the Introduc-
tion. The paragraph serves to emphasize how
much the thirteenth-century philosophy had an-
ticipated the viewpoint of nineteenth-century
thinkers. Dr. Bridges, himself a Positivist and
close disciple of Comte, felt that Bacon had an-
ticipated even his master.

The Opus Majus when published in its entirety
appears to me to present to the world a scheme of
culture, contrasting strongly with any that was offered
in Bacon's time or in the centuries that followed,
combining as it does the comparative study of language
with a comprehensive grasp of physical science, con-
ceiving these studies as progressive and yet holding
them subordinate to a supreme ethical purpose.

Dr. Bridges does not hesitate to say that it was
not until the time of Comte that anyone came to
give the world a philosophic and scientific pre-
sentation of the meaning of life, such as we
have from Bacon. Comte, I need scarcely say,
would be for Dr. Bridges, as for so many others

5 Roger Bacon, Sa Vie, Ses Ouvrages, Ses Doctrines,
d'apres des texts inedits, Paris, thesis 1851, fimile
Qiarles.

ROGER BACON 75

of his devoted followers, the very last word in
applied philosophy.

Bacon's appreciation broadened with the years
after this. S. A. Hirsch, whose volume, A Book
of Essays, published under the patronage of the
Jewish Historical Society of England, contains a
study of English Hebraists a>nd other Hebrew
scholars throughout Europe, felt constrained to
add his words of appreciation of Roger Bacon's
knowledge of Hebrew at a time when that lan-
guage was little known in the West. " I am of
the opinion," he says, " that the direct evidences
of Bacon's knowledge of Hebrew contained in
his works do less than justice to him. His own
testimony as to his proficiency in that language
cannot be lightly set aside. He describes himself
as a zealous student of Hebrew who had studied
the subject for a number of years. He declares
that, although he referred elsewhere to his
knowledge of Arabic, yet he did not write it like
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Bacon was not an
idle boaster, and full credence is due to asser-
tions of that kind."

Dr. Hirsch, whose book of essays contains
articles on Pfeffercorn, Reuchlin, and others
which show very clearly how competent he is in
this matter of early Hebraists, feels sure that
Bacon wrote a Hebrew grammar just as he did
a Greek Grammar, though unfortunately only the
Greek Grammar has been preserved. This study
of Hebrew at that time when the language was
of comparatively little interest to scholars gener-

76 CATHOLIC CmiRCHMEN IN SCIENCE

ally, shows at once the breadth of Bacon's inter-
ests and at the same tmie his unappeasible desire
to get at sources, as well as his readiness to take
any amount of trouble in order to do so.

On the other hand, the breadth of Bacon's
human sympathies can be very well appreciated
from a passage in his writings quoted by Hirsch,
in which Bacon expresses his feelings with re-
gard to the existence of many good Jews at the
time of the Crucifixion who rejected Christ. For
Bacon declared that he felt that there were at
the time of the Crucifixion many holy and good
men among the Jews ; and nevertheless they all
rejected the Lord, except His Mother and John
and the Marys : nay, it is even said that nobody
really believed in flim except His Mother.
His expressions show at once his own tolerance,
which went to an extent quite unusual at that
time, though the feeling toward the Jews voiced
by Innocent IH, the great Pope who was in the
pontifical chair when Bacon was born, had done
much to foster a new liberality of spirit toward
the Jew. What is more significant for us is that
Bacon's words reveal that feeling toward the
Blessed Virgin and her position in relation to
her Son which was so profoundly reverent at this
time and is noteworthy in the writings of St.
Thomas Aquinas and of Duns Scotus, the great
English Franciscan scholar of the next genera-
tion, whose conclusions with regard to the Im-
maculate Conception have since proved to be the
mind of the Church.

ROGER BACON J']

Every phase of Bacon's work has come to be
appreciated in our time. In the Commemoration
volume there is an essay by Cardinal Gasquet on
" Roger Bacon and the Latin Vulgate", in which
that great historian does not hesitate to say:
" Bacon's proposal to Pope Clement IV was to
appoint a commission of capable men with the
avowed object of restoring the text of St.
Jerome. The methods he suggests are the scien-
tific methods employed to-day in the production
of a critical text." His concluding sentence is:
" What must strike any reader of Roger Bacon's
works in regard to the Holy Scripture is the
grasp the learned doctor had in the thirteenth
century of the whole subject of Biblical revision,
and how true and clear were the critical prin-
ciples he laid down so many centuries ago."

Bacon's " Imprisonment ".

Like many other genius, Roger Bacon was
not very amenable to discipline nor prudent in
the control of his pen and tongue. He was typi-
cally one of those who in religious Orders, where
individuality must to a great extent be submerged
in the community, is likely to make himself and
others uncomfortable. This, of course, supplies
opportunities for both parties to make progress
in sanctity, though that phase of the problem is
only properly appreciated afterward and at the
moment often has no special appeal. Above all,
Bacon was, as we have seen, too much inclined
to indulge in personalities sometimes at the ex-

78 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

pense of members of his own Order, for he never
for a moment hesitated to criticize severely
Franciscans v^rith whom he disagreed, and occa-
sionally even his own superiors came in for a
thrust from his biting tongue. What was rather
more serious, he permitted himself to say and
write the bitterest things with regard to mem-
bers of the brother religious Order, the Domin-
icans. This caused a good deal of scandal, and
the Franciscans who seem to have borne with
Bacon's bitterness when it concerned only them-
selves felt compelled to take condign notice of it.
It was these unfortunate personal elements in
Bacon's disposition that prevented him to a great
extent from having the full amount of influence
in his own time that he might otherwise have
had. What Professor Smith says of Bacon's
judgment of the mathematics of his day, as "one
of profound and vociferous contempt ", might
very well be repeated with regard to nearly
every subject in which Bacon had done special
work until he felt the consciousness of knowing
more about it than those around him. There is
no doubt at all that much of the mathematical
teaching deserved his profound contempt, but
there was no need of his vociferousness in con-
demning it so scornfully. This bitterness only
aroused opposition and hardened men into the
maintenance of their opinions. This is always
the fault of the destructive rather than the con-
structive criticism.

ROGER BACON 79

Professor Smith's paragraph as to Bacon's
opinion of the mathematics of his contemporaries
can be applied to practically every feature of
Bacon's mode of regarding his university col-
leagues. He said : " Indeed, it is in the expres-
sion of this contempt that we find one cause of
his failure to influence the education of his time
as much as might have been expected from his
learning and undoubted ability. Instead of
soberly going about the work of construction, he
raves about the shortcomings of most of his
contemporaries. For a follower of the lovable
St. Francis of Assisi, he was filled with a bitter-
ness that is hard to explain, and that militated
against his success, not merely among his con-
temporaries but for at least three centuries after
his death."

Bacon's acerbity of character, often so typical
of genius, was sure to get him into trouble sooner
or later. He was impulsive and quite sure that
all the world was wrong except himself, and the
world does not accept that sort of judgment very
readily. He was a man far in advance of his
time, which gave cause enough of itself for lack
of sympathy from his fellows, but besides he
was utterly impatient of others and, as can be
seen from his writings, rather petulant and
prone to indulge in personalities when an expo-
sition of the subject in hand would have been
much better and might have been even irenic.
When his petulance involved the Dominican=;. his
superiors had to take notice of it, The members

80 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

of the two great religious Orders, which had
been founded about the same time in the preced-
ing generation, were brought into intimate con-
tact at the Universities of Oxford and Paris.
They had sometimes allowed themselves a liberty
of criticism in intellectual matters that degener-
ated into personal bitterness, until secular stu-
dents and pupils had been disturbed and even
serious scandals occasioned. What Voltaire
called in his cynical way la jalousie du convent,
has not infrequently had a tendency to degenerate
into unfortunate and even scandalously strained
relations between members of different Orders,
because after all even religious are only men, and
humanity is envious and jealous by nature and
the old Adam dies hard. This fact only makes it
all the more incumbent on religious superiors to
discipline even severely, at least the most serious
offenders in this important matter involving in-
fractions of Christian charity, among those sup-
posed to be most devoted to its practice.

It is no wonder that when a reaction came in
the Franciscan Order, Bacon was put in en-
forced retirement. It is doubtful whether any-
thing more than this can be said of what has
been called his " imprisonment ", and that some
people have been inclined to think of as twenty
or thirty years of confinement to a dungeon. It
is like Galileo's imprisonment. The good Flor-
entine mathematician and astronomer was never
in prison for an hour. He was confined to the
home of a Cardinal friend, but that was one of

ROGER BACON 8 I

the palaces of Rome where any of us would be
quite willing to be entertained while at the Papal
Capital. The main portion of Galileo's punish-
ment, poor fellow! was to say the Seven Peni-
tential Psalms every day for three years. He
was placed in charge of a Jesuit friend in his
own house, and later his guardian, that is, his
" jailor ", to use the word of Protestant contro-
versy, — selected for him by the Roman authori-
ties, — was his own son.

Roger Bacon was imprisoned, not by the com-
mand of the Church, but the " Minister General
of the Order of the Franciscans ", Jerome of
Ascoli, who was afterward Pope Nicholas IV
We know his career as a Pope very well, and his
character was the farthest possible removed from
the type of intolerant medieval churchman he
would have to have been if ordinary Protestant
traditions with regard to Bacon's imprisonment
at his command were true. Jerome of Ascoli
was the first of the Franciscans to be chosen as
Pope and declined the honor, being finally forced
to accept it under obedience after a second elec-
tion. He was one of the gentlest of men. As a
matter of fact, the records show that it was only
" on the advice of many of the Franciscan
brethren that the doctrines of the English Brother
Roger Bacon were condemned and rejected."

According to the Chronica, Roger was " im-
prisoned " Just what this imprisonment ^ con-

8 This whole question of imprisonment for religious,
^nd just what it consisted of, has not as yet been

82 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

sisted of for members of religious Orders is not
very clear. There is no question at all that they
were thrown into an ordinary prison. Some por-
tion of the monastery in which they had been
living or some special monastery was assigned as
their living quarters. They were expected to
say Mass every day, if they were priests, or to
hear Mass daily, if they were not priests. Their
freedom was restricted, and perhaps they were
not allowed to leave a small garden near the
house. Very probably the diet of the " im-
prisoned" was quite limited, but then in the
early fervor of the Franciscans a very restricted
diet was a very usual thing. Certainly, Bacon's
health does not seem to have been hurt in any
way. The assertion of many modern writers
that Bacon was imprisoned fourteen or fifteen
years is quite gratuitous, and has no foundation

worked out. Th^re are frequent references in the old
religious chronicles to the imprisonment of religious
for violation of their rules contumaciously, and above
all for repeated violations of charity. How far this
went as actual punishment beyond the stigma that for
a moment was placed on a religious among his
Brothers of the Order, is not clear. As a rule religious
Orders are careful not to injure a man's usefulness
among seculars by allowing any Order punishments to
be generally known. They were rather careful of the
reputation of their members. It is indeed sometimes
said that their esprit de corps made them over-careful.
Whatever imprisonment Roger Bacon suffered was
entirely within his Order and does not seem to have
created in him, so far as we know, any feeling of
resentment

ROGER BACON 83

in ancient sources. Its frequent repetition is due
entirely to over-zeal in proving the Church's per-
secuting tendencies, though the Church as such
had nothing at all to do with the matter.

At the end, all we can say is that here was a
great man of genius. He was, however, a man,
as well as a genius, which is as much as to say
that necessarily he had his faults — and indeed in
geniuses these are usually emphasized. Bacon's
wonderful power of penetration enabled him to
see far below the surface of things to truths that
were to be revealed with assurance only to schol-
ars long after his time. Men of his type are the
demonstration that at any time men who " have
the mind to ", in both senses of the expression,
are capable of facing the problems of humanity
and the universe and at any time seeing the an-
swers as clearly, though not in as much detail,
as the progress of knowledge may later permit,
as at any other time. It is the man, not his time,
that counts; his intellect, not the extent of his
knowledge. Fortunately for him. Bacon's lot
fell in happy conditions, where for forty years
he could devote himself to study almost without
distraction. The difficulties that came to him at
the end of his life were largely of his own mak-
ing, and they must not have disturbed him very
seriously, since he probably lived on to be nearly
four-score of years and perhaps more.

III.

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA.

npHE Roman Catholic Church then,
■*■ as now, was a great democracy.
There was no peasant so humble that
he might not become a priest, and no
priest so obscure that he might not
become Pope of Christendom, and
every chancellery in Europe was
ruled by those learned, trained and
accomplished men — the priesthood of
that great and then dominant Church;
and so, what kept government alive
in the Middle Ages was this constant
rise of the sap from the bottom, from
the rank and file of the great body of
the people through the open channels
of the Roman Catholic priesthood.

— President Woodrow Wii^on,
The New Freedom.

' I *HERE has always, in generous
■*■ souls who have some tincture of
philosophy, subsisted a curious kind
of sympathy and yearning over the
work of these generations of mainly
disinterested scholars who, whatever
they were, were thorough and, what-
ever they could not do, could think.

— Saintsbury, The Flourishing of
Romance and the Rise of Allegory.

In necessariis uniias, in non neces-
sariis libertas, in omnibus caritas.

T

III.

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA.

HE career of Roger Bacon presents a most
interesting but very striking contrast to
that of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, whom we
have chosen to follow him in this volume. Both
lived their lives in the Middle Ages, the Cardinal
dying just about ten years after the fall of Con-
stantinople, which is usually set down as the end
of the medieval period. Roger Bacon in the
thirteenth century was assuredly possessed of a
greater scientific mind than the distinguished
Cardinal of the fifteenth century, and yet the
Cardinal was undoubtedly a man of profound
learning and science in his time, and had he lived
out his four-score years as Bacon did, might
have left behind him works that would have at-
tracted scarcely less attention. As it is, Nicholas
of Cusa represents one of the important links in
that chain from the thirteenth-century scientists
to the Renaissance time which culminated in
Copernicus's revolutionary theory and the begin-
ning of modern astronomy; and he is himself a
great pioneer in that Renaissance of science as
well as of art that occurred in the fifteenth cen-
tury.

The difference in the fate of these two men.
Bacon and Nicholas of Cusa, is extremely inter-
esting. Bacon toward the end of his long life

88 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

had just been released from an imprisonment of
some kind, which was perhaps not very strict,
but which deprived him of bis liberty and repre-
sented his condemnation by his ecclesiastical
superiors; while Nicholas of Cusa was the
Bishop of Brixen, a Cardinal of the Holy Roman
Catholic Church who had been very frequently
sent as the Papal legate to various portions of
Europe. Cusanus, as he was called after the
fashion of the day in Latinizing names, was one
of the most highly honored of ecclesiastics of his
time, and while he too had been in prison for a
period, this was not due to any effort on the part
of ecclesiastical authority to suppress his very
liberal scientific speculations, but to Duke Sig-
mund, his civil ruler, who hoped thus to obtain
from the Cardinal Bishop of Brixen the abroga-
tion of certain Church rights and privileges.

The secret of the difference in the life histories
of the two men is undoubtedly one of personal-
ity. Roger Bacon was by no means an easy man
to get along with, critical to the highest degree
and perfectly certain that those who did not
agree with him and his opinions must be either
foolish or insincere. He bitterly aljused distin-
guished scholars of his own time, some of them
belonging to the Franciscans, but more of them
to the Dominicans ; and this was looked upon as
an abuse of charity that must be prevented at all
hazards. Nicholas of Cusa was a man of gentle
and kindly character, diplomatic in his relations
with others, sagacious and firm in his recognition

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA 89

and correction of abuses, but with an endless
fund of sympathy for human nature a"nd above
all for those who did not happen to see things as
he saw them. While the one found himself in
dishonor, the other added honors to honors, until
the very end of his life.

It is this personal element that has been only
too often forgotten in the stories of the careers
of men of science who supposedly have been per-
secuted by Church authorities, but who really
owed their persecution to personal character-
istics that made it extremely difficult for anyone
to get along with them. This applies very well
to other cases than Roger Bacon's, as, for in-
stance, to that of Giordano Bruno, whose life
follows that of Cusanus in the next century.
Now that we are having serious troubles with
anarchists ourselves, we are beginning to be able
to understand how disturbers of social order
may find themselves outside the pale of the law
mainly because they ofifend the sense of a time.
Our experience with cranks of many kinds dur-
ing the war has been an illuminating lamp of his-
tory, if we will but use it as such.

The story of the life of Nicholas of Cusa, or as
he was called, following the custom of the Re-
naissance time which took the Latin name of a
man's native place and made an adjective of it,
Cardinal Cusanus (so characteristically exempli-
fied in the case of Regiomontanus, about the same
time), is interesting not only for his personality,
however, but because he was one of the great

90 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

men of a great time in close touch with his dis-
tinguished contemporaries. He was a particular
friend of Toscanelli, the well-known physician
and scientist whose writings so deeply influenced
our own Columbus. But it must not be thought
for a moment that Nicholas was a narrow stu-
dent of physical science. On the contrary, he
was rather famous as a scholar in a scholarly
time, knowing Latin and Greek and Hebrew
well, and in later years Arabic; and he was a
particular friend of ^Eneas Sylvius Piccolomini,
that distinguished pioneer in the New Learning
who afterward became Pope Pius IL Probably
no churchman of the fifteenth century is more
thoroughly representative of the Church before
the Reformation came to disturb Europe than
this son of a German tradesman who rose to be
one of the most important characters in the civi-
lized world of his time.

Nicholas of Cusa is a striking example of that
acute expression of President Wilson in one of
the addresses of his book The New Freedom, in
which, recognizing sympathetically the great sav-
ing element of democracy in the Middle Ages
and the chance that this afforded many a man to
rise in life, he pays worthy tribute to it.

The only reason why government did not suffer dry
rot in the Middle Ages, under the aristocratic systems
which then prevailed, was that the men who were
efficient instruments of government were drawn from
the Church, from that great Church, that body which
we now distinguish from other Church bodies as the

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA 9I

Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church
then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no
peasant so humble that he might not become a priest,
and no priest so obscure that he might not become
Pope of Christendom, and every chancellery in Europe
was ruled by those learned, trained and accomplished
men — the priesthood of that great and then dominant
Church ; and so, what kept government alive in the
Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from
the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body
of the people through the open channels of the Roman
Cathohc priesthood.

Early Life and Education.

Nicholas, who was destined to become one of
the most prominent men in Europe before his
comparatively early death at sixty-four, was
born in an obscure little town of the Rhineland
called Cues, and it is the Latin form of this name
of his native town, Cusa, that now designates
Nicholas in history. His father was a trades-
man, probably a boatman by the name of Krebs,
reasonably well-to-do, perhaps even wealthy for
the community in which he lived, but for some
reason, perhaps miserliness, making life at home
very uncomfortable for his son. According to a
tradition, which however is not well substan-
tiated, Nicholas fled from the ill-treatment of his
father to Count Ulrich of Manderscheid, to
whose good-will he owed his opportunities for
the higher education. That is a point of history
that will probably never be decided now. His
father seems to have provided for his early edu-
cation with the Brothers of the Common Life at

92 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

Deventer, and this of itself was quite sufficient
to give him an excellent opportunity in life.

Many another distinguished thinker of the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries received his intro-
duction into the intellectual life from these good
Brothers of the Common Life. Among them,
besides the immortal Thomas a Kempis, were
such men as Desiderius Erasmus, the great clas-
sical scholar of the Renaissance, whose influence
was felt everywhere throughout Europe from
England to Italy, Jacob Wimpheling, who has
often been hailed as the schoolmaster of Ger-
many, "Preceptor Germaniae," Agricola and Alex-
ander Hegius, the humanists, John of Dalberg,
and many others. Deventer, where Nicholas of
Cusa studied in his earlier years, counted some
2,000 students, it is said, about the time of the
discovery of America. I have told the story of
the Brethren briefly in a chapter in The Century
of Columbus under the title, " The Scholarship
of the Teutonic Countries ". So far from Nich-
olas of Cusa being a solitary phenomenon of
genius among their pupils, he is only one of
nearly a dozen men who attained distinction dur-
ing the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
and who owed their youthful training, for which
they remained forever grateful, to the humble
simple Brothers of the Common Life. To rub
out what their students accomplished from the
intellectual life of Europe at this time would be
to leave a very sad and wide lacuna in the his-
tory of European mentality. The late Hamilton

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA 93

Mabie in his series of essays, My Study Fire,
has a paragraph with regard to the education
given by these Brothers of the Common Life
which will perhaps make clearer than anything
that I could say the meaning of their educational
institutions. It will give the best idea of the in-
fluences that surround Nicholas's school days.

I confess that I can never read quite unmoved the
story of the Brethren of the Common Life, those
humble-minded patient teachers and thinkers whose
devotion and fire of soul for a century and a half
made the choice treasures of ItaHan palaces and con-
vents and universities a common possession along the
low-lying shores of the Netherlands. The asceticism
of this noble brotherhood was no morbid and divisive
fanaticism ; it was a denial of themselves that they
might have the more to give. The visions which
touched at times the bare walls of their cells with
supernal beauty only made them the more eager to
share their heaven of privilege with the sorely bur-
dened world without. Surely Virgil and Horace and
the other masters of classic form were never more
honored than when these noble-minded lovers of learn-
ing and of their kind made their sounding lines familiar
in peasant homes.

The schools of the Brothers of the Common
Life afford the most striking evidence in contra-
diction of the often-asserted neglect of education
in Germany before the Reformation. All through
the Rhineland and in the Low Countries these
simple, devoted scholars gave themselves to the
education of the middle and lower classes of the
population with wonderful success. They repre-

94 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

sented preparatory schools for the universities of
the time, and the profound interest in even the
highest education in Germany at this time will
be best appreciated from the fact that altogether
some seven new universities were founded in
Germany during a little more than half a century
before the beginning of the Lutheran movement.
This is all the more interesting because at most
two or three new universities were founded dur-
ing the hundred years after the Reformation, and
Professor Paulsen of the University of Berlin
did not hesitate to quote with approval Eras-
mus's expression with regard to the influence of
the Lutheran movement on education that,
" wherever Lutheranism reigned there was an
end of good letters ".

How deeply Nicholas was influenced by his
teachers at Deventer, so that his whole mode of
thought was tinged by their teaching, will per-
haps be best recognized from the remark of a
critical reader of his popular treatises on theo-
logical subjects as they were written late in life.
Scharpff calls the theology of Nicholas of Cusa,
as it is to be found in books of his written for
the faithful on such subjects as De quaerendo
Deum, " The Quest for God ", De filiatione Dei,
" The Sonship of God ", and De visione Dei,
" The Vision of God ", Thomas a Kempis in
philosophical language. As Thomas a Kempis
probably represents more completely the deep
religious feeling of the Brethren of the Common
Life than any other, the enduring direction

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA 95

given to the great pupil's thought will be readily
appreciated. At the same time the kinship of
his writings with a Kempis is the best possible
demonstration of their orthodoxy, though some-
times it has been suggested that there were cer-
tain pantheistic tendencies in Nicholas's phil-
osophy.

After his studies with the Brethren of the
Common Life, at about sixteen years of age he
was matriculated in the University of Heidel-
berg. His ambitions were high, however, and so
in the following year, 141 7, he transferred his
university work to Padua. It was rather easy to
do this at that time, because all the universities
were under Papal charters and the exchange of
professors and students for the benefit of broader
scholarship was greatly facilitated. He grad-
uated as Doctor of Canon Law at Padua in 1423.
What probably influenced his life, that is, at
least his intellectual life, more than anything else
was his meeting at Padua with Paolo Toscanelli,
who was afterward to become so well known as
a physician and a scientist, and whose influence
over Columbus made him famous in the modern
time.

While he studied as a clerical student at Padua,
he does not seem to have determined absolutely
to take priestly orders until somewhat later. He
had studied Civil Law as well as Canon Law,
and his knowledge of civics was so well known
that some years later Bologna gave him the Doc-
torate in Civil Law. He seems indeed at first to

96 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

have thought of practising law as a profession,
but was turned from that idea by some experi-
ence in an actual lawsuit in which he recognized
the pitfalls of legal procedure and the difficulty
of securing justice, sometimes at least, without
putting forth efforts that to him seemed of ques-
tionable integrity. He lost a lawsuit in Mainz
shortly after his return from Padua, and then
under the patronage of the Archbishop of Trier
he matriculated in the University of Cologne for
the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He received
his doctorate, and the Archbishop recognizing
his ability gave him commissions of different
kinds at various places in Germany, mainly for
the correction of religious abuses.

He came prominently before the Catholic
world when, only a little more than thirty years
old, at the Council of Basel, and though he
pleaded two losing causes there — one of them
that of Count Ulrich of Manderscheid, the adop-
tive father of his youth, to whom he felt he
owed a great deal, and the other that of the
German nation against the Bohemians — he at-
tracted wide attention for his scholarship and
legal ability. The Council was under the presi-
dency of Giuliano Cesarini, the celebrated Italian
authority of the time on jurisprudence, who had
been Cusa's professor of jurisprudence at the
University of Padua. One may be reasonably
sure that under these circumstances every oppwr
tunity for the display of his abilities was afforded
a favorite pupil.

cardinal nicholas of cusa 97

Ecclesiastical Career.

The attention he attracted at Basel led to his
selection as the Papal representative at the Diets
of Mainz in 1441, of Frankfurt in 1442, of
Nuremberg in 1444, and of a second Diet at
Frankfurt in 1446, so that probably no eccle-
siastic in Europe was better known to the hier-
archy of his native country than Nicholas. Suc-
cessive Popes came to have the highest confidence
in him, and he was sent as legate to many places
not only in Germany but also in France and
Switzerland and other countries. He refused
the Cardinalate when it was first offered to him,
and it required a special order of Pope Nicholas
V to make him assume this honor later. He was
made Bishop of Brixen because that diocese was
considered to need a firm hand and yet a diplo-
matic heart and a sympathetic humanity to bring
about the obliteration of abuses that had been
allowed to creep into the diocesan institutions.
It is not too much to say that probably no one
was so close to the Popes or so thoroughly incar-
nated the policy of the Church of his time as
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, and yet after Roger
Bacon himself there is almost no one in whose
works are found so many anticipations of mod-
ern science as in those of Cusanus.

It might well have been expected that his rise
in the hierarchy would have made him cautious,
and that he would have felt that his ecclesiastical
duties made it advisable for him to avoid scien-

98 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

tific speculations. So far from this being the
fact, however, it was mainly while he was in the
midst of his busy life as a high ecclesiastic that
his scientific works were written. There was not
only no hesitancy on his part as to the advisa-
bility of his continuing his writing on extraneous
scientific subjects, but quite as evidently there
was no feeling on the part of his colleagues in
the hierarchy that it would be better for him to
confine himself to religious subjects.

In recent years our growing knowledge of the
Middle Ages has led a number of people to rec-
ognize that in the despised Middle Ages there
was a liberality toward philosophic thought,
especially in the great university centers, which
afterward came to be narrowed. Indeed it has
been often suggested that the shackles of eccle-
siastical authority were put on tighter over the
human mind during the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries than they had been earlier. For some
it constitutes the reason why the Reformation,
with its definite break for liberty, had come. Of
any such ideas as these, however, the life of
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa is an open contradic-
tion. Nothing that I know shows so well how
perfectly free the churchman might be to follow
out speculations of all kinds, not only without
danger to his personal liberty, but even without
detriment to his ecclesiastical career in any way,
and indeed his broad liberality of mind seems to
have been one of the reasons that aided rather
than hampered his successful career.

cardinal nicholas of cusa 99

Independence of Thought.

There is abundant evidence in Nicholas of
Cusa's writings of his thoroughgoing independ-
ence of thought and his power to think for him-
self. Writing about him in an essay in Old Time
Makers of Medicine, so as to explain to physi-
cians how it was that he was the first to make a
suggestion of laboratory methods in diagnosis, I
said of him : " There are many interesting ex-
pressions in Cusanus's writings which contradict
most of the impressions commonly entertained
with regard to the scholars of the Middle Ages.
It is usually assumed that they did not think
seriously, but speculatively; that they feared to
think for themselves, neglected the study of
nature around them, considered authority the
important source of knowledge, and were as far
as possible from the standpoint of modern scien-
tific students and investigators. Here is a pas-
sage from Nicholas, on writing and thinking,
that might well have been written by a great in-
tellectual man at any time in the world's history,
and that could only emanate from a profound
scholar at any time." It runs :

To know and to think, to see the truth with the eye
of the mind, is always a joy. The older a man grows,
the greater is the pleasure which it affords him; and
the more he devotes himself 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 knowl-
edge and truth the life of the mind. In the midst of
the movements of time, of the daily work of life, of

100 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

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 ajid a keener insight
into the origin of all goodness and beauty, the capacities
of our own hearts and minds, the intellectual fruits
of mankind throughout the centuries, and the won-
drous works of nature around us; at the same time
remembering always that in humility alone Ues true
greatness, and that knowledge and wisdom are alone
profitable in so far as our lives are governed by them.

What Nicholas succeeded in thinking out for
himself in astronomy is probably the most strik-
ing testimony to his individuality of intellect and
power to see things for himself. Father Hagan,
who is the Papal Astronomer in charge of the
Observatory in the Vatican, has summed it up
in a paragraph of his sketch of Cardinal Nich-
olas in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

The astronomical views of the Cardinal are scattered
through his philosophical treatises. They evince com-
plete independence of traditional doctrines, though
they are based on symbolism of numbers, on combina-
tions of letters, and on abstract speculations rather
than observation. The earth is a star like other stars,
is not the centre of the universe, is not at rest, nor
are its poles fixed. The celestial bodies are not
strictly spherical, nor are their orbits circular. The
difference between theory and appearance is explained
by relative motion. Had Copernicus been aware of
these assertions, he would probably have been encour-
aged by them to publish his own monumental work.

Like Roger Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa recog-
nized very clearly how much that was accepted

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA 1 01

in his generation, often even by men supposed to
be learned, was not true. His best known book
is called De Docta Ignorantia, that is, " About
Learned Ignorance ". I wonder if there ever
was a time in the world's history when one
could not write about learned ignorance. Even
the educated people of any period are always
ready to accept a large number of theories that
prove after a while to have been utterly mis-
taken. Often the wiser men of their generation
see very clearly, though there is no hope of their
convincing their fellows, how utterly insignifi-
cant, especially to any such extent as their con-
temporaries believe them, are the current the-
ories of the day. We are still intent on passing
theories, fairly slaves to them, while they last,
and then dropping them for others. The thera-
peutics of any generation has always been absurd
to the second succeeding generation, but so have
the current theories in any department of science.
Up-to-date thinking is in a few years scarcely
recognizable in the lumber room of cast-off hy-
potheses.

One of our greatest American humorists has
said in our time : "It is not so much the ignor-
ance of mankind that makes them ridiculous, as
the knowing so many things that ain't so." We
are just getting to recognize that what in our
ignorance — to quote John Fiske, surely an
authority not likely to be suspected of partiality
to the Middle Ages — we used to call the Dark
Ages ought to be called the Bright Ages. When

I02 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

we had no architecture, no beautiful buildings
inside and outside, no arts and crafts worth while
speaking of, we could not understand the Middle
Ages and so forsooth called them "dark". Now
when we are imitating their architecture, taking
the models of their wrought iron and carved
stone and woodwork for our developing arts and
crafts, when we are going back to study their
great poets, Dante, the Cid, the Troubadours,
the Meistersingers and the Minnesingers, we are
beginning to realize what a wonderful time it
was. There is a fine opportunity in our time for
another book with the title " On Learned Ignor-
ance ". The surprise is — but only for those who
do not know their Middle Ages — to find that the
first book bearing that title was written before
the close of the Middle Ages.

It is stated in his book De Docta Ignorantia
that the Great Cardinal set forth a theory with
regard to the constitution of the sun. How
clearly he anticipated some modern views, which
it would seem almost impossible for a medieval
scholar and above all a churchman to have had
any hint of, may be seen particularly in this solar
theory. It is all the more surprising that he
should, by some form of intuition as it were,
reach the conclusions he did, for the usual sources
of information with regard to the sun in his time
could not possibly have brought him to such a
theory, and it was only his own genius far out-
running the knowledge of his time that enabled
him to do it. The Cardinal said :

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA I03

To a spectator on the surface of the sun the splendor
which appears to us would b.e invisible, since it con-
tains, as it were, an earth for its central mass, with a
circumferential envelope of hght and heat, and between
the two an atmosphere of water ^xld clouds and of
ambient air.

After reading that bit of precious astronomical
science announced nearly five centuries ago, it is
easy to understand how Cusanus anticipated
other phases of our knowledge, as he did in his
declarations that the figure of the earth is not a
sphere, but is somewhat irregular, and that the
orbit of the earth is not circular.

Perhaps in our time it will be most interesting
to find that in the field of politics, too, Nicholas
of Cusa was capable not only of original think-
ing, but in this as in so many other fields of
thought he anticipated some of the greatest con-
clusions of the modern time. As the result of
his careful studies of conditions in Germany, he
realized very clearly how much of unfortunate
influence the political status at that time of the
German people, with their many petty rulers and
the hampering of development consequent upon
the trivial rivalries, the constant bickerings, and
the inordinate jealousies of these numerous
princelings, had upon his native country. Ac-
cordingly, toward the end of his life he sketched
what he considered would be the ideal political
status for the German people. As in everything
that he wrote, he went straight to the heart of
the matter and, without mincing words, stated

104 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEK IN SCIENCE

just exactly what he thought ought to be done.
Recalling that this scheme of Cusanus for the
prosperity and right government of the German
people was not accomplished until more than
four centuries after his death, it is interesting,
indeed, to realize how this clergyman of the
middle of the fifteenth century should have come
to any such thought. Nothing, however, makes
it clearer than this, that it is not the progress of
time that fosters thinking, but that great men at
any time come to great thoughts. Cusanus wrote :

The law and the kingdom should be placed under
the protection of a single ruler of authority. The
small separate governments of princes and counts con-
sume a disproportionately large amount of revenue
without furnishing any real security. For this reason
we must have a single government, and for its sup-
port we must have a definite amount of the income
from taxes and revenues yearly set aside by a repre-
sentative parliament, and before this parliament
(reichstag) must be given every year a definite ac-
count of the money that was spent during the preceding
year.

A Pioneer in Accurate Medical Science

Our modern advance in medicine, in so far as
it is real and enduring and not merely sensa-
tional and apparent, is dependent more on the de-
velopment of accurate methods of diagnosis than
any other single factor. Very few people realize
that, in spite of all that has been said with regard
to supposed advances in the treatment of dis-
ease, the dozen drugs that doctors use most and

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA I05

which they consider absolutely indispensable in
the treatment of their patients, are all more than
a century old, and some of them many hundreds
of years, and a few of them some thousands of
years old. It is in diagnosis that significant sci-
entific advances have been made. The more we
have been able to use mechanical means of vari-
ous kinds and scientific instruments and mathe-
matical formulae, the more valuable has been the
accumulation of data with regard to diseases and
the differentiation of disease conditions so as
best to assure their rational treatment.

Now I suppose that the last place in the world
that one might expect to find the first hint toward
the employment of accurate methods of diag-
nosis in modern times would be before the end
of the Middle Ages. Very probably the last per-
son who would be expected to give such a hint
would be a medieval churchman trained by the
knowledge of the classics in early life, with his
degree in canon law, not in medicine. If to this
be added the fact that the author was a Cardinal
of the Church, valued by his ecclesiastical con-
temporaries for his knowledge of theology, it
cannot but seem almost impossible that it should
be in his works that is to be found one of the
earliest valuable suggestions for the application
of a thoroughly scientific method to medicine.

In spite of this apparent impossibility, it is, as
I have shown in my Old Time Makers of Medi-
cine, to Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa that we owe
the first hint of accurate diagnostic methods in

I06 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

clinical medicine, and his work has now become
a well-recognized chapter in the history of medi-
cine. In an article on " An Early Allusion to
Accurate Methods in Diagnosis " which was
published in the Archives of Diagnosis,^ I re-
viewed the place of Cardinal Nicholas's sugges-
tion in our history of clinical medicine and
pointed out its definite significance. That story
is worth while repeating here because it is such
a surprising revelation of the way that genius,
when apparently wandering far afield from its
own special interest and intruding on others'
work, is able to give hints that may prove ex-
tremely valuable, though for the moment they
may be so far ahead of current scientific thought
as to be unavailable.

Some years ago Professor Ernst von Leyden,
at that time the Director of the First Medical
Clinic of the Charite Hospital, Berlin, and one
of the best known of the teachers of medicine
at the University of Berlin, in sketching the his-
tory of the taking of the pulse as an important
aid to diagnostics in medicine, said that John
Floyer, an English clinician, is usually named
as the man who about the beginning of the
eighteenth century introduced the practice of
determining the pulse rate by means of the
watch. He suggested, however, that William
Harvey, the English physiologist to whom we
owe the discovery of the circulation of the blood,

^New York, April, 1909.

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OP CUSA IO7

had before Floyer suggested the use of the
watch in counting the pulse and the value of the
pulse in medical diagnosis.

Professor Carl Binz of the University of
Bonn, commenting on these remarks of von Ley-
den, called attention to the fact that two cen-
turies before either of these men, to whom the
careful measurement of the pulse rate is attrib-
uted as a discovery, were born, a distinguished
German churchman, who died shortly after the
middle of the fifteenth century, had suggested
a method of accurate estimation of the pulse
that deserves a place in medical history. This
suggestion is so much in accord with modern
demands for greater accuracy in diagnosis that it
seems not inappropriate to talk of it as the first
definite attempt at laboratory methods in the
department of medicine. The pioneer of this
important subject of accurate diagnosis was Car-
dinal Nicholas of Cusa. The Cardinal suggested
that in various forms of disease and at various
times of life, as in childhood, boyhood, manhood,
and old age, the pulse was very different. It would
be extremely valuable to have some method, then,
of accurately estimating, measuring, and re-
cording these differences for medical purposes.
At that time watches had not yet been invented,
and it would have been very difficult to have
estimated the time by the clocks, for almost the
only clocks in existence were those in the towers
of the cathedrals and of the public buildings.
The first watches, " Nuremberg eggs ", as they

ro8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

were called, were not made by Peter Henlein
until well on in the next century. The only
method of measuring time with any accuracy in
private houses was the clepsydra or water-clock,
and Cardinal Nicholas suggested that this should
be employed for estimating the pulse frequency.
His idea was that the amount of water which
flowed while a hundred beats of the pulse oc-
curred should be weighed and this weight com-
pared with that of the water which flowed while
a hundred beats of the normal pulse of a num-
ber of average individuals of the same age were
being counted.

Cusanus was an extremely practical man, he
was constantly looking for and devising methods
of applying practically principles of science to
ordinary life. As we shall see in discussing his
plan for the estimation of the pulse rate later on,
he made many other suggestions for diagnostic
purposes in medicine and suggested other appli-
cations of mathematics and mechanics to his gen-
eration.

The book in which the suggestion as to the
accurate estimation of the pulse rate was made is
of special interest to physicians. It is his Dia-
logue On Static Experiments, which he wrote in
1450 and which contains the following passages :

Since the weight of the blood and the urine of a
healthy and of a diseased man, of a young man and
an old man, of a German and an African, is different
for each individual, why would it not be a great benefit
to the physician to have all these various differences

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA IO9

classified? For I think that a physician would make a
truer judgment from the weight of the urine viewed
in connection with its color than he could make from
its color alone, which might be fallacious. So also
weight might be used as a means of identifying the
roots, the stems, the leaves, the fruits, the seeds, and
the juice of plants, if the various weights of all the
plants were properly noted together with their variety
according to locality. In this way the physician would
appreciate their nature better by means of their weight
than if he judged them by their taste alone. He might
know then from a comparison of the weights of the
plants and their various parts when compared with
the weight of the blood and the urine, how to make
an application and a dosage of drugs from the con-
cordances an-d differences of the medicaments and even
might be able to make an excellent prognosis in the
same way. Thus, from static experiments he would
approach by a more precise knowledge to every kind
of information.

Do you not think, if you would permit the water
from the narrow opening of a clepsydra (water-clock)
to flow into a basin for as long as was necessary to
count the pulse a hundred times in a healthy young
man, and then do the same thing for an ailing young
man, that there would be a noticeable difference be-
tween the weights of the water that would flow during
the period? From the weight of the water, therefore,
one would arrive at a better knowledge of the differ-
ences in the pulse of the young and the old, the healthy
and the unhealthy, and so also as to information with
regard to various diseases, since there would be one
weight and therefore one pulse in one disease, and
another weight and another pulse in another disease.
In this way a better judgment of the differences in the
pulse could be obtained than from the touch of the
vein, just as more can be known from the urine about
its weight than from its color alone,

no CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

Just in the same way would it not be possible to
make a more accurate judgment with regard to the
breathing if the inspirations and expirations were
studied according to the weight of the water that
passed during a certain interval? If while water was
flowing from a clepsydra, one were to count a hundred
expirations in a boy, and then in an old man, of course
there would not be the same amount of water at the
end of the enumeration. Then this same thing might
be done for other ages and states of the body. As
a consequence, when the physician once knew the
weight of water that represented the number of ex-
pirations of a healthy boy or youth and then of an
individual of the same age ill of some infirmity or
other, there is no doubt that by this observation he
will come to a knowledge of the health or illness and
something about the case, and perhaps also with more
certainty would be able to choose the remedy and the
dose required. If he found in a healthy young man
apparently the same weight as in an old and decrepit
individual, he might readily be brought to the conclu-
sion that the young man would surely die and in this
way have some evidence for his prognosis in the case.
Besides, if in fevers in the same way careful studies
were made of the differences in the weight of water
for pulse and respiration in the warm and the cold
paroxysms, would it not be possible thus to know the
disease better and perhaps also get a more efficacious
remedy?

As will be seen from this passage, Cusanus
had many more ideas than merely the accurate
estimation of the pulse frequency when he sug-
gested the use of the water-clock. Evidently the
thought had come to him that the specific gravity
of the substances, that is, their weight in com-
parison to the weight of water, might be valuable

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA III

information. Before his time physicians had
depended only on the color and the taste of the
urine for diagnostic purposes. He proposed that
they should weigh it, and even suggested that
they should weigh also the blood, I suppose in
case of venesection for comparison's sake. He
also thought that the comparative weight of
various roots, stems, leaves, juices of plants
might give hints for the therapeutic uses of these
substances. This is the sort of idea that we are
apt to think of as typically modern. Specific
gravities and atomic weights have been more
than once supposed to represent laws in thera-
peutics that so far we have not succeeded in find-
ing, but it is interesting to realize that it is
nearly five hundred years since the first thought
in this line was clearly expressed by a distin-
guished thinker and scientific writer.

Charity and Loyalty.

On the death of his father considerable prop-
erty reverted to Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, and
by mutual agreement with his sister Clare and
his brother John his entire inheritance was con-
verted to a foundation for the benefit of the
poor. During the five years from 145 1 to 1456
extensive buildings were erected in his native
town with chapel, cloister, and refectory at-
tached. These were to serve as home for thirty-
three old men in honor of the thirty-three years
of Christ's earthly life. This institution is still
standing and would remind one of the Grey

112 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

Friars in which in Thackeray's The Newcomes.
Colonel Newcome takes his refuge at the end of
his life. Cardinal Nicholas by his last will left
his altar service, his manuscript library, and his
scientific instruments, to this hospital, as it was
called, for at that time the word hospital meant
only a guest house and had not become restricted
in significance to a place where only ailing folk
were given shelter. These bequests would seem
to indicate that the institution founded by Car-
dinal Nicholas was meant to be something more
than a refuge for the old, and that he intended it
to provide instruction also for the young. This
was a feature of the English Grey Friars, for
the famous " blue coat boys " went to school
there ; and it is typical of the spirit of the Middle
Ages thus to bring together youth and age for
the sake of the mutual beneficent influence that
they exercise on each other.

Even more significant for our appreciation of
the Cardinal's interests in life is the fact that,
though his body rests in his own titular church
in Rome beneath the sculptured efifigy of him in
relief provided by the Renaissance spirit, he
arranged that his heart should be deposited be-
fore the altar in the hospital of Cues. ?Ie wanted
his heart to be where his treasure was, and in
life he had often exhibited the feeling that the
real treasure of the Church is the poor.

He did not forget his Alma Mater at Deventer
when he became a Cardinal, for he founded there
a residence called after him the Bursa Cusana,

CARDINAL NICHOLAS OF CUSA II3

where twenty poor students were to be sup-
ported. In a word, this scholarly scientist and
distinguished ecclesiastical diplomat, who might
be expected to be immersed in important eccle-
siastical matters to the exclusion of interest in
the needs of his native town and his first school,
turned to accomplish concrete good by solving
the social problems that he had been brought in-
timately in contact with during his early years.
Best of all, he did not wait till after his death to
make the foundations, but arranged for them
during his life and saw to their organization
according to his plans for them.

It is, above all, significant that a man of these
broad intellectual interests and profound ability
should have been selected by successive Popes
as the person to whom the reforms of various
abuses in German dioceses should be committed.
The reform of abuses in any institution com-
posed of human beings will always have to be
made. They had crept in in many places in Ger-
many and needed correction. To Nicholas of
Cusa their reformation was committed, and while
he made many enemies, almost necessarily, while
engaged in such work, the friends he made far
outnumbered these. Indeed the Abbot Trithe-
mius, himself one of the most distinguished
scholars and churchmen of that time, did not
hesitate to say that everywhere Nicholas had ap-
peared as an angel of light and of peace. So
much of what we have heard of pre-Reformation
history, especially as regards Germany, is so

ri4 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

very different from this that it is worth while
noting both the character of the man and his
work, whom Rome selected for the delicate mis-
sion of reformation. Certainly, as we look back
at it now, no wiser selection than this, looked at
from every standpoint, could, humanly speaking,
have been made. Cusanus's career is in itself
an epitome of the times, full of the most signifi-
cant historical meaning.

IV.

ABBE.SPALLANZANI: A CLERICAL
PRECURSOR OF PASTEUR.

WHO loves not knowledge ? Who
shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars ? Let her work prevail.
— Tennyson, In Memoriam, CXIV.

TXTHILST mind unfettered o'er

* ' the earth extends
Its all-subduing energies, and wields
The sceptre of a vast dominion there.
—Shelley, The Demon of the World.

IV.

ABBE SPALLANZANl: A CLERICAL PRECURSOR
OF PASTEUR.

UNDOUBTEDLY one of the most interest-
ing problems of biology, and one that has
deservedly attracted a great deal of attention in
recent years — indeed it is now declared to be a
key factor as regards certain phases of the
theory of evolution — is what is known as regen-
eration. All of us know from experience that
we have certain powers of regeneration, so that
injuries, cuts, and even rather serious wounds
are repaired by regenerative processes, which in
a great many cases restore almost, if not quite
completely, the original appearance of the skin
surface. Imagine what battered bodies most
human beings would present if every injury that
went through the skin made a permanent scar or
even left some definite trace. Not only it does
not, but even rather deep injuries, if not fol-
lowed by suppuration, are repaired so well that
absolutely all trace of them may be lost, or at
least only very slight marks of them left. This
is due to the power of regeneration in the living
being.

Some of the lower animals possess this power
of regeneration to a marvelous degree. For in-
stance, there are certain salamanders or lizards
that regenerate whole limbs when they are lost.

Il8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

When we recall that the limb of an animal con-
tains bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, tendons, as
well as various layers of connective tissue, usu-
ally spoken of as fascus because they bind cer-
tain tissues together in a way to facilitate their
activity, it is easy to understand what a complex
problem is here presented. How is this restora-
tion accomplished? When the limb of the sala-
mander is removed, all that is left is the jagged
remnant of a limb with a superficial series of
more or less injured cells, practically all of which
will disappear before the true process of repair
begins. The next row of cells behind these, the
first healthy cellular layer, proceeds to grow, and
then the cells lay themselves down in regular
order until they have recreated the limb as it
was originally.

Perhaps the fulness of the mystery that is
thus briefly outlined will be better appreciated
from an illustration. Suppose that a cyclone
should blow off a wing of a brick building, as
storms have sometimes been known to do, leav-
ing the main portion standing. A jagged edge
of bricks— many of them broken, some of them
displaced, not a few of them torn from their
original location, yet still hanging on — would
represent the outer surface of what was left.
All these injured and dislocated bricks have to
be removed before men can begin the repair.
Suppose now the first row of uninjured bricks
that were still in place after having pushed the
displaced broken bricks out of the way, should

ABBE SPALLANZANI II9

begin to double, and then double again, and so
on, laying themselves down in order on top of
each other, until there would be a complete wing
where the former one was. That is a picture on
a large scale of what happens on a small scale
when an animal's limb is torn away and then re-
generated by a process of nature.

It must not be forgotten, however, that in
order to restore the wing of the building not
only must the bricks be laid in regular order,
but there are floors and partitions and stairs and
corridors and doors and windows and wainscot-
in,gs and plaster, and all the other contents of
the building, to be put in place. These must be
built up by degrees ; but the work is no more
complex than the making of bone, muscle, sinew,
tendon, joints, joint capsules, arteries, veins,
nerves — these three latter corresponding to the
plumbing, the water supply, the drainage, and
the electric bells or the telephones in the build-
ings.

How is so wonderful a work accomplished?
Of course it is no more wonderful than the orig-
inal growth of the limbs ; but, then, somehow we
do not think so much of that. Where is the
memory which recalls all the details of the limb
that was lost, and where is the force that directs
all the energies that accomplish the work? We
call in an architect to plan the building, and then
employ a contractor to direct the workmen how
to do it — the architect controlling the contrac-
tor's work. But where is all this mechanism in

I20 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

the little lizard, which, having lost a limb, pro-
ceeds to develop a new one just exactly like its
predecessor ?

It is easy to understand what an interesting
biological problem is here involved. Now, the
first man to study this problem from the serious
scientific standpoint was Lazaro Spallanzani, a
clergyman of the eighteenth century. But even
the fact that he was a clergyman is not so sur-
prising, perhaps, as the further information with
regard to him- — that his taste for scientific studies
was aroused by a distinguished woman professor
of the University of Bologna, Laura Bassi, who
was a cousin of his. And, then, there is another
surprise awaiting this generation — that a great
deal of his work was facilitated by his sister
Marianna, who became interested in the natural
sciences (or, as they were then called in general
terms, natural philosophy), in order to be of
help to her brother. She is one of the many
" Little Known Sisters of Well Known Men ",
as runs the title of a recent American book —
which does not, however, contain her name;
nor, for that matter, the name of Caroline
Herschel, who a little later was to be of so much
assistance in his work to her brother, the famous
Herschel the astronomer. We forget sometimes
that sisters have often been deeply affectionate
toward brothers of scientific genius, and that
some of them, even long before our generation,
have had the intelligence to reinforce their aflfec-

ABBE SPALLANZANI 121

tion and accomplish excellent results as their
auxiliaries.^

It is because of the many contradictions of
ordinary impressions as regards the history of
science that the life of Lazaro Spallanzani seems
to deserve recall for our generation, because it is
a keynote of actualities in history that are not
well understood. For indeed the Abbe Spallan-
zani, as he is usually called, was famous. He
was offered chairs in literally more than half a
dozen universities before he reached middle life ;
and later on he was made a member of acad-
emies and learned societies in many of the cities
of Europe — not alone in his native Italy, but in

^ Marianna Spallanzani's distinguished services to
her famous brother are all the more interesting be-
cause such feminine developments in' Italy are usually
not thought (at least in English-speaking countries in
our time) ever to have been possible. Even Dr.
Mozans, in his book, Women in Science, always so
thorough, and usually so exhaustive, has missed Mari-
anna Spallanzani's story. The arrangement of the
cabinet of Natural History which came to be the focus
of the scientific attention of Europe at Pavia was
largely in' her hands. .Spallanzani often confessed that
she knew more about it than he did. During his ab-
sence, distinguished visitors were taken through the
cabinet by Marianna; and, as one of Spallanzani's biog-
raphers (Senebier) says naively enough, " she knew
the properties of all the specimens contained in it, and
was capable of reasoning upon them." He adds, more-
over, the secret of her successful cultivation of natural
science; for "her mind was molded upon that very
illustrious brother, whom it was pleasure to her to
study and imitate."

122 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

Berlin, London, Paris, Madrid, and in distant
Stockholm, Upsala, and other places. He was
one of the most distinguished scientists of the
eighteenth century, known throughout all Europe,
and particularly well known because of his con-
troversies on spontaneous generation. Spallan-
zani had the modern idea in the matter, and in-
sisted that there was no such thing as spontan-
eous generation, but that life was always the re-
sult of preceding life. Though his dictum in the
matter was disputed by Needham and Buffon,
he came off victorious in controversies with
them. He had similar good fortune also in a
controversy with John Hunter on a topic relating
to digestion, though at the time Hunter was
rightly looked up to as one of the most distin-
guished authorities in Europe on questions of
anatomy and physiology.

What is even more to Spallanzani's credit,
however, than his success in the controversies in
question is the fact that, notwithstanding that
the temper of controversy in the eighteenth cen-
tury was, almost as a rule, very bitter (though
not so bitter as it had been in the seventeenth),
and readily became personal, Spallanzani never
stooped to anything of that kind. He was noted
for the gentleness of his ways and the suavity
of his manners. He probably did more than any
one else of the period to set the example, general
in our time, according to which scientists or
grammarians or mathematicians may disagree
without acrimony.

ABBE SPALLANZANI 1 23

When, at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, Dr. Thomas Hunt Morgan, Professor of
Biology at Bryn Mawr College, gave the series
of lectures on regeneration at Columbia Univer-
sity, wrhich were published in the Columbia Uni-
versity Biological Series,^ he reviewed in his in-
troductory lecture Spallanzani's work, regretting
that, unfortunately, the complete account of the
Italian clergyman's experiments had never been
published. As Professor Morgan has since come
to be looked upon as the authority on regenera-
tion not only in this country but in the scientific
world generally, his epitomization of Spallan-
zani's work is thoroughly authoritative. Here,
for instance, is a brief resume of the Spallan-
zani observations on earthworms :

He made a large number of experiments with earth-
worms of several kinds, and found that a worm cut
in two pieces may produce two new worms, or, at least,
that the anterior piece produces a new tail, which in-
creases in length, and may ultimately represent the
posterior part of the body. The posterior piece, how-
ever, produces only a short head at its anterior end,
but never makes good the rest of the part that was
lost. A short piece of the anterior end fails to re-
generate; but in one species of earthworm, that differs
from all the others in this respect, a short anterior
piece or head can make a new tail at its posterior end.
Spallanzani found also that if much of the anterior
end is cut off, the development of a new head by the
posterior piece is delayed, and, in some species, does
not take place at all. If a new head is cut off, another

2 Macmillan Co., 1901.

124 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

is regenerated ; and this occurred in one case five times.
If, after a new head has developed, a portion is only
cut off, the part removed is replaced; and if a portion
of this new part is cut off, it is also regenerated. If
a worm is split longitudinally into two pieces, the
pieces die. If only a part of the worm is split longi-
tudinally and one part removed, the latter will be re-
generated from the remaining part.

Spallanzani's experiments on other crawling
creatures, especially the tadpole and the sala-
mander, were not less interesting or less signifi-
cant; and these two have been epitomized by
Professor Morgan in such a way as to make it
clear that Spallanzani's observations were care-
fully made, and that practically no phase of the
problems was neglected. Any one who thinks
that biologic experimentation is in any sense
modern or recent, or that the older scientists
depended too much on theory and did not ask
direct questions of nature, or diversify the terms
of their experiment in such a way as to search
out the definite significance of the phenomena in
which they were interested, needs only to read
this epitomization of Spallanzani's work on re-
generation to have all such false notions oblit-
erated. Professor Morgan says :

Spallanzani found that a tadpole can regenerate its
tail; and if a part of the new tail is cut off, the re-
maining part will regenerate as much as is lost. Older
tadpoles regenerate more slowly than younger ones.
If a tadpole is not fed, it ceases to grow larger, but
it will still regenerate its tail if the tail is cut off.
Salamanders also regenerate a new tail, producing even

ABBE SPALLANZANI 125

new vertebrae. If a leg is cut off, it is regenerated; if
all four legs are cut off, either at the same time or in
succession they are renewed. If the leg is cut off near
the body, an imperfectly regenerated part is formed.
Regeneration of the legs was found to take place in all
species of salamanders that were known to Spallanzani,
but best in young stages. In full-grown salamanders
regeneration takes place more promptly in smaller
species than in larger ones. Curiously enough, it was
found that if the fingers or toes are cut off, they re-
generate very slowly. If the fingers of one side and
the whole leg of the opposite side are cut off at the
same time, the leg may be regenerated as soon as the
fingers of the other side. A year is, however, often
insufficient in some forms for a leg to become fully
formed. If an animal is kept without food for two
months after a leg has been cut off, the new leg will
regenerate as rapidly as in another salamander that has
been kept fed during this time. If the animal is kept
longer without food, it will decrease in size, but never-
theless the new leg continues to grow larger. Oc-
casionally more toes or fewer toes than the normal
number are regenerated; but as a rule the fore leg
renews its four toes, and the hind leg its five toes.

In one experiment, all four legs and the tail were
cut off six times during the three summer months, and
were regenerated. Spallanzani calculated that (in this
process in a single animal) 647 new bones must have
been made in the new parts. The regeneration of the
new limbs was as quickly carried out the last time as
the first. Spallanzani also found that the upper and
lower jaws of salamanders can regenerate.

Professor Morgan has also touched upon
Spallanzani's experiments on the snail and slug.
If the tentacles are removed, they are renewed ;
and, to quote Professor Morgan, " Spallanzani

126 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

found that even if the entire head is' cut off a
new one is regenerated. Also other parts of the
snail, as the foot and the collar, may be regen-
erated. The head of the slug, it was found, re-
generates with more difficulty than that of the
snail." No wonder that Professor Morgan did
not hesitate to say that the justly celebrated ex-
periments of Spallanzani and his contemporaries
furnish the basis of all later work, and that
many of the important facts in regard to regen-
eration were made known by their investigations.
Abbe Spallanzani's experiments on regenera-
tion, then, as can readily be understood, were not
merely superficial investigations of a curious
phenomenon, but very definite and searching
questions put to nature with regard to this im-
portant function of tissues. Spallanzani actually
showed that not only the tails and limbs of many
creatures, like tadpoles, salamanders, and snails,
could be regenerated on removal, but that some
of these creatures could regenerate their heads;
though it was afterward found that, in these
cases, what had been called the head of the
animal did not contain the essential part of the
central nervous system. In the course of these
experiments, he brought out very clearly how
important was the spinal cord as a portion of
the central nervous system. Up to this time the
spinal cord has been considered as merely a sort
of bundle of nerves running together through
the canal in the spinal vertebrse, somewhat as
the elements of an electrical cable run through

ABBE SPALLANZANI 127

a tube or tunnel. Spallanzani's experiments
show, however, that the spinal cord contains a
number of important reflex centers, which bring
about reflex movements and functions of various
kinds quite independently of the brain, and
almost entirely without reference to it.

His experimental removal of the head of the
land snail, followed by its regeneration, was
doubted until a series of observers had controlled
and confirmed his conclusions. It was afterward
shown that this does not contain the brain ; but
it does contain the eyes, the mouth, the tongue,
the teeth, and most of the sense organs of the
animal, and these are all regenerated. In a word,
the whole subject of regeneration was gone into
so thoroughly as to make it a special chapter in
biological science. In the midst of preoccupa-
tions with other developments, and particularly
the cell doctrine, this subject was neglected in
the nineteenth century, until, during the last two
decades of that period, Roux, Driesch, and
others in Germany, as well as Thomas Hunt
Morgan, Loeb, and other American biological in-
vestigators, took it up again and showed its sig-
nificance. Practically, all that they have accom-
plished has added little to our knowledge of the
details of it, though they have succeeded in
pointing out how much the possession of the
faculty of regeneration tells against Darwinism.

While Spallanzani's studies in regeneration
have attracted attention to him, particularly in
our time, it was his work on so-called spontan-

128 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

eous generation that gave him his reputation in
the eighteenth century. The question of the
possibility of the spontaneous origin of life
(abiogenesis, as it is called scientifically — that is,
of the occurrence of life as the result of non-
living forces and without any necessary relation
to preceding life) has often occupied men's
minds, and, above all, in the nineteenth century
was the subject of not a little thought and a
great deal of experimentation. Even distin-
guished scientists have lent themselves to the
conclusion that life could thus originate of itself,
as, for instance, in the moist, hot climate of a
tropical country, or in the slime at the bottom of
the ocean. Huxley rather brought himself into
ridicule by his acceptance of bathybius — a low
order of life, as its Greek name implies, which
was supposed to be intermediate between non
living or non-organic material and living or
organic material. In some minds the problem is
not yet settled; for all those who refuse to
accept creation as the origin of life, consider that
life must have come into existence originally by
some chance disposition of merely physical
factors.

In centuries preceding the nineteenth, all sorts
of curious notions with regard to the spontan-
eous origin of life were accepted even by scien-
tific minds. The old Greeks were quite sure that
insects and even other highly organized forms
of life sprang into existence as the result of
merely favorable physical conditions. Putrefy-

ABBE SPALLANZANI 1 29

ing material, for instance, was supposed actually
to generate little living things. The Romans
adopted this set of ideas from the Greeks; and
everyone will recall Virgil's very curious de-
scription of the way to obtain a swarm of bees,
by allowing a carcass to rot on a hillside in the
sun. He had evidently mistaken the buzzing
flies, so often with curiously brilliant wings and
bodies, which are seen under such circumstances,
for young bees ; though perhaps he had never
seen the phenomenon, but merely adopted it, as
he did most of the biological and agricultural
hints in his Georgics from writers of curious
things in the world around him.

One of the well-known names at the begin-
ning of modern science was Van Helmont, to
whom we owe the word " gas ", and who is
looked upon as one of the most distinguished
medical scientists of the seventeenth century.
His ideas, therefore, would be reasonably repre-
sentative of the science of his time. He was in-
deed the founder of the iatrochemical school in
medicine, which did so much to suggest the
chemistry of the human body as the basis of
pathology and the scientific foundation for thera-
peutics. We owe to him the physiological im-
portance of ferments and gases, particularly of
carbonic acid ; and his knowledge of the bile, the
gastric juice, and the acids of the stomach was
considerable.^

3 Garrison, History of Medicine.

130 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

In spite of all this knowledge of chemistry in
general and the chemism of the body in partic-
ular, in which he was practical enough to intro
duce the gravimetric idea in the analysis of urine,
which has since been of so much importance,
Van Helmont had what would seem to us the
most absurd notions with regard to the subject
of the origin of even highly organized life, and
of spontaneous generation in general. He sug-
gested, for instance, that even living beings so
high in the scale of life as mice might be ob-
tained by spontaneous generation. The terms of
the experiment were that some meal should be
taken, placed in an earthenware jar in a dark
corner of a cellar, covered with dirty linen (this
latter seemed to be an important factor in the
experiment) ; and he said that in the course of
a few weeks mice would be found making a
home in the meal. This occurrence of life he
considered to be due to spontaneous generation ;
and, as he had tried the experiment a number of
times, he was quite convinced that his conclusion
in the matter was scientific.

In the eighteenth century they had gone far
beyond these crude notions at least, though many
scientists were still inclined to think that in-
sects were produced spontaneously in decaying
or rapidly changing organic matter ; and that
surely the smaller living things (the animalcules,
as they called them — the micro-organisms or
microbes, to use the familiar name of the modern
time) arose spontaneously

ABBE SPALLANZANI I3I

Curiously enough, about the middle of the
eighteenth century, the controversy over spon-
taneous generation was between two Catholic
clergymen — one of them Father Walter Need-
ham, an Irish priest whom the Penal Laws made
an exile on the Continent, and who devoted a
good deal of his leisure time to biological experi-
ments ; the other, our Abbe Spallanzani. In 1748
Father Needham published the account of cer-
tain experiments on boiled meat juices, which
were enclosed in glass phials and sealed, so that
apparently whatever developed in them must
come from their contents and not in any way
from without. As the boiling was presumed to
have killed all life in the organic materials, the
subsequent presence of micro-organisms in these
liquids seemed to demonstrate that these must
have been produced by spontaneous generation.
The same controversy, almost in the same form,
was destined to come up in the nineteenth cen-
tury, when Pasteur's crucial experiments once
more refuted the idea of spontaneous generation.

Spallanzani anticipated Pasteur by repeating
Father Needham's experiments under conditions
which showed conclusively that whenever, after
thorough boiling, the air was completely excluded
from the flasks, no life ever developed in them.
He used glass flasks which could be hermetically
sealed in flame, immersing them in boiling water
prior to the test. When Father Needham ob-
jected that the real reason for the failure of sub-
sequent occurrence of micro-organisms in the

132 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

organic fluids was that their exposure to the
flame had killed the " vegetative force " in them
which would have enabled them to support life,
Spallanzani extended this experiment so as to
show that just as soon as the sealed fluids were
exposed to the air once more, they were thor-
oughly capable of supporting organic life, only
that life must be introduced into them from
without. This work, almost needless to say, at-
tracted a great deal of attention; and Spallan-
zani's triumphant demonstration of his ideas
gave him great scientific prestige throughout
Europe, and created as well a new point of view
which was to form a firm fundamental principle
in modern science.

Regeneration and spontaneous generation were
only two out of many subjects that Spallanzani
treated in the field of what we now call biology.
There were many others. Digestion, generation,
fertilization, respiration, circulation, were all
taken up, and all of them illuminated by his
genius; for there is no other word for his mar-
velous power of observation, his infinite patience
in diversifying his experiments, his ingenuity of
device for his questions to nature, and his perti-
nacity in following up hints to definite conclu-
sions.

Probably the most interesting discovery made
by Spallanzani was that of the digestive power
of the saliva. Ordinarily it was assumed up to
that time (and the idea is still prevalent enough)
that the purpose of saliva was mainly to moisten

ABBE SPALLANZANI I33

the food and make it easier to swallow ; and, as
a matter of fact, this is one of its important
functions. So far from this being the all-
important function, however, it is now well un
derstood that, if saliva does not become mixed
properly with starchy food, its digestion is not a
little interfered with, or at least hampered. If
the starches are always presented in such form
that very little chewing is needed — as, for in-
stance, when potatoes are mashed, and peas and
beans are pureed, and only the soft portions of
bread eaten, or bread always soaked in some
fluid before being eaten — the digestion of the
starch is rendered difficult. On the other hand,
if a piece of bread be chewed faithfully, and
especially a crust of bread chewed until it is
ready to swallow without any fluid being taken,
the substance becomes sweet in the mouth, show-
ing that the saliva is already bringing about a
change of the starch of the bread into sugar.
Something of this change ought always to take
place in the mastication of starchy foods.

We owe the knowledge of this important func-
tion: of the saliva to Spallanzani, who also ex-
tended the knowledge of the gastric juice as a
solvent of food in the stomach. This fact had
been known before, and the function of the gas-
tric juice had been scientifically determined ; but
Abbe Spallanzani showed that the gastric juice
acts outside the body, and somehow contains in
itself apart from the stomach, once it has been
secreted, the digestive power. This led later to

134 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

the preparation of pepsin from animals' stom-
achs as an adjuvant to human digestion. Spal-
lanzani also showed that the gastric juice pre-
vented the putrefaction of even the most highly
organized materials, and that it had the power of
stopping putrefaction even after it had once
begun. As a matter of fact, his thoroughness of
investigation of the subject set stomach diges-
tion on a scientific plane that was little raised
until well on toward the end of the nineteenth
century.

Regeneration and digestion are two very im-
portant subjects to have illuminated so well as
Spallanzani illuminated them ; but after this he
took up the subject of respiration, and left it as
much his debtor as that of digestion. He studied
not only the respiration of warm but also of cold-
blooded animals. By experiments, he demon-
strated that animals that hibernate — that is, pass
the winter in a sort of comatose condition — con-
sume only an almost infinitesimal amount of
oxygen. Indeed, he demonstrated that they can
live comfortably for a considerable time in an
atmosphere of carbon dioxide, in which ordinary
warm-blooded animals will perish in the course
of a few minutes.

Abbe Spallanzani went still further, however,
and showed that living tissues excised from a
freshly killed animal will take up oxygen and
give off carbon dioxide for a time, quite as if
they were directly connected with the blood
stream which brought them oxygen and carried

ABBE SPALLANZANI 135

off the carbon dioxide. In this he anticipated,
in certain fundamental aspects, the series of ex-
periments which have been made in recent years
to demonstrate that tissues retain vitality for a
definite and sometimes rather prolonged period
after their detachment from the living being to
which they belonged originally. When I add
that he was very much interested in the subject
of artificial fecundation, which, like regeneration
and spontaneous generation was to occupy
biology so much in the last century, it is quite
easy to understand how far ahead of his time he
was. He was undoubtedly the most important
pioneer in experimental morphology, that de-
partment of biology which came to attract so
much attention in the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century; though his work on this subject
began a full hundred years before that time.

Spallanzani's early education and his youthful
intellectual interests were not such as might nat-
urally lead him into experimental science. In-
deed, his thoroughly classical education was such
that, to believe certain modern theorists in edu-
cation, it might have been expected that he could
not have developed that interest in the things of
nature around him and the marvelous power of
observation which characterized his subsequent
career. For, as Senebier says in his sketch of
him prefixed to the Memoirs on Respiration,
" he confined himself to the study of grammar,
the importance of which in general is not suffi-
ciently felt, informing the mind so as to seize

136 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

those relations which are adapted to confer on
it distinction or at least happiness."

Spallanzani was born 10 January, 1729, at
Scandiano, in Modena, which, with Parma, was
then an independent Duchy in North Italy. His
college education was obtained with the Jesuits
at Reggio; and, after the completion of his
studies of rhetoric and philosophy, he went for
his university work to Bologna. At that time
one of the most distinguished professors at the
University of Bologna was that celebrated
woman teacher of the natural sciences and
mathematics, Laura Bassi. She was a cousin of
Spallanzani, and deeply influenced his intellec-
tual development. This mother of twelve chil-
dren, " who never permitted her scientific and
literary work to conflict with her domestic
duties, or to detract in the least from a singular
affection which so closely united her to her hus-
band and children ", was a focus of attention
in Bologna that attracted visitors from every-
where.*

In spite of this interest in the natural sciences
aroused by his distinguished cousin, Spallanzani
devoted himself to the classics and especially to

* This same century saw no less than three other
distinguished women professors at the University of
Bologna : Madame Manzolini, professor of anatomy,
a colleague of Galvani ; Maria dalle Donne, for whom
Napoleon established a chair of obstetrics at the Uni-
versity; and Clotilda Tambroni, the famous professor
of Greek, of whom it was said " only three persons in
Europe are able to read Greek as well as she does.''

ABBE SPALLANZANI 1 37

Greek. His favorite authors were Homer, De-
mosthenes, and St. Basil; and the first work
from his pen was a critique of Salvini's transla-
tion of Homer, which had been considered up to
that time as one of the best translations of the
old Greek poet ever published. Spallanzani
showed, however, in how many ways the trans-
lator had failed to reproduce in Italian the spirit
and vigor and sometimes even the sense of a
very great number of Flomer's expressions. In
doing so he entered into the most erudite details
respecting the etymology of a variety of words,
pointing out their exact import and restoring the
true sense of the Greek text. His letters on the
subject constitute a real monograph, and were
printed in the works of the distinguished scholar,
Conte Algarotti, to whom they were written.

Besides his work in literature and the natural
sciences, Spallanzani, conforming to the wishes
of his father, whom he dearly loved, took up the
study of jurisprudence, so as to follow out the
custom of Italy of the son's embracing his
father's profession. He was in the midst of his
course in jurisprudence when he confided to the
well-known Vallisnieri, professor of natural his-
tory at Padua, his lack of serious interest in law ;
and Vallisnieri, who was also a native of Scan-
diano, and was well acquainted with the Spallan-
zani family, promised to secure his father's per-
mission to give up law. Deeply affected with
the proof of obedience to his will, Spallanzani's
father readily consented that his son should

I3>*^ CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

henceforth be left at liberty to follow the bent
of his own inclinations. F"rom this time on
Spallanzani's life was almost entirely devoted to
the study of natural history — what we now call
physical and biological science.

At the conclusion of his years with the Jesuits,
Spallanzani passed some time with the Domini-
cans at Reggio, and received Minor Orders
there. I have been able to find no record of his
ever receiving Major Orders, though he was in-
variably known as Abbe Spallanzani in all that
was written about him in English and French
literature; and he seems always to have consid-
ered himself as devoted to the Church. He was
only twenty-five years of age when, in 1754, he
was chosen professor of Greek, logic, and mathe-
matics at the University of Reggio. Such a
combination of studies and teaching would seem
absurd in our day, and would lead one to think
that the poor fellow who had to undertake so
various a duty would surely not be able to find
any satisfactory self-development. Before five
years had passed, however, Spallanzani's work
had attracted widespread attention ; and the
University of Coimbra in Portugal and the Acad-
emy of Petersburg in Russia, as well as the Uni-
versities of Parma and Cesena in Italy, offered
him chairs. Fie preferred the call of the Uni-
versity of Modena, in his own North Italy, and
continued his good work there.

In 1768 the Empress Maria Theresa suggested
to her minister of education that Spallanzani

ABBE SPALLANZANI 1 39

should be secured for the chair of natural his-
tory in the University of Pavia, which the great
Empress, in her policy of conciliating the Italians
who were under Austrian rule, was engaged in
reorganizing. Spallanzani hesitated about ac-
cepting the offer until he was assured that a
most liberal policy was to be instituted as re-
gards the University of Pavia, and that he would
be given large opportunities to develop its de-
partment of natural history, as well as liberal
allowances in order to make the museum at
Pavia one of the best known not only in Italy
but throughout the world. During his occu-
pancy of the chair at Pavia, Spallanzani, in ac-
cordance with this prearrangement, spent a great
deal of his time in Switzerland and along the
Mediterranean coast, also in Asia Minor and
Turkey and Greece, gathering collections of
scientific material for the museum at Pavia,
which made that a center of interest for Europe
and the biological sciences at that time.

Pavia, after having been a very distinguished
university, had been allowed to run down under
the Austrian domination until it was scarcely
more than a shadow of its former greatness.
The administrative ability of Maria Theresa
made it clear to her that a continuance of the
previous neglect would surely create disaffection
among the Italians, and foster revolution. Hence
the issuance of the invitation to Spallanzani, with
the offer of such special opportunities in his line
as would surely secure his acceptance. Some

140 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

idea of her success in gathering a hand of dis-
tinguished professors at the reawakened Univer-
sity of Pavia may be gathered from the group
of men who came there in Spallanzani's Hfe-
time — including Boscovich, the great mathema-
tician; Fontana, the naturalist; as well as Bur-
serius and Moscati.

Vallisnieri, professor of natural history at the
University of Padua, who was considered the
most prominent teacher of the biological sciences
throughout Europe, having died, his chair was
offered to Spallanzani — a compliment which im-
plied that the faculty regarded the professor of
Pavia as the legitimate successor of his great
compatriot. Spallanzani was tempted to accept
the position, because of the prestige that went
with it ; but the Empress of Austria wished to
retain him, and the Austrian authorities doubled
his salary, and offered him a long leave of ab-
sence for a scientific expedition to Turkey,
knowing well that this latter stipulation would
carry far greater weight with Spallanzani than
any monetary consideration.

He remained at Pavia, then, and accomplished
a long scientific tour throughout Turkey, his re-
turn being made the occasion of a magnificent
university ovation. After this at regular inter-
vals he continued to make scientific journeys,
always with definite investigation purposes. He
made a series of special studies, for instance, of
Vesuvius and of the volcanoes of Sicily and of
the Lipari Islands; for he was interested not

ABBE SPALLANZANI I4I

only in the biological sciences, but in all the
physical sciences.

Abbe Spallanzani's most important work in
his time was the collection of specimens for the
museum of the University of Pavia. In this task
he anticipated what was to be a particular fea-
ture of university scientific life at the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
century. As there was practically none of the
natural sciences in which Spallanzani was not
interested, the specimens he collected illustrated
every phase of natural history at that period.
He made a great natural history museum in the
broadest sense of the word ; and the surprise is
that a man so deeply interested in collection,
comparison, and classification of the objects for
a museum, should at the same time have been so
indefatigable an experimenter, and so ingenious
an organizer of experimental methods of all
kinds. There is scarcely a biological question
that has deeply interested scientists during the
past generation which, apparently, did not occur
to Spallanzani, and which he did not make some
attempt to answer. Even when his attempts are
failures, because of the state of science at the
time, almost without exception his methods are
suggestive.

There was a very large group of Italian scien-
tists doing magnificent work in the latter half of
the eighteenth century. We have been so little
accustomed to consider Italy as the pioneer in
nearly all great scientific achievements that we

142 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

are not likely to appreciate this phase of the his-
tory of science. Among those whose work was
attracting world-wide attention among his fel-
low-countrymen in Spallanzani's lifetime were
Galvani, after whom galvanism is named ; Volta,
whose name has been chosen, and meritedly, as
one of the basic terms in electricity ; Morgagni,
the father of modern pathology ; Scarpa, the
greatest anatomist of his day; Vallisnieri, the
naturalist; Mascagni, and others. It was in a
generation of this kind that Spallanzani was
properly appreciated, and looked up to as, if not
the most distinguished among them, certainly the
one with the greatest breadth of knowledge and
probably the widest reputation in his own time.
Dr. Tourdes, of the University of Montpellier,
who knew Abbe Spallanzani personally, and who
translated a number of his works into French,
in his sketch of the literary productions of Spal-
lanzani which precedes his translation of the
Abbe's experiments upon the circulation of the
blood, has a series of paragraphs which demon-
strate Spallanzani's contemporary reputation."

5 This work, with a number of others, including most
of the important books published by Spallanzani, as
well as some of his unpubli.shed manuscripts which
were edited after his death, can be obtained in English
translation. Indeed, there is scarcely any language in
Europe — that is, of the more important countries —
into which most of Spallanzani's works were not trans-
laled. It is no surprise to find them in English; for
during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
English and Italian science were rather closely in touch

ABBE SPALLANZANI I43

Italians were certainly among the first to do justice
to their fellow-countryman. They had the highest
opinion of his merit, and the writers of that country
participated in the general admiration of Spallanzani.
It was impossible that the greater part of them should
not be conscious of their inferiority; and such men
as Volta, Scarpa, Moscati, Fontana, and Mascagni,
could have no reason to envy his glory.

Foreign naturalists likewise paid him the most honor-
able tribute of praise. Haller dedicated to him one
of the volumes of his immortal work. The founder of
the most magnificent edifice that has ever been erected
to the science of man owed, doubtless, some mark of
acknowledgment to one who had furnished him with
such a number of materials. " You have discovered
to us," said Bonnet in a letter to him, " more truths
in a few years than whole academies have done in half
a century.'' This observation, too, was made before
Spallanzani had pubhshed his mineralogical productions,
his chemical essays, or his various papers in natural
history.

Spallanzani was intimately connected with Trembley,
Saussure, Tissot, and the French scientists of his time.
Everyone knows the esteem and attachment enter-
tained for him by Senebier, the illustrious librarian of
Geneva. The familiar friend of Spallanzani, and an
enHghtened judge of his merit, he incessantly cele-
brated his discoveries, extolled his talent in the ex-
perimental art, and enriched with the most instructive
notes the translations which he gave of almost the
whole of his works.

The Germans and English have done equal justice

with each other; though, it must be confessed, with
the obligation entirely on the part of the English
toward the Italians, who honored themselves by honor-
ing such men as Malpighi, Morgagni, Galvani, and
Spallanzani.

144 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

to the Professor of Pavia. The former have confirmed
by experiments almost all his discoveries; the latter,
notwithstanding their prejudice against the inquiries
of foreigners, have been compelled to acknowledge the
importance of his observations on organic reproduction,
digestion, generation, etc. ; and they have translated
his works upon these subjects into their own language.
But France, beyond every other country, claims
the merit of having assigned to this celebrated man
the honorable rank which he will occupy in the annals
of history. No sooner were his works known to this
nation, than it appropriated them by translations exe-
cuted with elegance and fidelity. His discoveries were
never mentioned but in terms of admiration, and they
were adopted almost with implicit belief. His name
resounded in all our schools, and it was everywhere
heard with enthusiasm.

One of the theses (No. 59) for the Faculty of
Medicine at the University of Paris, written for
the Doctorate in Medicine in 1912, had for its
subject " Spallanzani the Biologist ". In a com-
paratively short space this thesis reviews partic-
ularly Spallanzani's contributions to the sciences
related to medicine. It enumerates no less than
four opuscules of Spallanzani on the circulation
of the blood published between 1768 and 1775.
His special work on digestion I have already
noticed; and it was illuminated by his experi-
mental methods, which included the inclosure in
tubes, closed by wire netting, of digestive mate-
rials, which were thus exposed to the action of
the gastric juice of the animal, and might after-
ward be recovered for the study of the com-
parative effect of digestive secretions on these

ABBE SPALLANZANI I45

materials. His experiments on respiration were
not less ingenious, and always brought concrete
knowledge. Indeed, it is the ingenuity of his
experiments that attracts attention at the present
time.

One of Spallanzani's very dear friends and
admirers was Senebier, who was the librarian at
Geneva, a corresponding member of the National
Institute of France, and member of a number of
academies. We owe to him a sketch of the liter-
ary life of Spallanzani, and he has summed up
the great scientist's influence on his time :

If we are to judge Spallanzani by the number of
his works, he is phenomenal. If we turn to the sub-
jects which have occupied him, they are the most
important and the most difficult that could be; for he
has added to our knowledge of the generation of
animals and of plants and the circulation of the blood,
digestion, animal reproduction, spermatic fluids, mi-
crobes, mineralogy, volcanoes, combustion. He has
described a number of animals hitherto unknown, and
a large number of crustaceans and testaceans, besides
providing the solution of many physical and chemical
problems hitherto misunderstood.

If we are to judge him by his method, that is at
once the most ingenious, the easiest, and yet the most
severe. He never leaves any doubt behind, and his
explanations are always solidly founded. It is only
in the universality of his labors that we can see his
vast conceptions, which are always the happy develop-
ment of a great idea which flows naturally from some
of the great principles of natural history. One might
well be persuaded that, somehow or other, he possessed
the plan of the univeise, from which he detached
parts here and there in order to put them under the

146 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

eyes of ordinary people. Finally, if we are to judge
of Spallanzani by his style, we have here another
characteristic trait of genius ; for the man who can
see clearly expresses himself well, and his style is pure
and clear, yet colored and melodious. His compatriots
place his works beside those of the best writers in
Italian.

The writer of the thesis at the University of
Paris, Dr. Jean Rosenwald, says in conclusion as
to Spallanzani : " If genius, as Buffon said, is
the power of continuous attention, or if, as
Thiers declared, genius has no specialty, Spallan-
zani fulfils these definitions better than any one
else. He cannot but appeal to us, and there is
no eulogium which is more correct or more de-
served than that which styles him the precursor
of Pasteur as well by the depth of his researches,
the precision of his experiments, and the sagacity
of his deductions, which leave very little for
criticism or for sincere controversy. It seems
too bad, then, that Lazaro Spallanzani .should
have been in the penumbra in which modern his-
tory has left him ; for a place in the full light is
due to this illustrious man and giant pioneer of
human progress."

V.

ABBE BREUIL AND THE CAVE-
MEN ARTISTS.

AIN was the chief's, the sage's

■yAIN 1
^ pride !

They had no poet and they died.

— Pope.
They had an artist and they lived.

"VTEQUE solum vivi, atque prae-
-'- ' sentes studiosos discendi eru-
diunt, atque docent : sed hoc idem
etiam post mortem monumentis
litterarum assequuntur. — CicBRO.

Learned men not only instruct and
educate those who are desirous to
learn, during their life, and while
they are present among us, but they
continue to do the same after death
by the monuments of their learning
which they leave behind them.

T

V.

ABBE BREUIL AND THE CAVE-MEN ARTISTS.
HERE has been a very surprising — one might

well say almost astounding — development
of science intimately concerning man, during the
last few years, which comparatively few even of
educated people have realized. A good many of
the publications with regard to it came shortly
before the war and unfortunately the war has so
occupied men's minds all over the civilized world
that almost nothing else has had any proper
chance for consideration. Besides blockades of
various kinds, the high cost of living and the
high prices of many things have prevented the
diffusion of the literature of the subject. Shortly
after the war, however, I feel sure that this will
prove one of the most startling revolutionary
scientific developments that have come to us for
many generations, if not indeed for many cen-
turies. It consists of what we have learned with
regard to the earliest ancestor of man in Europe,
that is, the dweller in caves, whose mode of life
and something even of his mode of thought have
been brought home to us by the wonderful dis-
coveries made in the Dordogne in Western
France, as well as in Northern Spain and in cer-
tain parts of the South of France.

That from the very beginning it may be clear
that I am not exaggerating the significance of

ISO CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

this set of discoveries, it seems well to quote a
recognized authority in the matter, a man who,
though himself not engaged in this particular
field of archeology, is eminently in a position to
estimate the significance of the discoveries made.
I suppose that it would be generally acknowl-
edged that the address of the President of the'
British Association for the Advancement of
Science each year is looked upon, in the English-
speaking world at least, as the paramount scien-
tific message of the year. The position is occu-
pied in rotation by the men who have distin-
guished themselves in the various scientific bodies
that constitute the membership of the Associa-
tion, so that about once every dozen years or so
there is a review of each important department
of science. The President in his annual address
brings up to date all the significant knowledge in
his department and presents a forecast, from the
standpoint of a leader in the science, of the out-
look of that special mode of human knowledge.
The well-known conservatism of the English
mind makes these recurring reviews of very
great value for those who from outside the par-
ticular science desire to know exactly what the
meaning of the previous decade's work in it is.

The President of the British Association for
1916 was Sir Arthur Evans, the archeologist,
and his address had for title, " New Archeo-
logical Lights on the Origins of Civilization in
Europe " Almost needless to say, if, as we are
all pretty well agreed, " the proper study of man-

ABBE BREUlL 151

kind is man", this review of the earliest positive
knowledge that we have with regard to man in
Europe, from the actual remains that are to be
found, can scarcely help but be of the greatest
possible interest. Sir Arthur Evans is himself a
man who by his excavations in Crete has addeJ
many precious centuries, even a millennium or
more, to the history of mankind. For Crete has
proved to be a veritable gold mine of archeo-
logical information. On that island was found
the connecting link between Egyptian and Grecian
civilization, and many Greek problems hitherto
insoluble become ever so much simpler in the
light of the illumination from Cretan discoveries.
He is therefore, as I have said, in a partic-
ularly favorable position to judge critically and
yet sympathetically of the other investigations
made by archeologists throughout Europe, and
he accords the palm for significance in the entire
round of the science, whole-heartedly to the
work that is being done in the caves of the Dor-
dogne and of North Spain, in the discovery of
the remains of the earliest man that we know in
Europe, and to the bringing out of the meaning
of the objects and conditions found in these
caves. Sir Arthur Evans does not hesitate to
say that these remains indicate " a high level of
artistic attainment in Southwestern Europe at a
modest estimate some 10,000 years earlier than
the most ancient monuments of Egypt or Chal-
dea ". The President of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science in his formal

152 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

annual address does not hesitate to add that not
only were there men in Western Europe who
lived 10,000 years earlier than the earliest date
ascertainable with any degree of assurance in
Egypt or Chaldea, but these men were artists
bent on making their homes beautiful, and, be-
sides, " one by one characteristics, both spiritual
and material, that had been formerly thought to
be the special marks of later ages of mankind,
have been shown to go back to that earlier
world ".

Here indeed is the greatest surprise of modern
science. Whatever is to be thought of the dates
suggested (for they remain to be determined by
further investigation, and dates in archeology
have a definite tendency to come nearer to us
rather than to go farther away from us as we
know more about the history that they mark),
one thing is sure, namely, that the men who
lived in the caves of Western France and North-
ern Spain were the contemporaries of many ex-
tinct animals — the mammoth, the cave bear, the
sabre-toothed tiger — and during a time when an
animal very close to them in the Pyrenees was
the reindeer which has long since abandoned a
habitat so far South as this anywhere in the
world.

Now it is extremely interesting to find that the
two men to whom we owe by far the greatest
part of our knowledge of these cave men — Abbe
Breuil and Father Hugo Obermaier — are both
priests; the one a Frenchman, and the other a

ABBE BREUIL 1 53

German. The story of what they have done in
adding to our knowledge of man's existence in
Europe is one of the romances of modern
science. Nothing has been a greater shock to
preconceived notions than the discovery that so
far from the ordinary accepted view of the cave-
dweller of the olden time being true, it is sep-
arated toto coelo from realities. Instead of hav-
ing been only a bit higher than the animals, this
earliest man we know by his remains was as a
matter of fact an artist and in every sense of the
word as highly developed a human being as we
are ourselves.

His cave homes were discovered to be decor-
ated with beautiful pictures and figures of ani-
mals and occasionally of men and women as well
as of the natural objects that surrounded the
cave man in his life. These pictures are not
crude and childish, though they are primitive;
but, then, the primitives in art have come back
into favor and critical appreciation so strikingly
in recent years that it is much easier to under-
stand than it was a generation ago that primitive
painting may be great painting, and there is now
universal agreement on the part of the artists
and critics that the cave man did great painting.
A distinguished artist said not long since that
there is no animal painter alive to-day who can
paint animals more vividly, more true to the
life, more artistically in any genuine sense of
that term, than the cave-man artist.

154 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

The artist is the flower of our civihzation such
as it is, and we are quite willing to acknowledge
that a man who is Capable of seeing the beautiful
things of the world around him and reproducing
them so as to give pleasure to others is a leader
among men.. He may be the son of a little pio-
neer farmer who secures his first colors from
the Indians dwelHng near him, whose portraits
he makes, as our own Benjamin West did; or he
may be brought up in a stone mason's family as
Michelangelo was and learn his first use of the
chisel and mallet for the crudest mechanical pur-
poses; or he may be the son of peasant farmers
who remains a peasant at heart and never gets
out of sympathy — thank God ! — with his peasant
relatives, like Francois Millet, the great French
artist of the end of the nineteenth century. But
whatever he is and no matter what his education
or refinement, we look upon the genuine artist
as much more than an ordinary man, as one of
the highly gifted beings of his genefation. Now
there is no doubt at all that the cave man was,
or at least the artists of his time were, just such
superior individuals. Before he was a carpenter
and built himself houses, before he was a farmer
and planted seeds instead of gathering the natural
produce of the woods, before he was a tailor
and fashioned his garments to fit his body,
merely dressing himself in the skins of the beasts
that he hunted, man was an artist, a lover of the
beautiful, a decorator of his home, a man among
men for all time.

ABBi BREUIL 155

Is it any wonder that this new appreciation of
the earliest ancestors of man that we know any-
thing about is considered to be the most revolu-
tionary development in modern science. Just
consider for a moment how different are the
realities from the theories that had been woven
for us and that had been so widely and fre-
quently published that practically everybody was
inclined to think that they must represent quite
serious scientific truth. The cave man had been
pictured to us as the first stage in the evolution
of human beings from the beasts. Some large-
sized monkey who had acquired the habit of
walking on his hind legs, developed cunning
enough to displace the other wild animals from
their lairs in the caves of the hillside and thus
begin domestic life and an upward career toward
civilization. He was a little better able, because
of his recently achieved cunning, to care for
himself and his family than were the other
beasts; but he was at best a very pitiable object.
His wife, doubtless a conquest of his club, he had
probably dragged home to his cave by the hair
of her head to keep her there in the most abso-
lute subjection and drudgery in order that she
might be the mother and caretaker of his chil-
dren. Popularizers of science are still telling us
stories of the cave man quite as if they were
truths and not fables. The very same people
would laugh at the myths of savages (though so
many of those myths contain a kernel of mar-
velous beauty), but they are quite unconscious

156 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

that they are myth-making and that their myths
are quite sordid and unworthy of humanity's
striving.

Above all, we have heard a great deal about
the cave man and how far humanity has ad-
vanced since his day. He was supposed to be
ready to quarrel on the slightest provocation and
to be always in readiness to get the other man
first so that he might not get him. Of course it
was clear on these assumptions that the cave
man was quite without the ethics which charac-
terize civilized man and which are so confidently
asserted to be the gradual development of man's
recognition, as his evolution progresses, of his
duties toward other men. We have a nice long
name for it in our time adopted and adapted
from the Greek, so as to make a very simple old-
fashioned idea appear important and novel. We
call it altruism. Of course the cave man is sup-
posed to have had none of it. He was merely
selfish, as the animals are; for all that the ani-
mals think of is themselves and those separated
parts of themselves, their offspring. The cave
man was a slightly better beast.

Now we have changed all that, as the French
say ; at least we ought to proceed to change it at
once, for the archeologists have shown us very
clearly that the cave man was just a man like
ourselves, only, if anything, somewhat more cul-
tured in his interests. For his devotion to art
and the beautiful things round him, and his de-
sire to reproduce the living things of nature

ABBE BREUIL I 57

round him, in which he rejoiced so much that,
even in the winter time when the weather made
the chase impossible and on rainy days when con-
fined at home, he wanted to see them on the
walls of his cave, stamp him as a superior being.

We owe most of our knowledge of this new
set of ideas, founded on actual observation with
regard to the cave man, above all to two great
scientists, both of whom, as I have said, are
priests. In the divided state of feeling that sep-
arates cultured humanity at the present time,
superinduced by a war that contradicts so strik-
ingly the ideal progress of which we hear so
much, it is of more than passing interest to find
that one of these is a Frenchman, a representa-
tive as it were of the Allies, Abbe Breuil, and
the other a Bavarian, quite as sincerely represen-
tative of the Central Powers, Father Hugo Ober-
maier. When shall we be able to have such co-
ordination and cooperation in the great scientific
work after the war once more?

Manifestly this revolution in our knowledge of
man deserves to be well known, above all by
those who have maintained a conservative atti-
tude in their philosophic opinions as to the origin
of man and have waited patiently for anthro-
pology to develop properly, though they were
being pushed into premature opinions by so
many supposedly authoritative scientists who
were urging the most radical notions. Brother
priests all over the world should surely know the
facts, for not only do they represent one of the

158 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

greatest triumphs of science in our day, but they
confirm traditional opinions that for so long
were looked upon as hopelessly backward. Not
that it is unusual for priests to be distinguished
in science. On the contrary, a knowledge of the
world of a half-a-dozen modern priests would
give one an encyclopedic knowledge of modern
scientific advance. Abbot Mendel, Father Secchi,
Father Wasmann are names that make this very
clear, and now we must add two more to them —
Abbe Breuil and Father Obermaier, who, while
following faithfully priestly and ecclesiastical
duties, have given the world such ripe fruits of
their scientific research.

Abbe Breuil and His Work.

Abbe Breuil was bom 28 February, 1877, at
Mortain, in the Manche, of a family many of
whose members of preceding generations had be-
longed to the magistracy of Picardy. From his
very early years he manifested a marked taste
for natural history, and above all took up quite
seriously of his own volition the study of ento-
mology, to which he later did distinct services
by collecting the subterranean fauna of the cav-
erns as also of the Spanish territories surround-
ing the habitations of the cave men.

His college studies were made in the College
Libre of St. Vincent at Senlis. He entered the
Seminary of St. Sulpice of Paris in 1895 at the
age of eighteen. Abbe Guibert noticed very soon
his liking for the sciences and gave him special

ABBE BREUIL 1 59

opportunities and recommended that he direct
his attention toward archeology and the earliest
records of human existence. Abbe Guibert was
himself the author of a volume on origins {Des
Origines), which concerns itself, however,
mainly with apologetic problems.

During his vacations Abbe Breuil had the op-
portunity to associate himself with some of the
distinguished men who were doing the best work
in archeology in Paris at that time. He came
to know and receive the directions of such men
as Capitan d'Ault-du-Mesnil, Salomon Reinach,
Boule Gaudry, and these associations gave a
strong impetus to the interest in archeology
which had been aroused by Abbe Guibert. Above
all, young Breuil had the magnificent advantage
of becoming the intimate friend of Edouard
Piette, that great searcher of the Pyrenees cav-
erns, who exercised a very special influence over
him and indeed adopted him as a student and
disciple. Their intimate relations to one another
until the death of M. Piette in 1905 directed
Abbe Breuil's work, particularly in the line of
the artistic archeology of the caverns and to the
study of what is known as superior paleolithics,
because it concerns itself with art objects rather
than merely with the remains of the crafts of
the olden time.

Abbe Breuil's first scientific publications began
in 1898, when he published an article on the
chronological status of the Bronze Age. After
Tooi all his attention was devoted to the Old

l6o CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

Stone Age and especially to the higher art and
industry of that time. He was ordained at St.
Sulpice in December, 1900, but remained at Paris
for the next five years studying for his degrees
in science and taking special courses at the Cath-
olic Institute. From 1905 to 1909 he was a
Privat-docent at the University of Fribourg in
Switzerland. His special subjects were Prehis-
tory and Ethnography.

Since 1901 about one-half of Abbe Breuil's
time has been occupied with the actual investiga-
tion of caverns, alone and with Capitan and other
well-known archeologists. A large number of
caverns adorned with designs or paintings have
been found, the reproduction of which and the
description of their surroundings as well as* the
deciphering of their meaning have fallen upon
Abbe Breuil almost alone. Cartailhac called
Breuil to collaborate with him in the caverns
which were found in the French Pyrenees and
together they discovered a number of others in
the same region. In 1902, with Cartailhac, Abbe
Breuil was invited to take up the study of the
celebrated cavern of Altamira in Spain. In 1906
he returned to Spain to pursue new researches
in other caverns of the Cantabrian Province with
Alcalde del Rio, their discoverer. During the
following year he was very much occupied
with the paintings discovered in large numbers
after systematic search of caverns in Aragon,
Catalonia, Estremadura, Castile, and Andalusia.
In 1909 he was asked by the Prince of Monaco

ABBE BREUIL l6l

to take a post in the foundation created by that
liberal patron of the sciences, the Institute of
Human Paleontology. Most of his best work
since then has been published under the patron-
age and at the expense of the Prince.

To him more than anyone else is owed the
recognition of the significance and the impor-
tance of the Aurignacian level or horizon in
cave-man archeology, a period which preceded
the Solutrean and followed the Mousterian. He
worked out the application of the idea of a cer-
tain development of style in the engraved figures
on the various objects picked up in the cave. He
pointed out a certain development from the re-
production of the natural image by the engraver
to a schematization of the mode of ornament in
the moveable paleolithic art. For the first artists
saw things for themselves and reproduced them
simply as they saw them. John Ruskin once
said that this was the hardest thing in the world
to do. Then their successors after several gen-
erations refused to follow the difficult path of
personal observation, but they looked through
the eyes of those who had seen before them,
imitated their pictures, took short cuts to get the
results, schematized, and of course art degen-
erated. This is what men have always done ; so
far from being surprising that some of the cave
men should have done it, the surprise would
have been if they had not done it. We know in
our time how tempting it is for men to take such
short cuts and then think, because they are get-

l62 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

ting more or less the same results, that they are
doing just as good work as their predecessors,
though their work is really trivial, cheap copying
and easy imitation.

Abbe Breuil's work has been very widely rec-
ognized and highly complimented. While he has
occupied himself almost exclusively with the
scientific aspects of paleolithic archeology, a
great many other names are much better known
because they have devoted themselves to the
vulgarization of the newly acquired information.
Vulgarization seems a very good word to em-
ploy, though we call it popularization in English ;
for there is an innuendo in the other word that
deserves to be recognized. Practically all the
authoritative writers on the subject, however,
Dechelette in his Manuel d' Archeologie Prehis-
torique, Salomon Reinach in his classical works,
and many others, have expressly outlined their
obligations to him, and Professor Henry Fair-
field Osborn in his Men of the Old Stone Age
dedicated that book to " Emile Cartailhac, Henri
Breuil, and Hugo Obermaier, his distinguished
guides through the upper paleolithic caverns of
the Pyrenees, the Dordogne and the Cantabrian
Mountains of Spain ". He confesses that his
main reliance has been upon the work of Abbe
Breuil and Father Obermaier, and his book is
full of references to their published books and
articles.

Abbe Breuil has published much in the jour-
nals — L'Anthropologie, La Revue Archeologique,

ABBE BREUIL 163

La Revue de I' Anthropologic, as well as in the
volumes issued under the patronage of the Prince
of Monaco. Much of the material, however,
that he has gathered from the caverns is still
unpublished. Besides, a good deal of work has
appeared in collaboration with others. At the
International Congress of Archeology, held at
Monaco in 1906 and Geneva 1912 to discuss the
whole subject of the archeology of the cave man,
his industries, his arts and crafts, his colored
paintings, his movable and parietal art, Abbe
Breuil was considered by all those present as by
far the best informed man on the whole circle
of departments of knowledge that have gathered
round the subject of this earliest ancestor of
man in Europe. He has not only visited prac-
tically all of the caves, but he has also studied
the collections in the various countries of Europe,
not only in France, Switzerland, and Spain, but
also in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and
even Russia. No wonder then that he is looked
upon as an authority on the subject and that a
comprehensive view of the significance of the
life of this earliest ancestor of man in Europe
is now readily available to all who want to re-
place the ridiculous theories foisted upon us by
over-confident evolutionists, by actual informa-
tion derived from the direct observation of the
remains of the cave-dweller.

164 catholic churchmen in science

The Caves and Cave-Dwellers.

These cave dwellings must not be thought of
as shallow holes in the rocks of the mountains,
or even as deeper cavities caused by the loosen-
ing of a boulder and its fall. The caves in which
the cave men dwelt are much more like our
famous caverns of Kentucky, the best known of
which is the Mammoth Cave, though none of the
European caverns can be compared for variety
or extent with our American wonder of the
world. Many of the caverns, however, pene-
trate the rock for a quarter of a mile or a half
a mile and even farther. They were the product
of the same sort of water activity as produced
the caverns of Kentucky, and of course, while
the Mammoth Cave is so well known that most
people are inclined to think of it as unique, actu-
ally a great many caves exist in the State. So
it was in the Dordogne and in certain parts of
North Spain and in Southern France, where
these cave dwellings have been found.

There was plenty of room in them, and some
of the living-rooms must have been at a consid-
erable distance from the entrance. Indeed not a
few of the pictures are many hundreds of feet
from the entrance of the caves. This makes it
easier to understand how they were preserved
and are now comparatively so fresh and vivid
for the study of our time. This, however, makes
it only the more difficult to understand how the
painting came to be done.

ABBE BREUIL 165

Almost needless to say, at this distance from
the entrance the caverns are utterly dark. There
is no question of seeing one's hand in front of
one's face. How then did the cave men come to
make their pictures under such conditions?
What sort of light did they employ? Sir Arthur
Evans does not hesitate to say that the mystery
of the illumination of these caves is astounding.
There is no trace of smoke on the wall or ceil-
ing, and yet we may be quite sure that any ex-
tensive use of the primitive modes of lighting by
torches or oil lamps, such as the making of the
pictures would require, could scarcely have been
secured without leaving its traces. It is even
more surprising to think that in this pitch dark-
ness men should have cared to take the trouble
and the time and exercise the patience needed to
make their pictures. The difficulties increase the
more we know about the circumstances of the
cave man's life.

What is very clear from these discoveries, as
has been brought out emphatically by Abbe
Breuil's studies of the mural art of the caves, is
the fact that man, before he was a carpenter so
as to be able to build himself a house, or a tailor
so as to know how to make himself clothes, was
an artist. It is even probable that before he was
a farmer in our modern sense of the word he
took up the decoration of his home, such as it
was. Instead of occupying himself with the
domestication of plants or of animals so as to
accumulate stores for the morrow and assure

l66 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

himself for the future, he depended on being able
to hunt successfully and to find many edible
things in the forest without sowing and reaping
them. This is indeed a surprising conclusion to
be forced to. Man at the beginning of his known
history preferred to satisfy his sense of beauty,
the intellectual and artistic side of his being,
rather than to assure the satisfaction of his lower
nature.

It has been the rule to think that man first cul-
tivated the utilities, or perhaps it would be better
to say developed them ; and then, having secured
himself in a position where he had leisure, he fol-
lowed the first faint glimmerings of the duty of
occupying that leisure with art and poetry and
other of the confessedly higher things of life.
His soul is supposed to have been developing
within him, but at first his mind was as yet in-
choate and his body was the one thing that he
was looking out for, pushed thereto by his nature.
What proves to be true, however, is that his
nature urged him first toward artistic things, led
him to see what was beautiful in the world about
him, to try to reproduce it so that he might have
the chance to look at it at times when he was
necessarily out of the presence of it, and in gen-
eral led him to be an intellectual and not an
animal being.

The evolutionists have emphasized the animal
in man because they did not quite believe in the
presence of a soul. Here, however, is the dem-
onstration that man was at least as far away

ABBE BREUIL 167

from the animals as we are, at the very earliest
period that we know anything about him in his-
tory. As a matter of fact, I think that it must
be perfectly clear to anyone who thinks about the
conditions under which the cave man developed
his art, that he was, if anything, much higher
than our generation, for, in spite of urgent neces-
sities, he would not occupy himself with mate-
rial things to the exclusion of his higher life,
though there is a very readily traceable tendency
to do so at the present time.

Of course it has always been true that it was
not the man who had secured leisure for himself
and his children from whom we might expect
art and poetry and the higher things. Our
artists and poets have come to us almost as a
rule from among the very poor, and to a great
extent necessity has been the mother of art and
invention for them. Almost never have they been
cradled in luxury, and practically always they
have known, in Dante's words, " how bitter it
is to eat the bread of others' tables ", and as a
rule they have had to struggle with the urgency
of material necessities.

Almost literally our great poets and painters
have been the cave men of the modern times.
They have neglected the utilities of life and have
cultivated the higher things. They have not
cared to make money, or, whenever they have
been tempted into that direction, their gift of
poesy has usually dropped from them and their
art taste has dwindled. They have been bom

l68 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

oftenest in small towns or in country places.
They have been scoffed at because of their im-
practicalness. They, too, were not carpenters
nor tailors nor farmers, because they were
artists and poets and preferred to be such even
though they had to pay for the privilege of living
the higher life by bitter physical suffering. All
this, as it seems to me, has been actually brought
out by Abbe Breuil's successful investigations of
the artistic life of the cave men. When we
think of conditions as they are and were, so far
as art and poetry are concerned, we realize the
kinship and indeed the nearness in every sense
of the word to us of this cave man, though we
had been taught to think of him as so very dis-
tant from us in every way.

Phases of Artistic Development.

After considerable practice with black and
white the cave-men artists became dissatisfied
with this as a medium and sought to express
themselves also in color, and thus reproduce not
only the outlines and the character, but the very
look of the objects they saw. At first they used
masses of black to express the shadows on the
animal, and then occasionally to bring out the
fact that the animal was spotted in various ways.
After a time they found certain ochres that
would give them yellows, and then it was not
long before they found a way to produce red,
and were evidently very much taken with the
color. Indeed it is very curiously interesting to

ABBE BREUIL I 69

find that after their discovery of colors there
was a period of art in which they neglected the
drawing which had been so artistically done be-
fore. They fairly revelled in their new-found
colors, but now did very weak artistic work.
The same thing has often happened again in art
almost in the later time whenever some new-
fangled notions have come in, and it is not sur-
prising that the cave men should have been like
subsequent generations in this regard. The sur-
prise, I suppose, should rather be that subse-
quent generations have not got over the tendency
to follow after fads and fancies, very often to
the detriment of the art with which they are
concerned.

Every step in advance in our knowledge of
these pictures has simply added to the astound-
ing significance of them as historical documents.
Incredible almost as it must appear, these paint-
ings made by the cave man thousands of years
ago are done in oils. The artists, whoever they
were, who wished to reproduce as far as possible
in their original colors the animals that they saw
round them, looked for coloring materials and
found that they could obtain the reds and yellows
and browns that they desired from the oxides of
manganese and of iron. They also found, how-
ever, that these materials were not soluble in
water. They therefore ground them fine in a
mortar — some of the mortars are still preserved
for us — and having mixed the powder well with
the rendered fat of the animals that they had

170 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

killed in hunting, they made what are actually
oil colors. Having manufactured brushes out of
the bristles of the animals, they painted in oils
on the walls of their caves, and their colors were
so permanent that, in spite of the lapse of time
and the vicissitudes of climate to which they
have been subjected (though fortunately, of
course, they have been rather well protected
deep in the interiors of the cave), they made the
pictures that are now the evidence of their high
place as intellectual beings.

An extremely significant phase of this mural
art of the cave man is to be found in the fact
that, in order to give the appearance of plastic
rotundity or solidity to the animals that he
painted, occasionally the cave artist took advan-
tage of various bosses or rounded projections on
the walls of the cave. These were somewhat
irregular in outline, though, from their being
worn by water, they were rather smooth of con-
tour. The cave artist painted his animals on
them in such a way as to produce an illusion of
high relief, usually only the horns and tail of an
animal in the painting projecting beyond the
boss or convexity. The animals had to be placed
in various lying poses and the positions of their
feet and legs carefully accommodated to the
cramped space into which they had to be fitted.
The hoofs particularly were studied very care-
fully, and these pictures show the legs often very
well foreshortened. In a word, the cave artist
solved both of the most difficult problems of art

ABBE BREUIL ITI

for these pictures. It has been very well said
that the great artist is, above all, one that can
accommodate his art to even cramped conditions.
The cave artist wanted to take advantage of tlie
sense of solidity that would be given by these
mural projections, so he made his painting fit
into the rather confined space.

Vivid Observation.

The art of the cave man, as we have seen, did
not blossom into full flower all at once. Defi-
nite developments of it can be noted. At first
animal figures were executed in what we would
call black and white, though, owing to the color
of the background of the limestone, it was really
gray and white. Lines were cut with a flint in
the stone and then lampblack was set in so as
to emphasize the line. It is easy to understand
that such an outline drawing could exercise
artistic ability and call for artistic genius, if good
work was to be done. The surprise is how firmly
and with what confidence the lines were made.
Professor Osborn, Director of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York and
Emeritus Professor of Zoology at Columbia
University, made a journey through the cave-
dwelling regions of Spain and France during the
year just before the war. In his book on The Men
of the Old Stone Age, he has emphasized above
all the confident sure-handed drawing of the
artists. He says : " In the drawings in the large
on these curved wall surfaces, only part of which

172 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

could be seen by the eye at one time, the difficul-
ties of maintaining the proportions were extreme,
and one is ever impressed by the boldness and
confidence with which the long sweeping strokes
of the flint were made. For one rarely, if ever,
sees any evidence of corrected outline."

As a trained zoologist particularly interested
in the horse, because the problem of the evolu-
tion of the horse has occupied so much space in
modern zoology, Professor Osborn has been
chiefly struck by the acute and accurate observa-
tion of this cave-man artist in picturing horses.
He says (p. 407) : " Only a life-long observer
of the fine points which distinguish the different
prehistoric breeds of the horse could appreciate
the extraordinary skill with which the spirited,
aristocratic lines of the Celtic horse are exe-
cuted, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
plebeian and heavy outlines of the steppe horse.
In the best examples of Magdalenian engraving,
both parietal and on bone or ivory, one can
almost immediately detect the specific type of
horse which the artist had before him or in
mind, also the season of the year, as indicated
by the representation of a summer or winter
coat of hair " (italics mine).

The cave artist was quite complete in his tech-
nical equipment, and even artistic in the mate-
rials that he adopted as his artistic utensils. A
single paragraph of Professor Osborn's book
brings this out very well (p. 415) :

ABBE BREUIL 173

To prepare the colors, ochre and oxide of manganese
were ground down to a fine powder in stone mortars;
raw pigment was carried in ornamented cases made
from the lower limb bones of reindeer, and such tubes
still containing the ochre have been found in the Mag-
dalenian hearths; the mingling of the finely ground
powder with the animal oils or fats that were used was
probably done on the flat side of the shoulder-blade of
the reindeer or on some other palette. The pigment
was quite permanent, and in the darkness of the Alta-
mira grotto it has been so perfectly preserved that the
colors are still as brilUant as if they had been appUed
yesterday.

Plastic Art.

The cave artists, however, did not limit their
artistic aspirations to engravings and paintings
in oil. Their paintings of the animals on the
bosses or rounded projections of the walls of
their cave show that they had a sense of the
plastic in art, and so it is not surprising to find
that after a time they attempted to make figures
in high relief, and that they succeeded quite as
admirably as they did with their painting and
engraving. For instance, in the cavern of Tuc
d'Audoubert, at the summit of a very narrow
ascending passage, where therefore they would
be best preserved from breakage or the vicissi-
tudes of time, Cartailhac and Abbe Breuil found
two superb statuettes of bison in clay, about 60
centimetres (24 inches) in length, absolutely un-
broken and showing the high sculptural ability
of this particular cave artist. Abbe Breuil was
filled with enthusiasm about them, and they

ic

174 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

have been described as of perfect workmanship
and of ideal art. Photographs of them have
since been reproduced, so that there is no doubt
at all of the artistic qualities of them, and the
story of the cave man as sculptor is in process
of development, just as tv^fenty-five years ago his
development as a painter was being traced.

There are, besides these, some bone and horn
and ivory sculptures that are very beautiful,
vividly natural and sometimes very charmingly
finished. Osborn says of them : ^

Small human figures jgain appear in the form of sta-
tuettes in bone or ivory, representing the renaissance
of the spirit of human sculpture. Some of this work
is apparently in search of beauty and with altogether
different motives from the repellent feminine statuettes
of middle and late Aurignacian times, for the subjects
are slender and the limbs are modeled with relative
skill. As in the earlier works, there is a partial failure
to protray the features, which is in striking contrast
to the hfelike treatment of animal heads. Very few
examples of this work have been found, and most of
them have been broken. To this period belong the
Venus statuette of Laugerie Bass and the head of a
girl carved in ivory found at Brassempouy (Fig. 237),
with the features fairly suggested and an elaborate
head-dress.

A procession of six horses cut in limestone
under the sheltering cliff of Cap Blanc, is by far
the most imposing work of Magdalenian art that
has been discovered. They are thus described
by Professor Osborn of Columbia, who saw them

» Op. cit., p. 433.

ABBE BREUIL I 75

and who reproduced a picture of one of them in
his volume on The Men of the Old Stone Age
(P- 431) :

The sculptures are in high relief and of large size
and are in excellent proportion; they appear to repre-
sent the high-bred type of desert or Celtic horse, related
to the Arabian, so far as we can judge from the long,
straight face, the slender nose, the small nostrils, and
the massive angle of the lower jaw; the ears are rather
long and pointed, and the tail is represented as thin
and without hair; they were found partly buried by
layers containing implements of middle Magdalenian
industry, and they are therefore assigned to an early
Magdalenian date in which animal sculpture in the
round reached its climax.

Some of the ivory carving is particularly beau-
tiful. There is a series of statuettes of horses
carved on fragments of mammoth tusks that
were found in the grotto of Espelugues. These
pieces have attracted great attention. Espelugues
is near the famous Shrine of Lourdes in France,
and therefore a great many visitors have seen
copies of these. They represent horses of Celtic
type with manes erect. The animals are full of
action and life. Authorities have declared that
they show such certainty and breadth of treat-
ment as sculptures that they must be regarded
as the masterpieces of upper paleolithic glyptic
art, that is, of the artistic carving of the men of
the Old Stone Age at the highest period of de-
velopment.

One of these pieces of ivory is the head of a
young girl. Quite contrary to our custom in the

176 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

matter, young girls are seldom the subjects of
cave-man art. This one is notable for many fea-
tures that are reminiscent of what is most mod-
ern in our artistic expression of young women.
The mouth is not treated at all ; the chin is nar-
row and rather pointed, though in the profile it
projects somewhat; the eyes are slit-like and
narrow, and the head is covered by either a
rather elaborate head-dress or a suggestion of
some curious arrangement of the hair. It has
been suggested that decadence in art had begun
or that this was the work of a very young cave-
man artist. Some of the bone and ivory statu-
ettes show a very thorough appreciation of femi-
nine lines of beauty, with very skilful artistic
modeling. One model of a trunk has been called
the A'enus statuette, and well deserves the name,
for the artist who did it evidently viewed the
feminine human form exactly in the same way
that the great Greek sculptors did, and in ac-
cordance with the standards that have interested
us ever since.

In these small objects of art the artist's power
of adaptation of his ideas to the material which
he is employing is very admirable and has often
been called to attention. Batons, dart-throwers,
and poniards are made of bone and tusks in
such a way as to use the material to the best
advantage by combining utility with beauty, em-
ploying the natural form of the material to
bring out artistic points and in general exempli
fying the same artistic power that was exhibited

ABBE BREUIL 177

SO strikingly in making use of the bosses or
rounded projections in the caves in order to pro-
duce plastic effects in connexion with the colored
paintings. Too much cannot be said of this
power of adaptation as exhibiting real artistic
genius.

Discovery of the Mural Paintings.

The story of the discovery of these mural pic-
tures in the caves is an interesting little romance
by itself. A distinguished Spanish archeologist
was some twenty-five years ago engaged in look-
ing for bone and horn remains and other objects
that might be of interest, in the debris on the
floor of one of the cave dwellings at Altamira
near Santander in Spain. For company he had
taken his little girl, aged about ten, with him
into the cave, and as she got used to the dark-
ness and the light of the torch she ran here and
there at play for herself. After a time, however,
she went to her father declaring that there were
pictures on the walls and asking him to come
and look at them. He refused to be disturbed in
his investigation of the floor of the cave, and
when she insisted concluded that she had been
seeing her own shadow on the wall or some other
shadows which deceived her with the idea that
there were pictures. After a time, however, she
succeeded in persuading him to look carefully for
himself, and sure enough he found the colored
pictures that she described. Some of the most
beautiful mural paintings of the cave-man art

178 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

have been found in this particular cavern, and
the little girl as the real discoverer has found a
very definite place in the history of archeology.

When this discovery was announced, it at-
tracted very little attention. First the story was
not believed at all. Cave men might scratch
rather interesting outlines of animals on horn
and bone, but it was too much to ask the world
to believe that they had painted pictures on the
walls of their cave homes. It was concluded
that these were either non-existent, the report of
them being due to a heated imagination or desire
for a sensation, or that they were modern sophis-
tications. It was not until similar wall paintings
had been found in caves at other places in Spain
and at a number of places in France, so that
there are more than a score of caves now known
to contain them, that the mural art of the cave
man became a definitely accepted department of
archeology.

The whole story would remind one very much
of what was happening just about this same time
with regard to brain anatomy, in Spain. A
young man, Ramon y Cajal by name, the first
who had ever applied a microscope at a Spanish
University, discovered in the later 'eighties the
endings of the neurons in the brain, a discovery
which revolutionized our knowledge of brain
anatomy and made it very clear that cells and
not fibers were the all-important elements of the
brain. When this discovery was first announced
it was received with utter incredulity. Biologists

ABBE BREUIL 1 79

refused to believe that anything so good as that
could come out of Spain. Some of the best bio-
logical journals in the world refused to publish
Ramon y Cajal's articles, and when finally La
Cellule, printed at the University of Louvain,
published them, the discoveries announced were
received with a great deal of scepticism. It was
not until Ramon y Cajal went in person to the
International Medical Congress held in Berlin in
1891 and exhibited his specimens that, led by
such men as Virchow and Koelliker, to whom
the specimens had been demonstrated, the bio-
logical world accepted Ramon y Cajal's work.
In 1900 he was given the prize of the city of
Paris by the International Medical Congress and
later received the Nobel Prize.

Just as Ramon y Cajal's work was destined to
be extended and amplified by others, so the
Spanish discovery of cave-man mural art fell
into other hands for its development ; and above
all, the Abbe Breuil, himself an artist, took up
the accumulation of information with regard to
it and the working out of its significance for the
life of the men and women who created it and
for whose delectation manifestly it had been
made a part of their homes. Fortunately the
Prince of Monaco, who is so nobly using the in-
come that accrues from that dubious source of
revenue, the Casino at Monte Carlo, in the ex-
tension of scientific knowledge, became nearly as
much interested in this subterranean science as
he is in suboceanic observations, and devoted

l8o CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

nearly as much money to archeology as to ocean-
ography. As a consequence Abbe Breuil has
been able to publish some magnificent volumes
containing copies in the exact colors of the orig-
inals of literally hundreds of these mural paint-
ings as well as other illustrations of the art of
the cave men.

Distinguished archeologists and scientists of
other departments interested also in the antiquity
of man have turned not only to Abbe Breuil's
books but also to him personally in order to
secure first-hand knowledge of these magnificent
contributions to modern science. I have had the
good fortune to talk with several Americans who
met Abbe Breuil in the course of their own
special studies on the subject of the cave men,
and all are agreed in talking of him as a very
charming man, a thoroughly sincere scientist, a
very hard worker, a careful, accurate observer —
in a word, a thoroughgoing example of the vir-
tues that a scientist must have if his work is to
secure a permanent place in his favorite science.
Abbe Breuil is tireless in his explorations, faith-
ful in his reproductions, deeply interested in the
diffusion of knowledge with regard to his sub-
ject, yet constantly ready to share his knowledge
with others and willing to take almost endless
trouble in order that foreign scientists may have
the opportunities they desire to study the cave
man under as favorable circumstances as pos-
sible.

ABBE BREUIL l8l

I have been told, too, by those who met him
of his faithfulness as a clergyman and his recog-
nition of his priestly duties as the most important
part of life. Even when on his exploring expe-
ditions he makes it a particular point to arrange
if possible to say Mass every morning, and if
there are country folk in the neighborhood (for
the caves are often situated at a great distance
from the towns and even villages) he offers them
the opportunity to attend his Mass. Sunday he
devotes entirely to his priestly duties among the
poor folk of the neighborhood, and his kindliness
and zeal win over even men who have been long
away from their religious duties. The fact that
he should be the head of a scientific expedition
of this kind gives him great prestige among the
country folk and he uses this in order to influ-
ence them for their own good as regards the re-
awakening of their faith and above all the taking
up again of their religious duties.

He is himself almost scrupulously exact with
regard to little things relating to his religious
duties, as a well-known professor of archeology
of one of our great universities in this country.
Professor MacCurdy of Yale, told me smilingly.
The Professor had spent some time with him
one summer. Abbe Breuil said his Mass in the
morning, giving Holy Communion to the country
folk who may come if they are so minded, and
then dons the khaki of his explorer's uniform
and proceeds to spend the day in a cave. He
comes home at night quite thoroughly tired and

l82 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

hungry, but he is not willing to sit down to his
evening meal until he has doffed his khaki and
reassumed his cassock so that he may be once
more the ecclesiastic. He does this even though
at times it would seem to be an over-meticulous
regard for ecclesiastical regulations and a fol-
lowing of rule from which it would seem that
under the circumstances he might dispense him-
self. He never seemed to think so.

The interesting fact to me when the story was
told to me was that, though it was told smilingly,
there was evidently a deep-seated feeling of re-
spect and reverence for the man who took his
sacred obligations so seriously that he would not
dispense himself from them even in such slight
matters as might easily be j. "ised over without
scrupulous regard. And this is the man to whom
modern science owes one of tne most remarkable
phases of its recent development.

VI.

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER

THE TIME AND PLACE OF

THE CAVE-MAN IN

WORLD HISTORY.

w

E are deceived by the shadow, we
see not the substance of things.
For the hills are less solid than

thought; [and artj
Back of the transient appearance

dwells ineffable calm,
The utter reality, ultimate truth ;
this seems and that is.
— Don Marquis, Dreams and Dust.

\ UGESCUNT aliae gentes, aliae
^ ^ minuuntur ;

Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla

animantum,
Et, quasi cursores vitai lampada
tradunt. — I<UCRETIUS.
One nation rises to supreme power
in the world, while another declines,
and in a brief space of time the sov-
ereign people change, transmitting
like racers the lamp of life to some
other that is to succeed them.

VI.

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER: THE TIME AND
PLACE OF THE CAVE-MAN IN WORLD HISTORY.

UNDOUBTEDLY to the Abbe Breuil, as I
said in the preceding article, more than
to any other, the present generation owes the
most precious information in proof that the cave
man, our earhest known ancestor in Europe, was
an artist. Possessed of no inconsiderable artistic
ability himself, Abbe Breuil has carefully and
sympathetically studied the examples of art pro-
duced by these oldest European artistic col-
leagues and has reproduced them sympathetically
for all those throughout the world who cannot
have the precious opportunity to see them for
themselves. The distinguished priest's work in
this regard has completely revolutionized our
ideas about man and has made it very clear that
the commonly accepted notions of our own and
immediately preceding generations with regard
to man's constant progress upward from century
to century, if actually not from decade to decade,
as some seem to think, are quite absurd and
founded on some ridiculous assumptions which
prove now to have no foundation in any of the
realities of prehistory or archeology.

On the contrary, far from man beginning low
down in the scale of civilization, the very earliest
man that we know anything about, the date of

l86 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

whose existence Sir Arthur Evans, President of
the British Association for the Advancement of
Science, set down as 10,000 years earlier than the
earliest date in Egypt, was an artist in the high-
est sense of that word. He had the artistic sense
of beauty, the power of vision, the ability to re-
produce his vision, the taste, and even the inven-
tive faculties which the most modern of artists
enjoy. In a word, he had all the qualities which,
when they appear in a man at any time, no matter
what his parentage, or whether he is brought up
as a peasant or a farmer, all the rest of the
world are ready to recognize as among the high-
est gifts man can possess, while all those whose
critical appreciation is worth while are ready to
recognize their possessor as a man among men,
far above the average of human kind.

It was extremely important, however, for us
to know as far as possible the date at which
these men lived and their place in prehistory as
regards their known successors in time. These
are the men of the Paleolithic time (or the Old
Stone Age, to translate that Greek epithet), and
we want to know their relations in time and de-
velopment to the men of the Neolithic period,
as well as to the Lake Dwellers, and then the
early modern races. It is very interesting to
realize that this all-important work in chronolog^y
owes more to another priest than to any other
worker. Curiously enough, though the caves
were situated in Western France and Northern
Spain, the man to whom we owe most in the

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 187

chronological department of paleolithic paleon-
tology was a German, Father Hugo Obermaier
of Munich. He had quite as significant material
to work with as Abbe Breuil, who gave himself
to the pictures on the walls of the caves, only it
required more patient and careful study to elab-
orate the significance of this material and to
trace the meaning of the various objects and their
relations to all the knowledge that has been
gradually accumulating, for more than half a
century, with regard to the cave men.

Father Obermaier's merit in this regard has
been recognized by the authorities in the subject
all over the world. When Professor Henry Fair-
field Osborn, Research Professor of Zoology,
Columbia University, New York, and Curator of
Vertebrate Paleontology in the American Mu-
seum of Natural History, wrote several years
ago his book Men of the Old Stone Age, Their
Environment, Life and Art, in which the story
of the cave man is given in considerable detail,
he did so only after having visited the caves of
North Spain and of the Dordogne in South
France. Then he dedicated his volume to the
men who had proved helpful to him in enabling
him to secure first-hand information on all these
details. That dedication runs : " To my distin-
guished guides through the upper paleolithic
caverns of the Pyrenees, Dordogne and the Can-
tabrian Mountains of Spain, Emile Cartailhac,
Henri Breuil, Hugo Obermaier." How curiously
interesting it is to think that two of these three

l88 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

men whose names are thus placed, and rightly,
at the head of the volume of scientific construc-
tive work which has attracted most attention in
recent years, are Catholic priests. How different
that fact is from the very definite impression so
generally accepted that the Church is opposed to
scientific development, and especially to science
that would lead us to think that man lived on
earth so long ago, and that at least priests would
not be liberal-minded enough to be the great
scientific pioneers in such a remarkable develop-
ment.

Professor Osborn confesses his obligation
particularly to these two priests, and dwells on
the amount of information obtained from Father
Obermaier. He says in his Preface :

This work represents the cooperation of many special-
ists on a single, very complex problem. I am not in any
sense an archeologist, and in this important and highly
technical field I have relied chiefly upon the work of
Hugo Obermaier and of Dechelette in the Lower
Paleolithic, and of Henri Breuil in the Upper Paleo-
lithic. Through the courtesy of Doctor Obermaier I
had the privilege of watching the exploration of the
wonderful grotto of Castillo, in Northern Spain, which
affords a unique and almost complete sequence of the
industries of the entire Old Stone Age. This visit and
that to the cavern of Altamira, with its wonderful
frescoed ceiling, were in themselves a liberal education
in the prehistory of man. With the Abbe Breuil I
visited all the old camping stations of Upper Paleolithic
times in Dordogne and noted with wonder and admira-
tion his detection of all the fine gradations of invention
which separate the flint makers of that period.

the rev. hugo obermaier 189

Obermaier's Patient Research and its
Reward.

Father Obermaier above all has worked out
the significance of a number of remains that at
first seemed to be merely accidental forms in
nature, and yet when found under the circum-
stances in which they occurred had a very sig-
nificant meaning in archeology. At first, as
pointed out by Obermaier, the earliest man in
Europe, while recognizing the need of artificial
aids in the shape of tools, found it difficult to
make these for himself and had to be satisfied
to help himself with such rude pieces of flint
as he found. He was dependent on the chance
shape of fragments of flint which he shattered
by letting them fall from heights or by letting
heavy stones fall on them. He had not yet
learned to shape them symmetrically. In the
search after the most useful form of flint which
could be grasped by the hand for various pur-
poses, a rather characteristic form was evolved
of which a great many are found actually in or
in close proximity to the cave dwellings. Very
soon the cave man learned, however, to shape
suitably-sized flints more or less into the form
of almonds, so that they could be easily grasped
by the hand, there being a rather smooth surface
for the palm and a sharp edge leading to a point
on the other side. Dr. Obermaier worked out
the progress of flint-shaping, by himself learning
patiently how to fashion flints for various pur-

190 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

poses and thus demonstrating the course of old-
time flint tool-making.

Father Obermaier spent some three years in
the great grotto of Castillo near Ponte Viesgo in
the province of Santander, Northern Spain.
Professor Osborn mentions his visit to that
grotto with Obermaier as most illuminating.
The results of investigations conducted were very
fruitful in scientific results. The deposits which
filled the grotto presented in cross section alto-
gether some forty-five feet in thickness, reach-
ing from the floor to the roof. Father Obermaier
succeeded in differentiating some thirteen layers
of distinct interest, and these proved to cover
eleven periods of " industry ", representing
many dififerent kinds of flint tools and other im-
plements. Indeed this grotto, now famous in
archeology, provided by itself a magnificent epi-
tome of the prehistorical period of ^^^ester^
Europe from what is known as the Acheulean
Age (because the first deposits recognized as be-
longing to it were found near St. Acheul in
France), to the age of bronze in this same part
of the country. Father Obermaier has found
that the floor of the grotto was possibly used as
a flint-making station in the Acheulean and very
likely also in Chellean times. ^

■■ The names applied to the different periods or
horizons or industries, as they are variously called,
are modern geographic. Aurignacian, Chellean, Mag-
dalenian, Solutrean, Acheulean, are all adjectives de-
rived from places where special finds occurred illustrat-

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER I9T

The tracing of the age of the various layers
was accomplished by noting carefully the chang-
ing forms of animal life which are to be found
round the fireplaces or hearths, and the modifica-
tions of the flints in the ascending levels. In the
first or lowest of these layers were found only
very crude flints. In the second were some arti-
ficially worked flints and the bones of the cave
bear and Merck's rhinoceros. In the third
layer the flints were of still finer workmanship,
and quartzites were also used, and Merck's
rhinoceros was present, though not in large

ing some special level of prehistoric culture. The
Aurignacian industry, as it is termed, is based on the
Aurignac man so-called, of Combe-Capelle, who was-
found decorated with a necklace of perforated shells
and surrounded with a lot of fine Aurignacian flints.
The Acheulean and the Mousterian have reference to
finds at Acheule and Le Moustier. Magdalenian refers
to discoveries at La A'lagdalene, the most ancient of
which occur in the grotto of Placard, Charente. The
first harpoons or fish hooks were found at this level,
and this important addition to the food supply was
apparently followed by a decline in the chase. The
Chellean industry, as well as early Acheulean times,
came when the river shores and the neighboring forests
and meadows were favored by a warm temperate
climate, such as is clearly indicated by the presence of
the fig tree and of the canary laurel in the region of
North Central France near Paris. They hunted the
bison or old German zuisent and the wildcattle, that is,
the wild ox or Aurochs, called also Urochs, the nrus of
Csesar. The Urus survived in Germany as late as the
seventeenth century, while a few of the bison or wisent
survive to the present time.

192 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

numbers. In the fourth layer the so-called upper
Mousterian was rich in small implements and
large tools of quartzite. Merck's rhinoceros was
very abundant. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh
layers, the lower and upper Aurignacian, there
were remains of the reindeer and some burins of
flint, with implements of stone and bone and the
remains of a human infant. In the ninth, tenth,
and eleventh layers there were fine engravings
on bone and very artistic engravings on stag-
horn. These represent what are called the lower
and upper Magdalenian. In the twelfth and
thirteenth layers the stag is very plentiful, and
in the top-most layer a small triangular dagger
in copper was found.

Father Obermaier made a series of experi-
ments with flints which showed exactly how the
early flint-workers had gone about producing the
forms of flint implements which are now so com-
monly found. While these men were satisfied at
first with the accidental sharp edge that they
picked up in quarries, they soon learned how to
flake flints and to fashion them skilfully by re-
touching until they secured a really symmetrical
almond form, which fitted the hand very well
and made a fine effective tool for a great many
purposes. They were able to produce symmet-
rical instruments with straight, convex, or con-
cave cutting edges at will, until the specialization
of their instruments for various purposes must
have become a craft requiring a great deal of
ingenuity.

the rev. hugo obermaier i93

The Caves as Dwellings.

Father Obermaier has pointed out the vicissi-
tudes of the history of the cave man in his cave
dwelling. He finds that long before these caves
were inhabited by man, they served as lairs or
refuges for the cave bear and the cave hyena,
their homes being shared by a number of birds
of prey. Sometimes large numbers of skeletons
of these animals are found within the caves, and
it would seem as though man must have had a
hard struggle not only to drive the animals out
but to keep them out in inclement weather.
While of course the men and women lived mainly
near the entrance to the cave, it is well known
that even a short distance from the entrance to
such underground workings the temperature is
likely to be very uniform and never cold. While
it might seem as though cave dwelling would be
very unhealthy, Father Obermaier points out
that the smallest cave was considerably larger
and better ventilated than the small smoky cabins
of some of the European peasants of the present
day, or the snow huts of the Esquimo.

The principal hardship in cave life was the
dampness in the winter time. This could not be
expelled in any complete way by fire, because the
smoke would have been otherwise impossible to
stand. During spring, in times of freshets, the
cave men were often displaced from their dwel-
lings and these were made uninhabitable by the
seepage of water. But every spring in our time

194 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

somewhere in the world, and usually somewhere
in the United States, many hundreds and even
many thousands of people are driven from their
homes and suffer severely because of flood con-
ditions. The dampness of many of the dwel-
lings, however, gave rise to certain arthritic con-
ditions, with swellings of joints, so often called
rheumatic in the modern time, though not always
with complete justification; and there seems no
doubt that the rheumatoid diseases were rather
frequent, for bones are found of both men and
beasts exhibiting diseased swellings and chronic
inflammatory conditions of the vertebras such as
are associated with extreme dampness. It is
rather interesting to find that man reacted to a
damp environment at that time quite as he does
at the present time, and we have not as yet found
any remedies for preventing such afflictions.

What Father Obermaier has done for us par-
ticularly, besides bringing out the significance of
the various objects found in the cave, is to place
the epoch at which these various finds must be
considered to have happened in the history of
the race and of the earth, that is. in the geology
of the earth's surface. His book on The Man
of the Early Time ^ is very well known and
forms the basis for nearly all the scientific writ-
ing on the subject that we have had in recent
years. Father Obermaier has worked out the
problems of the relationship of the artistic finds

- Dcr M^nsch rirr Vorzcit,

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 195

and other remains to one another and to the
human skulls that have been discovered, and has
placed the progress and decadence of the races
as well as calculated about the length of time
that the various strata of culture and geologic
horizons in which these remains occur, lasted.
For strange as it must seem to those who have
been quite sure of the assumption that the cave
man was a savage, we know now that not only
we have the right to speak of culture in his re-
gard, but actually these patient investigators
have been able to trace a series of cultures among
the earliest known ancestors of man.

Culture among the Cave Men.

Long before pictures were found on the walls
of the caves it had been recognized that the cave
man was an artistic artisan, and even something
of his startling and marvelous ability in pure art
had come to be recognized. Among the very
earliest things that were found in the caves and
that attracted special attention to the old-time
dwellers in them were implements or utensils of
various kinds which had been used by the cave
men and which bore on them ample evidence
that he had an artistic spirit. These objects,
bone and horn and ivory and other material,
some of which are among the most resistant to
the vicissitudes of time that we know, had been
preserved in the debris on the floor of the caves.
A great many of them proved, when carefully
examined and when the dirt that had gathered

196 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

around them had been removed, to' have on them
very interesting engravings, that is, pictures
scratched with a sharp-pointed instrument.

It was a good while, however, before the high
quality of this engraving came to be generally
appreciated. A large number of objects were
collected, but the markings on them were sup-
posed to be more or less crude and very primitive
misrepresentations of the animals hunted by
these early men. Indeed it was only after the
discovery of the pictures in oils on the walls of
the caves that a more careful study of the smaller
objects found in the caves showed clearly that
there had been in our hands abundant evidence
of the fine artistry of the cave men even before
the wall pictures were known. The engravings
on bone and ivory and horn were thoroughly
artistic in quality in a great many cases, vigorous
vivid representations of animals of all kinds
presented in many ways and modes of activity.

The cave man then came to be studied from
two very different aspects, though these two had
many very intimate relations, and the researches
were founded, not on theory but on actual study
of remains. There was in the caves a mural or
parietal art consisting of the pictures in oils on
the walls and occasionally the ceilings, and then
besides there was the movable art, as it came to
be called, consisting of the decorated objects of
various kinds which soon began to crowd the
museums. While Abbe Breuil did so much, as
we have seen in the former article, to develop

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER I97

our knowledge of the mural or parietal art of
the caves, he helped also to bring out the signifi-
cance of the movable art. It remained, however,
for Father Obermaier to trace the evolution of
these art objects and to give them their proper
places in prehistory. There proved on careful
investigation to be a series of various cultures
to delineate and of divers horizons of progress
and decadence to locate, for early as these ob-
jects are in the history of man, both upward and
downward artistic tendencies are to be noted in
them. All their archeological relations were
illuminated by the careful researches of Father
Obermaier and above all by his intuition amount-
ing to genius in recognizing and appreciating
even minute differences.

What has been found is that the cave man
ornamented practically all the utensils and im-
plements that he used, that is, of which we can
find any remains. He made drinking cups out
of the horns of animals, but before finishing
them for use he scraped and polished the outer
surface of them and then engraved outline fig-
ures of animals of many kinds on the surface
thus presented. These were done very vividly
and presented the animals in all postures, stand-
ing, lying, running, charging, and at bay. No
maker of the finest decorated glassware of mod-
ern time has ever given more labor and thought
to the making of beautiful engraved glass than
this cave-man maker of drinking horns. His
one idea was to present on them a faithful pic-

198 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

ture of exactly what he saw and thus recall,
while he was peacefully drinking in his cave
home, some of the scenes of the active life in
which he had been engaged earlier in the day or
perhaps at another time in the year.

What was thus true for the drinking cups may
be said also of all the other utensils and imple-
ments that we have found. Portions of flat
horns were used for the making of ladles and
spoons of various kinds, and these too were
smoothed and engraved. Long bones were
sharpened and made into pins to hold together
the skins of the wild beasts in which the cave
man and his family dressed themselves. These,
too, though presenting comparatively so little
surface, were beautifully engraved. We have,
for instance, the radius of an eagle, one of the
long thin bones of the eagle's wing, some nine
inches in length and scarcely more than half an
inch in diameter at its widest part, and yet the
cave-man artist has drawn on it a most vivid
picture of a herd of reindeer.

It should be emphasized, too, that these en-
gravings, especially when done on pins meant for
holding skins together, probably added to their
utility as well as making them things of beauty.
The roughness produced by the engravings on
the bone made it more difficult for the pin to
slip out and thus added to its security as a clasp.
It is a good while now, though it was a long
while after the cave man's time, since Horace
said.

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER igy

Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci,
he carries off every point who mingles the useful
with the beautiful,

but this cave-man ancestor seems to have grasped
quite thoroughly the principle that Horace re-
ferred to and that has been so often quoted, and
appears also to have put it into excellent prac-
tice.

Perhaps it should be added that, as has been
pointed out by artists and art critics who have
studied these remains of the movable art of the
cave man, most of it is distinctly impressionistic
in character, that is to say, the picture is called
up to the mind of the beholder with just as few
lines, just as little artistic work as possible.
When the herd of reindeer was engraved on the
radius of the eagle, one or two of the animals at
either end of the herd were pictured completely
but all the rest are represented just by a forest
of horns as it were, and yet the effect produced
is startlingly complete as of a large group of
reindeer grazing.

The animals drawn by the cave artist are
pictured in all modes of activity and inactivity.
There is a wonderful engraving on a piece of flat
horn of a mammoth charging. Only someone
who had seen often and studied most carefully
and had a power of reproducing his vision that
has never been excelled could have made this
very vivid picture. Only a few lines compara-
tively are needed for it, but it is eminently effec-
tive. There are charging boars and bisons, and

200 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

bisons at bay, and other studies of wild animal
life that are just as true to nature as they can be.
As I said in the previous article, " Abbe Breuil
and the Cave Man Artist", probably the hardest
thing in the world for the artist to express is
suppressed motion, just as the most difficult task
for the actor and actress is to express suppressed
emotion. Free expression of emotion or motion
are much less trying tasks. The cave man could,
however, picture very vividly an animal not yet
in motion, but with every muscle tense to move,
though not yet moving. The pictures are evi-
dently reminiscences of times and events in the
cave man's experience when a cornered animal
backed away for a moment, or perhaps stood
still and got ready to charge. To express this
attitude in a few lines is a difficult task indeed,
but the man who does it shows that he is an
artist of surpassing ability. It is over such
achievements of their cave-man colleague that
modern artists grow enthusiastic.

The putting of all these artistic engraved pic-
tures on the ordinary utensils and implements of
the home raises some very interesting questions.
The cave man manifestly believed in trying to
make everything around him beautiful. He
beautified his home by painting pictures on the
walls there. In most cases, doubtless, he had
them painted for him, for it is of course ex-
tremely improbable that every dweller in the
caves could paint such beautiful pictures as we
find in them, and quite as unlikely that every

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 201

cave-holder, or home-maker so to speak, could
make striking artistic engravings on his own
household utensils. These decorated materials
are found, however, in so many places that it is
evident that the cave man felt that the things
around him should be beautiful, and so practi-
cally all of them called in the artists of the time
and the artistic craftsmen to make these veritable
objects of art with which they surrounded them-
selves.

The Irish poet Yeats, when bidding a small
group of friends good-bye here in New York a
few years ago, reminded us as Americans that
though there was so much talk of culture in
America, the effect produced on a visitor was
the feeling that we were beginning to appreciate
how little of culture our people yet had. He
even ventured to suggest that there was so much
talk about it that it was a little bit like the case
of people who talk very much about politeness,
for it is only those who are not quite sure of
their own manners who make a great to-do about
the rules of politeness. He ventured deprecat-
ingly, then, to suggest that perhaps it might be
well for us to realize that " there is no real cul-
ture in the hearts of a people until the very uten-
sils in the kitchen are beautiful as well as use-
ful ".

This is, of course, a standard that does not
always occur to a people intent mainly on sur-
rounding themselves in the show rooms of their
houses, the drawing rooms and libraries, with

202 „ CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

bric-a-brac and " art objects " of all kinds, but it
is a standard that, once set up, makes everybody
brought in touch with it appreciate that culture
is for life and not merely for leisure, that it is
for all the people and not merely for the leisurely
rich, not to use the adjective idle, so often em-
ployed in recent years.

Perhaps the most startling thing of all re-
mains to be said, and that is that of all the gen-
erations of men, probably there is no one of
whom it can be said that the very utensils in the
kitchen were useful as well as beautiful, as it
may be of the cave man. He literally tried to
make everything that he handled, even the most
simple utensils and implements of daily life,
beautiful as well as useful. He had the true
spirit of art, which in this is a gift of the Cre-
ator, who never made anything merely useful,
but always added an element of beauty. All the
beautiful things in nature around us are emi-
nently useful — the leaves, the flowers, the fur of
animals, the feathers of birds, all these are beau-
tiful, often supremely so. There is no need to
say, however, that they are also finely useful.
The leaves of the trees are the stomachs and the
lungs of plant life. We usually do not associate
the idea of beauty with stomachs and lungs, yet
how marvelously beautiful in their almost in-
finite variety are the leaves! The feathers of
birds are eminently useful, but how charmingly
beautiful are most of them! This is true not
only of highly-colored feathers but even of the

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 2O3

simple ones. The eyes in the wing feathers of
the pheasant are indeed artistic and represent
the outpouring of beauty from the Creator quite
as if it were impossible for Him to make any-
thing without making it beautiful as well as
useful.

It is surprising indeed to find the earliest an-
cestor of man in Europe thus closely in sym-
pathy with the Divine mind, but it must not be
forgotten that the surprise is due entirely to the
fact that we have allowed ourselves to be led by
modern science, so-called, to believe that man
began as a savage and then gradually worked up
to our supposedly high stage of civilization, the
height of which, by the way, we do not boast so
much of since this war began. Until compara-
tively recent years, say the last two generations
at most, it was the custom of man to look back,
not on savage ancestors, but on a happier, more
peaceful time, a Golden Age from which men
had descended. All the poets have this, and it
was evidently a commonplace in the thought of
men until the theory of evolution came to dis-
turb modern thinking. The Christian back-
ground of thought would, of course, rather fos-
ter the idea of man early in his history having a
fine sense of beauty and a close sympathy with
nature even though his material circumstances
might be of a character that is usually supposed
to hamper artistic expression.

204 catholic churchmen in science

The Cave Man an Inventor.

Of the cave man's ability as an inventor as
well as an artist there can be no doubt, for the
very fact that he invented painting in oils would
of itself exhibit him as an ingenious technical
expert in anything that he wanted to do. In all
the years that have elapsed since, man has im-
proved but little on the technique of painting in
oils. Whenever he wanted to make permanent
pictures of his activities he has reverted to the
cave man's invention. We have re-invented the
process of painting in oils two or three times
since at least, but we have not modified it essen-
tially, nor indeed, if we study the cave men's
pictures seriously, have we added to its power
to express human vision.

There is another invention of the cave man
which deserves to be recalled. He is the first
human being to whom can be traced the use of
fire for heating and lighting purposes. It would
not be too much to assume that this earliest an-
cestor in Europe, subjected to the inclemencies
of the weather of the Pyrenees region, must
have inevitably developed the means of making
fire. What is often not properly appreciated,
however, is that the inventor of fire was one of
the greatest inventors that humanity has ever
had. For fire is literally one of nature's great
active agents, and the finding of a way to make
it available is then our most important invention.
Electricity is as nothing compared to it, though

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 20$

the use of electricity in recent years has made us
so proud of man's ability to adapt 'nature's agen-
cies to his own advantage. According to the
legend, man stole fire from heaven; which has
often been interpreted to mean that from above
the clouds he secured it first from the edge of a
burning volcano. That would be the natural
tradition in a volcanic country. But there seems
no doubt that the cave man used fire very com-
monly for a number of purposes. This adapta-
tion of this natural agent, which makes such a
good slave yet can be such a tyrannous master,
stamps him as quite capable of going to nature
for whatever necessities he had. As it is, if we
were to rub out fire to-morrow, it would more
nearly bring about the end of our civilization
than any other single act that could be per-
formed, and the cave man seems to have been
the individual who first enabled men to make
use in divers ways of this all-important civiliz-
ing agent.

Domestic Life of the Cave Man.

The domestic life of the cave man becomes
very interesting. Here is a man who makes
his home beautiful by painting in oil on the walls
of it, and makes too all the implements and uten-
sils of daily use as beautiful as he can make
them by simple decorative procedures which do
not interfere with their usefulness. It would be
hard to think that the life in such a home must
be that of the savage or anything but a rather

206 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

pleasant existence. Of course we have the pop-
ular science theories, the oft-repeated declara-
tions of newspapers and magazine science, those
fosterers of pseudo-knowledge which has to be
corrected and which serves only to make people
more ignorant, that the cave man's wife was a
slave whom he had probably dragged home by
the hair of the head and kept in his domicile
merely to care for his children; but there is not
the slightest bit of evidence for this; it is all
mere assumption. Granted that evolution from
the beast to man is true, then this must be so,
the evolutionists declare, and that's all about it.
We have come to realize during the present
generation that most of the things that were de-
clared by science or pseudo-science that they
must be so, are not really so, and we are trying
to find out not new theories but new facts. The
facts with regard to the cave man's home are
accumulating. He tried to make it beautiful.
Fortunately, among these pictures, of which of
course some at least may have been made by the
cave woman, for there is not the slightest reason
to think that the cave man alone had a sense of
beauty, we have some that give us a good idea
of the human beings of that time. These pro-
vide an excellent basis for reflection as to the
real status of the women of the period, in one
regard at least. The cave artist always pictures
his women folk as rounded and fat, and indeed
rather inclined to be obese. He almost never
pictures her without children near her, and his

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 207

ideal evidently was the rounded, rubicund,
healthy mother of children, and not at all the
thin younger woman on whom the modern artist
expends his efforts so exclusively. Almost need-
less to say, only an abiding interest in her and
the children could have dictated this.

On the other hand, we have also some, though
but a few, pictures from the cave man of cave
men. Masculine human beings are always rep-
resented as muscular and athletic, thoroughly fit,
as it were, but not at all fat. Manifestly, his
ideal man was the athlete who could go out and
chase the animals successfully and who could
compete with any of them in strength of muscle
and vigor and rapiditj? of movement. The con-
trast between the cave man and the cave woman
in this regard is very interesting. The conclu-
sion is almost forced on us that the cave woman
sat down at home and cared for her children,
lived, as it were, on the fat of the land, and so
became stout and rounded, while her lord and
master, by the rude strenuous work of the chase
and the demanding efforts of the hunt, was
thoroughly hardened into athletic fitness.

Such stout women could not very well have
been drudges. On the contrary, the rule of
humanity has always been that it was when men
have succeeded in making it possible by their
successful efforts in creating a home life in
which their wives did not have to work, that
these wives became stout or even fat. Farmers
wives are usuallv rather thin. The old pioneer

2o8 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

women in America were thin and wiry, though
their descendants with more leisure and better
eating are getting so fat that foreigners are de-
manding whether the caricatures of Uncle Sam
and his wife as thin and rather scrawny individ-
uals are not a living lie, for certainly even the
older American families are not represented
very often by such types in our day.

In a good many of the caves that were mani-
festly the homes of the cave people many split
long bones have been found. The one reason
for splitting bones is to get at the marrow of
them. The marrow even in our time represents
a delicacy that is much sought after. Evidently
the cave man or his wife had learned the secret
of the dietary quality of grilled marrow, and so
we have a great many remains of these split long
bones. It has been suggested that an indulgence
in a diet that contains a good deal of grilled
marrow, especially if the individual was not com-
pelled to take very much exercise, would produce
a state of obesity such as the cave man some-
times pictured his women folks in, as rapidlj' as
does Huyler's candy in our time. It is only those
who have abundant time for eating and the
preparation of toothsome delicacies who can take
the pains to split bones in order to secure the
marrow within them in such easily edible quan-
tities, as readily produces a tendency to corpu-
lency at least. The whole story as thus outlined
for us is extremely interesting and Father Ober-
maier's studies of movable cave art and of the

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 2O9

other objects found in the debris on the floor of
the caves has brought out a great deal beyond
even this of suggestive information.

Belief in Immortality.

What is even more interesting perhaps is the
evidence that these cave men had a very firm
and thoroughly practical belief in immortality,
for which they were quite ready to make rather
serious sacrifices. The bodies of the dead were
buried with implements near them to take with
them to the other world, and even traces have
been found of the burial of food with them for
their journey. Not infrequently red pigment of
one kind or another is found also in the grave,
and the explanation of its presence usually given
is that the cave men wanted their dead relatives
to look well. What struck them most was the
greenish pallor of the dead, and to avoid their
appearing with this in another world, where
they were as yet strangers, red ochre was buried
with them to give them a ruddy appearance.

This may seem to many to be a sign of bar-
barism and of savagery, but let us not forget
that at the present time the undertaker is very
careful to make corpses look nice by rouging
them and even by padding sunken cheeks and
jaws and the like. Human nature has not
changed very much in the thousands of years
since the cave man's time, and we still want to
have our dead look beautiful, just as Hector's
mother Hecuba rejoiced over the fact that her

210 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

son's body had not been marred in spite of
Achilles having dragged it many times around
the walls of Troy.

The dead of the cave-dwellers were dressed in
their best. Apparently some of their finest im-
plements were placed beside them, and the living
were quite willing to make the sacrifice of beau-
tiful things over which many hours of labor had
been spent, in the desire to provide their dead
friends with the instruments necessary, as they
believed, for life in another world. I under-
stand that there has never been a tribe found
that did not prove on careful investigation to
have some religious ideas and, above all, a sure
confidence in a hereafter. The cave men might
very well be expected to have had it as well as
the others, though this evidence for it has proved
rather surprising to a good many people.

War and the Cave Man.

It is interesting to appreciate that the investi-
gation of the caves was interrupted just as it
had reached this interesting point by the war in
Europe. Just before the war began, a French
nobleman and his three sons were engaged in
exploring one of the most interesting caves that
had been uncovered in recent years. The call to
arms at once put an end to the expedition, for
two of the sons were called to the colors and the
third for preliminary training. I believe that
one of the young men has since been killed, an
other has been wounded, and the father, all of

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 211

whose attention is now devoted to patriotic work,
is alone. That exploration will never be re-
sumed by the same investigators. Indeed it
seems very dubious as to when such researches
can be taken up seriously again in France. We
are thousands of years after the cave men, with
all the progress that is supposed to have taken
place since then ; but it is war that makes it im-
possible to go on with the interesting researches
of the cave man.

One of the French archeologists. Comment,
who has spent a good deal of time investigating
the cave man's life and customs during the past
twenty years, does not hesitate to declare that
the older cave man, the maker of his home beau-
tiful, when that home was only a cave, had no
weapons for war. He killed the animals that he
hunted by dead falls, that is, by pits dug in the
path that the animal was accustomed to follow
to water, and then covered with branches and a
light layer of dirt so that if the animal were
scared he would in his hurry rush upon this
light frame-work and then plunge to death in
the pit below. The weapons, or rather imple-
ments, that are found are for peaceful voca-
tions, the skinning of animals, the sharpening
of bones, the graving of bone and horn and the
like, but not for war. Could there be any more
curious contrast possible than our cave-man an-
cestor demonstrated as a man of peace, while
we as descendants of thousands of years later
are engaged in the greatest war that humanity

212 CATHOLIC CHURCHMEN IN SCIENCE

has ever waged. Verily man is a very curious
creature and the more we know of him, forget-
ting our theories and waiting for real knowledge,
the more curious and inexplicable he becomes.

When the war broke out Father Obermaier
was fortunately engaged in archeological work
on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees in connexion
with the cave dwellings of Spain, or he might
have found it extremely difHcult to go on with
his scientific labors, and perhaps even have suf-
fered some personal inconvenience. As it is,
the pursuit of his research work was sadly dis-
turbed by the war, but his presence in Spain led
to the creation for him of the Directorship of
the Paleontological Institute in Madrid, where
he is continuing his work of classifying, arrang-
ing, and bringing out the significance of the
many specimens, especially of movable art, that
have been found in the caves of Spain.

After even this brief story of his work, with
that of Abbe Breuil, and the results which they
have produced on human thinking, it is not diffi-
cult to understand why the claim should be
made that probably no other two men have done
so much in our present generation to revolution-
ize human thought with regard to the history of
man as these two faithful clergymen. So far
from being hampered in their work in any sense
of the word by the ecclesiastical authorities, they
have been encouraged, materially aided, and
their very priestly character has been of a dis-
tinct help to them in their work. They have

THE REV. HUGO OBERMAIER 213

done in our generation for man what the Abbot
Mendel did for lieredity, and their work fdls a
corresponding place in a particular department
of biology. Father Mendel found after a time
that he was called to higher things in his own
order and left his scientific work reasonably
complete, though its significance was not to be
recognized for a generation later. These two
clergymen have been more fortunate, and prac-
tically no one writes anywhere in the world on
paleontology and archeology without quoting
them.

The respect in which Obermaier is held will
be readily appreciated from the fact that, when
the war disturbed his work and cut off his con-
nexions with his home country, a position was
provided for him in a foreign country, in Cath-
olic Spain, so that he might be able to go on
with his precious scientific work during the war.
The whole story is extremely interesting from a
human point of view, but still more significant
because of the light that it throws on the real
relations between the Church and Science.

INDEX.

PAGE

A BIOGENESIS.... 128
Acheulean igo

Adam de Marisco 44

Ages, Dark, Bright.... loi

Agricola 92

a Kempis, Thomas.. 92, 94

Albert of Bollstadt 32

Albertus Magnus

23. 32, 35, 55, 61

Alcalde del Rio 160

Alexandre de Villedieu 61

Alphonso. Table of — 60

Altamira 160, 177, 188

Altruism 156

Anarchists 89

Archives of Diagnosis. 106
Aristotle. Albertus

Magnus on — 56

Bacon on— 56

Errors of — 56

Ars Harnwniae et Dis-

cordiae 18

Magna Lucis et

Umbrae 18

Art Degeneration 169

Impressionistic—. 199

Movable — 196

Mural— 165

"Objects" 202

Parietal^ 196

Plastic— 175

Primitives in — ... 153

Astrology 66

Astronomers. Papal — 9

Atomic Weights iii

Aurignacian 190

Aurochs 191

Authority 58

Avicenna 64

PAGE

BACILLUS Bulgari-

cus 66

Bacon. Academic Ca-
reer of — 40

and America 38

and the Blessed

Virgin 76

and the Latin Vul-
gate 77

and Mathematics. 58

Arabic 75

as Teacher 41

at Oxford 41

at Paris 41

Bitterness 78

Brothers 40

Chemist 51

Doctissimus Math-

ematicus 61

Family 40

Francis — 51, 69

Franciscan 44

Genius 83

Hebrew 75

on Calendar 60

Optics 50

Physical Science . 50

Robert 40

Roger. .31, 87, 97, 100

Roger and Francis

69, 72

Uncle 40

Bacon's Acerbity 79

Eclipse 35

Imprisonment 77

Bartolomeo de Parma. 61

Basel. Council of — ... 96

Bassi. Laura — 120, 136

Bathybius 128

2l6

INDEX

PAGE

Binz. Professor Carl — 107

" Blue Coat Boys " 112

Bologna 95

Bonnet 143

Boscovich 140

Boule Gaudry 159

Brasenose 36

Breuil Career 158

Henri— 188

Bric-a-Brac 202

Bridges. Dr. — 72, 74

Brixen. Bishop of — .. 88
Brothers of the Com-
mon Life 91

Bruno. Giordano — ... 89

Buflfon 122, 146

Bursa Cusana 112

Burserius 140

riAESALPINUS 12

yj Caesar. Urus oi — 191

Calendar. Julian — 60

Capitan d'Ault-du-

Mesnil 159

Cardinalate. Nicholas

of Cusa refused — 97

Carriages, Automatic . 37

Cartailhac 160, 173

Castillo. Grotto of — .. 190

Cave Culture 195

Implements 195

Man and War 210

Domestic Life of

the — 205

Inventor 204

O bservation 1 72

of Theory 155

Sculptor 173

Men of the Mod-
ern Times 167

Woman 206, 207

Caves and Cave-Dwel-

lers — 164

as Dwellings 193

Celtic Horse 175

Cesarini. Giuliano — 96

rAGE

Chaldea 151

Charles. Emile — 74

• of Anjou....T 47

Charme 66

Chellean igo

Christ Rejected 76

Chymiae. De Arte—. 52
Circulation of the

Blood 144

Civilization in Europe.

Origins of — 150

Clavius. Father Chris-
topher — ID

Clement IV ^^

— -VI 24

Clepsydra 108

Clifford. Professor

Kingdon — 60

College Endowments.. 43
Colleges. Medieval

and Modern — 42

Columbus 12, 38, 90

The Century of— .. 92

Commemoration Es-
says 46

Common Life. Breth-
ren of the — 93

Commont 211

Copernicus 70, 87

Cousin. Victor — 73

Crete 151

Crusade. Children's — 47

Cues 91

Cultures 197

Curriculum. Univer-
sity— 7

Cusa 91

Cardinal Nicholas

of — 16, 62, 87

Cusanus's Astronomi-
cal Ideas 114

■ Beneficence iii

Charity m

Germany. Union

of — Pioneer 104

Medical Diagnosis 105

INDEX

217

PAGE

D' AILLY. Cardinal
Pierre— 38

Dante 20, 102, 167

Darwinism 127

Dechelette 162, 188

Decoration of Utensils 198
Degeneration Cycles .. 169

Deventer 92, 112

Diagnosis. Accurate

Methods of — 105

in Medical Pro-
gress IDS

Doctor. Illustrious — . 44

Mirabilis 31, 39

Donne. Maria dalla — 136

Dordogne 149, 164

Draper. Professor — .. 71

Driescfi 127

Drugs. Old — 104

Duns Scotus 76

EARTH. Orbit of— 103
Earthworms 123

Education. Utility in

- 67

Egypt 151

Electromagnetismos — 17
England. Royal Soci-
ety of— 33

Engraving. Magda-

lenian — 172

Espeluges. Grotto of

— 175

Essays. Commemora-
tion — 47

Ethics 156

Europe. Intellectual
Development of — ... 71

Eustachius 12

Evans. Sir Arthur —

ISO, 165, i85

Explosives 53

Harnessing — 37

FASCINATION" 47
Fecundation.
Artificial— 13S

PAGE

Figure 66

Fire and Civilization... 205

Invention of— 204

Fiske. John— loi

Fitzacre. Richard — .. 44

Flint-Shaping 189

Floyer. John — 106

Fontana 140

Francis of Assisi 79

Frankfurt Diet 97

Freedom. The New — 90

Friar Bacon 36

Berthold of Reg-

ensburg 48

pALILEO 26

VT Imprisonment of . 80

Punishment of — .. 81

Galvani 53. 142

"Gas" 129

Gasquet. Cardinal—. ^^

Generation of Mice .... 130

Spontaneous- 128

Gerbert 23

Germany. Political

Status of— 103

United— 104

Gilbert of Colchester . . 71

Golden Age 203

Gravity. Specific — ... no

Greek Fire 53

Gregory XIII 9, "

Grey Friars 112

Grosseteste. Robert — 44

Guibert. Abbe— 158

Gunpowder yj

Arabs, Hindus,

Chinese S3

Invention of - — S3

Guy de Foulques 48

HAGAN. Father—. lOO
Haller 64, 143

Harvey. William — .. 106

Haiiy S3

Health Contagious 64

Hecuba 209

2l8

INDEX

PAGE

Hegius 92

Heidelberg. Univer-
sity of— 95

Helmont. Van — 129, 130

Henlein. Peter — 108

Henry III 47, 48

Herschel. Caroline — 120

Hippocrates. English- 65

Hirsch. S. A.— 75

Hohenstaufen 47

Homer. Spallanzani

on— 137

Horace 198

Horizons 197

Horse. Arabian — 175

Celtic— 175

Hugh of St. Victor 20

Humanities 4

Humboldt 51

Hunter. John — 122

Huxley. Professor —

5, 6, 7, 8, 70, 128

Huyler's 208

TGNORANCE. Four

J- Sources of — 57

On Learned — 102

Ignorantia. De

Docta — 17, loi

Imago Mundi 38

Immortality. Belief

in — 209

Impressionistic Art 199

Imprisonmentof Bacon 81

of Monks 81

Inanitas. Methodica — 64

" Industry" 190

Innocent III 76

Inquisition 54

Institute in Madrid.

Paleontological — ... 212

Iter Celeste 18

Ivory Carving 172, 174

JEROME of Ascoli.. 81
Joachim. Abbot — 20

John 76

PAGE

John of Dalberg 92

XXI 20

Jordanus 61

KIRCHER, S. J.

Father— 17

Kircherianum 19

Knowledge. Stum-
bling Blocks to—.... 57
Koelliker I79

LABORATORIES.

Anatomical — 13

Astronomical — .. 13

in the Vatican 8

Lake Dwellers 186

Lancisi 13

Learning. New— 4

Lenses. Theory of- . 50

Leo XIII 9

Leyden. Professor

Ernst von — 106

Light. Propagation

of— 51

Little. Professor — 46

Loeb 127

Lourdes 175

Lutheranism 94

MABIE. Hamilton— 93
MacCurdy. Pro-
fessor — 181

Machines. Flying — .. .38

Magdalenian 190

Magic 66

Magnes, sive de Arte

Magnetica r7

Mainz Diet 97

Malpighi 12, 143

Malus 53

Mammoth Cave 164

Charging 199

Manzolini. Madame — 136
Maria Theresa. Em-
press— 138

Marsh. Adam — 44

Marys. The— 76

INDEX

219

PAGE

Mascagni 142

Mathematics the Key

of Science 59

Matter and Form 52

Medical School. Papal- 12
Medicinarum. De

Graduacione — 62

Medicine. Old-Time

Makers of— 16, 105

Medicorum. De Er-

roribus — 63

Meistersingers 102

Mendel. Abbot— 158, 213
Mensch der Vorzeit.

Der— 194

Merck's Rhinoceros... 191

Metchnikoff 65

Meteorology 13

Method. Inductive — . 70

Michelangelo i54

Middle Ages 39

Appreciation of — 34

Millet. Franijois— ... i54

Minnesingers 102

Mirrors. Properties

of— SO

Mivart. George — 26

Monaco. Prince of—

160, 179

Monte Carlo i79

Morgagni I43

Morgan. Dr. Thomas

Hunt— 123, 127

Morphology. Experi-
mental — 13s

Moscati 140

Motu Propria 9

Muir. Patterson—.... 51
Mundus Subterraneus. 18

Museo Kircheriano 19

Museum. Natural His-
tory— 141

Musurgia Universalis. 18

NEEDHAM. Father
Walter— 122, 131

Neolithic Period 186

Newcomes. The — 112

Newman 26

Nicholas IV 8t

V 97

Nicholson S3

Nuremberg Diet 97

" Nuremberg Eggs ".. 107

OBERMAIER. The
Rev. Hugo— 152, 185

Opus Majus 49. 74

Minus 49

Tertium 49

Osborn. Professor

Henry Fairfield —

162, 171, 174, 187. 190

PADUA. University
of— 95. 96

Painting in Oils 173

in Rehef 170

Mural— 177

Paleolithic Time 186

Paleontology. Institute

of Human- 161

Papal Astronomers... 9, 25

Physicians 24

Parliament Responsible 104
Pasteur Anticipated.... 131

Precursor of — — 146

Pattison. Mark— 42

Paulsen. Professor—. 93
Pavia. University of— 139

Pf.psin 134

Peter of Spain 20

Pfefifercorn 75

Philebus 62

Philippines. Stormsin- 14
Physician Archbishop 21
Physicians. Papal— . . 24
Physiologia Experi-

mentalis 18

Piccolomini. Aeneas

Sylvius— 12, 90

Piette. Edouard— IS9

Pins. Decorated— ... 198
Pius II 90

220

INDEX

PAGE

Plato 62

Poincare 59

Pons Varolii 12

Pope. Philosopher-
Physician — 20

Popes and Science 24

' ' Preceptor Germa-

niae ' 92

Primitives in Art 153

Progress. Failure of — 57

Psychotherapeutists ... 67

Pulse Comparison 109

EAMON y Cajal 178
Reflexes. Spinal — 127

Regeneration 117

Reichstag Responsible 104
Reinach. Salomon — . 159

Renaissance 4

Respiration 134

Comparison no

Memoirs on — 135

Reuchlin 75

Revolt of the Pastor-

eaux 47

Rhinoceros. Merck's — 191

Rich. Edmund — 44

Roger Bacon and Med-
icine 63

Roman College 10

Romance of Modern

Science 153

Rome. Papal Univer-
sity of — 12

Roux 127

Ruskin. John — 161

SAINT Acheul 190
Louis. Cru-
sades of — 47

Salamanders 117, 124

Saliva 133

Saltpeter 53

Santander 177, 190

Sapienza 12

Sarton. Professor — .. 3

PACE

Saussure 143

Scarpa 142

Scharpflf 94

Science. Experimen-
tal— 54

History of — 3

Institute of the

History of — 27

Popes and — 24

Sciences. History of

Inductive — 72

Secchi. Father—. 13, 158

Seismology 14

Senebier 133, 143

Shelley 116

Sigmund. Duke—.... 88
Smith. Professor David

Eugene— 61, 78

Solutrean 190

" Spallanzani the Biol-
ogist" 144

Digestive Studies

of— 132

Experiments In-

genious 144

on Snail and

Slug 125

Hibernation 134

■ Literary Life of — 145

Marianna — 120

Observations on

Earthworms 123

on Homer 137

■ Respiration 134

Translations 142

Volcanoes 140

Spinal Reflex Centers. 127

Statuettes of Bison 173

Stone Age. Men of

the Old — 162, 171

Studium Generate 41

Sun. Constitution of

the — 102

Swift. Dean — 37

Sydenham 65

Sylvester II 22

INDEX

221

PACK

TADPOLE 124
Tambroni. Clo-
tilda — 136

Telesio 70

Tennyson 116

Teutonic Knights.

Cruelties of — 48

Thackeray 112,

Theodoric. Bishop — 21 !

Thiers 146

Thomas Aquinas

23, 35, 57, 76

Tissot 143

Tool Making 189

Toscanelli 9°, 95

Tourdes. Dr.— 142

Transmutation 52

Trembley 143

Trithemius. Abbot—. 113

Troubadours 102

Truth: Its Joys 99

TTROCHS 191

YALLISNIERI 137, 142
Van Helmont 129, 130
Varolius 12

PAGE

Vatican Observatory... 10

Venus Statuette... 174, 176

Virchow 179

Virgil 129

Volcanoes 140

Volta 142

Vulgarization of Sci-
ence 162

Vulgate 77

rAR. Cave Man and

210

211

158

no

154

71

48

23

No Weapons for .
Wasmann. Father — .
Water-Clock. 108, 109,

West. Benjamin —

Whewell. Dr.—

William de Rubruk ....

of Malmesbury.... —

of St. Amour 47

Wilson. President — . 90

Wimpheling 92

Wiseni 191

Women in Science 121

YEATS 201
Youth Exhalation 65