THE MARTYRDOM OF SCIENCE. 71 



And of Cassius 



" Would he were fatter ! 



If my name were liable to fear, 



I do not know the man I should avoid 



As soon as that spare Oassius." 



Macbeth was not fat, nor Richard III., nor Henry V., nor Harry 

 Hotspur. They did the things which they planned to do. They did 

 not have to stop to "breathe " themselves like the Prince of Denmark. 

 Who can possibly conceive of a fat Coriolanus ? The fat man may be 

 greedy and avaricious like Cardinal Wolsey, or witty and sensual like 

 old Jack, or brooding and melancholy like Hamlet ; but he who can 

 vault into his saddle " like feathered Mercury " will ever win the day 

 by action. 



Hamlet's uncle-father might confidently have left the unhappy phi- 

 losopher to his questionings and musings ; had he not set his own trap 

 he might have finished his reign in safety, if not in peace, for the Ham- 

 let of Shakespeare, unlike the real Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, would 

 no more have set the palace on fire than he would have produced a con- 

 flagration of the Skao-er Rack for he was " fat and scant of breath," 

 impeded at every step by a superfluity of adipose. 



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THE MARTYRDOM OF SCIENCE. 



By J. W. SLATEE. 



THE history of human progress presents no feature more interesting 

 yet more commonly overlooked and misrepresented than the 

 treatment of discoverers and inventors. That these men have, as a 

 rule, fared ill at the hands of their species is carelessly or grudgingly 

 admitted. But the questions by whom have they been persecuted, 

 and what may have been the motive of their enemies, are avoided even 

 in works where we might expect them to be carefully discussed and 

 fully answered. Such omission may be especially charged against Sir 

 D. Brewster. His treatise is merely a biography of certain astrono- 

 mers who have been, for anything the reader learns to the contrary, 

 incidentally and casually afflicted by their contemporaries, and it omits 

 the most striking instances of persecution. Nay, the very term " mar- 

 tyrs of science " is applied quite vaguely, and is made, e. g., in the 

 work of M. Tissandier, to include three distinct classes of men. We 

 have on the one hand personages whose love for research has cost them 

 health and even life itself. We find physicists like Richmann, chem- 

 ists like Gehlen, Mansfield, Chapman, who have been struck dead while 

 engaged in some hazardous experiment. We read of naturalists like 

 Marcgrave and the elder Wallace, geographers, navigators, and tr?v- 



