THE MARTYRDOM OF SCIENCE. 73 



an almost prophetic insight he foretold the evil consequences of the 

 destruction of forests, and in our day not merely meteorologists and 

 farmers, but governments find that he was in the right. But in spite 

 of all his innovations in science and in industrial art or rather in con- 

 sequence of those very innovations he was honored and protected by 

 Catherine of Medicis and Henry III. That he was at last arrested, 

 condemned to death, and allowed to die in the Bastile, was the conse- 

 quence of his firm adherence to the doctrines of the Huguenots. Had 

 it not been for his scientific greatness he would have perished earlier. 



If Lavoisier perished on the scaffold amid the storms of the first 

 Revolution, he merely shared the fate of his colleagues the fermiers 

 generaux, none of whom were men of science. It is true that " the 

 brutish idiot into whose hands the destinies of France had then fallen," 

 as Professor Whewell justly remarks, declared that " the republic had 

 no need of chemists." But these foolish words give us no right to 

 assert, as a modern writer has done, that Lavoisier suffered death for 

 his chemical ideas. 



If Bailly likewise perished upon the scaffold, and if Condorcet poi- 

 soned himself to escape a similar fate, they died not as philosophers 

 and mathematicians, but as victims of indiscriminate popular frenzy. 



There are many other men whose names we are thus compelled to 

 erase from the list of the martyrs of science men whose inventions 

 and discoveries have been of the highest order, but whose sufferings 

 and death can not be justly looked on as a consequence of their 

 achievements. 



But there still remains a third and a too numerous class : thinkers 

 and discoverers who have been persecuted in many cases to the death, 

 not incidentally, but because of the very services they have rendered 

 to science. Their persecutions have differed very much in nature and 

 degree according to the age and the country in which they lived. In 

 the dark ages it was practicable to arrest a troublesome thinker and 

 to put an end to his researches, or at least to their promulgation, by 

 the straightforward means of imprisonment, torture, banishment, and 

 even death at the stake. Hypatia, of Alexandria, was seized by a mob 

 of infuriated monks, who literally tore the flesh from her bones with 

 fragments of pots, dragged her mangled remains outside the city, and 

 there burned them. The Bishop Cyril, who had instigated the outrage, 

 endeavored to screen the malefactors from justice. Virgilius, Bishop 

 of Salzburg, was burned by Boniface, the papal legate, for asserting the 

 existence of antipodes. Cornelius Agrippa, after much persecution, 

 died at last of actual famine. Roger Bacon, perhaps the mightiest 

 philosopher of the middle ages, of whom it has even been said that 

 could he revisit the earth he would shake his head at the slowness of 

 our progress since his death, suffered bitterly. He was first prohibited 

 from lecturing at the University of Oxford and from communicating 

 his researches to any one. The accession of Clemens IV. to the papal 



