98 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



college expresses it, "boldly and accustomably took upon them great 

 cures, to the high displeasure of God, the great infamy of the faculty, 

 and the grievous hurt of his Majesty's liege people." Physicians had 

 gradually become distinct from the sacerdotal order on the Continent, 

 and as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century we find that 

 monks were expelled from the hospitals by the University of Vienna 

 lor their " insatiate avidity, and flagrant incompetency," and the care 

 of the sick poor given into the hands of the laity. The monks re- 

 venged themselves by procuring an order from the Pope, prohibiting 

 physicians from visiting their patients a second time, without summon- 

 ing a priest to attend also ! 



From the Protestant era, original investigation and the accumula- 

 tion of facts from accurate observation proceeded with a rapidity and 

 certainty beyond all previous experience. Their progress was, never- 

 theless, impeded, and the value of the results produced depreciated by 

 several opposing influences. 



The Romish Church, ever intolerant of novelties which did not 

 emanate from herself, viewed with apprehension and hatred all scien- 

 tific discoveries, since they were subversive of dogmas which infalli- 

 bility had sanctioned and approved. Roger Bacon was persecuted by 

 a priesthood said to be so ignorant that they knew no property of the 

 circle, except that of keeping out the devil and the cry of sorcery or 

 heresy was raised against succeeding explorers of Nature to the time 

 of Galileo. It is terrible to think how many great lights must have 

 been extinguished, how many great discoveries nipped in the bud, by 

 the rigorous stamping out of heresy and unholy pursuits, carried on 

 by the Inquisition. And Protestantism, which had its origin in a sim- 

 ilar spirit of inquiry, deprecated with almost equal bigotry, though 

 with less power, every conclusion which seemed contrary to her own 

 interpretation of the word of God. God had afflicted Job with horri- 

 ble diseases, and the history of the demoniacs proved that devils could 

 derange bodily functions ; therefore to doubt these causes was to im- 

 pugn the veracity of the Bible. 



As late as the year 1699, the Royal Society was attacked by theo- 

 logians soon after its foundation, on the ground that the society neg- 

 lected the wiser and more discerning ancient philosophers, and de- 

 pended too much on their own unassisted powers that, by admitting 

 men of all religions and all countries, they endangered the stability of 

 the Established Church and, more than all, that a philosophy, founded 

 on experiment, was likely to lead to the overthrow of the Christian 

 religion, and even to a formal denial of the existence of God. And 

 ibout this time, the orthodox and devout Willis, who gave all his 

 Sunday fees in charity, who procured a special early service daily at a 

 church in St. Martin's Lane, in order that he might be able to attend 

 before he visited his patients, and dedicated his treatise, " De Anima 

 Brutorum," to the Archbishop of Canterbury, was condemned by the 



