NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 605 



severity ; and, in some of these, offenses generally punished much 

 less severely were visited with death. Every pulpit interpreted 

 the ways of God to man in such seasons so as rather to increase 

 than to diminish the pestilence. The effect of thus seeking super- 

 natural causes rather than natural may be seen in such facts as 

 the death by plague of one fourth of the whole population of the 

 city of Perth in a single year of the fifteenth century ; other towns 

 suffering similarly both then and afterward. 



Here and there, physicians more wisely inspired endeavored 

 to push sanitary measures, and in 1585 attempts were made to 

 clean the streets of Edinburgh, but the chroniclers tell us that 

 " the magistrates and ministers gave no heed." One sort of ca- 

 lamity, indeed, came in as a mercy the great fires which swept 

 through the cities, clearing and cleaning them. Though the town 

 council of Edinburgh declared the noted fire of 1700 " a fearful 

 rebuke of God," it was observed that, after it had done its work, 

 disease and death were greatly diminished.* 



But by those standing in the higher places of thought some 

 glimpses of scientific truth had already been obtained, and at- 

 tempts at compromise between theology and science in this field 

 began to be made, not only by ecclesiastics, but first of all, as far 

 back as the seventeenth century, by a man of science, eminent 

 both for attainments and character Robert Boyle. Inspired by 

 the discoveries in other fields, which had swept away so much of 

 theological thought, he could no longer resist the conviction that 

 some epidemics are due, in his own words, "to a tragical con- 

 course of natural causes"; but he argued that some of these 

 may be the result of divine interpositions provoked by human 

 sins. As time went on, great difficulties showed themselves in 

 the way of this compromise difficulties theological not less 

 than difficulties scientific. To a Catholic it was more and more 

 hard to explain the theological grounds why so many orthodox 

 cities, firm in the faith, were punished, and so many heretical 

 cities spared, and why, in regions devoted to the Church, the 

 poorer people, whose faith in theological fetiches was unques- 

 tioning, died in times of pestilence like flies, while skeptics so fre- 

 quently escaped. Difficulties of the same sort beset devoted Prot- 

 estants; they, too, might well ask why it was that the devout 

 peasantry in their humble cottages perished, while so much larger 

 a proportion of the more skeptical upper classes were untouched. 



* For the plague at Marseilles and its depopulation, see Henri Martin, Ilistoire de France, 

 vol. xv, especially document cited in appendix ; also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap, xliii ; 

 also Rambaud. For the resort to witch-doctors in Austria against pestilence, down to the 

 end of the eighteenth century, see Biedermann, Deutschland Im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert. 

 For the reign of filth and pestilence in Scotland, see Charles Rogers, D. D., Social Life in 

 Scotland, Edinburgh, 1834, vol. i, pp. 305-316; see also Buckle's second volume. 



