43Q THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



authority as a system of cosmogony being discredited on all hands by 

 the abandonment of the obvious meaning of its writer. It is a poem, 

 not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is forever beautiful ; 

 in the latter aspect it has been, and it will continue to be, purely ob- 

 structive and hurtful. To knowledge its value has been negative, 

 leading, in rougher ages than ours, to physical, and even in our own 

 "free" age, as exemplified in my own case, to moral violence. 



To the student of cause and effect no incident connected with the 

 proceedings at Belfast is more instructive than the deportment of the 

 Catholic hierarchy of Ireland ; a body usually wise enough not to con- 

 fer notoriety upon an adversary by imprudently denouncing him. The 

 Times, to which I owe nothing on the score of sympathy, but a great 

 deal on the score of fair play, where so much has been unfair, thinks 

 that the Irish cardinal, archbishops, and bishops, in their recent 

 manifesto, promptly and adroitly employed a weapon which I, at an 

 unlucky moment, had placed in their hands. The antecedents of their 

 action cause me to regard it in a different light ; and a brief reference 

 to these antecedents will, I think, illuminate not only their proceed- 

 ings regarding Belfast, but other doings which have been recently 

 noised abroad. 



Before me lies a document, bearing the date of November, 18*73, but 

 which, after appearing for a moment, unaccountably vanished from 

 public view. It is a memorial addressed by seventy of the students 

 and ex-students of the Catholic University in Ireland to the Episcopal 

 Board of the University. This is the plainest and bravest remon- 

 strance ever addressed by Irish laymen to their spiritual pastors and 

 masters. It expresses the profoundest dissatisfaction with the cur- 

 riculum marked out for the students of the university; setting forth 

 the extraordinary fact that the lecture-list for the faculty of Science, 

 published a month before they wrote, did not contain the name of a 

 single professor of the Physical or Natural Sciences. 



The memorialists forcibly deprecate this, and dwell upon the neces- 

 sity of education in science: "The distinguishing mark of this age is 

 its ardor for science. The natural sciences have, within the last fifty 

 years, become the chiefest study in the world ; they are in our time 

 pursued with an activity unparalleled in the history of mankind. 

 Scarce a year now passes without some discovery being made in these 

 sciences which, as with the touch of a magician's wand, shivers to 

 atoms theories formerly deemed unassailable. It is through the physi- 

 cal and natural sciences that the fiercest assaults are now made on our 

 religion. No more deadly weapon is used against our faith than the 

 facts incontestably proved by modern researches in science." 



Such statements must be the reverse of comfortable to a number 

 of gentlemen who, trained in the philosophy of Albertus Magnus and 

 Thomas Aquinas, have been accustomed to the unquestioning submis- 

 sion of all other sciences to their divine science of Theology. But 



