72 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



elers, such as Cook, La Perouse, Franklin, Livingstone, meteorologists 

 like Croce-Spinelli, who in their ardor for discovery have succumbed 

 to ungenial climates, to the attacks of savages, to hunger, tempest, or 

 to an irrespirable atmosphere. All honor to these men, and to the 

 noble army of which they may be taken as representatives ! They 

 have fallen in the cause of science, but they have undergone no perse- 

 cution, and may hence be regarded as victims rather than martyrs. 



We turn to another class : illustrious inventors and discoverers not 

 a few have been clearly and decidedly persecuted ; hunted down by 

 mob- violence, imprisoned, or even judicially murdered ; but these in- 

 flictions are to be traced not to their scientific discoveries, speculations, 

 and writings, but to their religious or political opinions. When the 

 house of Priestley was sacked and burned by the rabble of Birming- 

 ham, and when his very life was endangered, it was not the chemist 

 and physicist but the so-called " Jacobin " and Socinian whom Mid- 

 land roughdom sought to crush. It is not, we believe, generally known 

 that the attack on Priestley's house was headed by the town-crier, a 

 man of the name of Sugar, who rang his bell and exclaimed : 



" Pile up the wood higher, 

 I am (Sugar, the crier ; 

 By my desire 

 This place was set on fire ! " 



This man and his doggerel are only worth our notice as proof of 

 the official countenance lent to the outrage. It is utterly incredible 

 that a town-crier would thus avowedly act as the ringleader of a mob 

 unless sure of the connivance of his superiors. 



If Campanella was put seven times to tbe torture, on one occasion 

 for forty hours in succession ; if he passed twenty-seven of the best 

 years of his life in loathsome dungeons ; if, after his release, he nar- 

 nowly escaped the rage of a brutal populace, it was not as the cham- 

 pion of the Copernican system of astronomy, the refuter of mediaeval 

 Aristotelianism, but as a patriot who longed to deliver southern Italy 

 from the tyranny of Spain, that he suffered. Still we may concede 

 that like all the reformers of science he must have aroused the hatred 

 and jealousy of many of the learned, who would doubtless use against 

 him whatever influence they possessed. 



Servetus was certainly a learned physician, and is by some ranked 

 as one of the forerunners of Harvey. But his judicial murder by Cal- 

 vin was due solely to his theological opinions. The merits of Bernard 

 Palissy, not merely as the creator of modern fictile art, but as an able 

 physicist, chemist, and geologist, can not be contested. He shocked 

 the philosophasters and sophists of his day by maintaining that fossil 

 shells were not, as was then supposed, mere freaks of Nature, but the 

 remains of extinct animals. He dared to deny that stones were capa- 

 ble of growth. He pointed out the possibility of artesian wells. With 



