508 PATRICK H. YANCEY 



adequate educational facilities by their British masters, the 

 Irish immisfrants to America were largely uneducated. Even the 

 educated Irish in the past had been more interested in the 

 arts and humanities than in the natural sciences, and this bent 

 carried over to their descendants in America, Since the begin- 

 nings of Catholicism in this country are due chiefly to the Irish 

 it is not surprising that scientific achievement was not high on 

 the list of their attainments. This was recognized by Lehman 

 and Witty, who show that Catholics are much more in evidence 

 in such fields as drama and politics. 



Whatever may be said of national background, the children 

 of immigrants usually received no adequate education of any 

 kind, due to the poverty of their parents. Those who did suc- 

 ceed in going to college generally selected careers of prestige, 

 such as law or medicine, rather than that of scholarship. It 

 should also be said that many of the best minds among these 

 first generation Americans elected to follow the Master in a 

 priestly or religious vocation, and thus were lost to science. 



Another factor which operated adversely on the development 

 of scientists in the Catholic population was the distrust and 

 even fear on the part of many, especially among the clergy, of 

 science as atheistic and dangerous to faith and morals. This 

 was due largely to the controversy aroused by the publication 

 of Darwin's The Origin of Species. Since Darwin was an 

 Englishman and not a Catholic the theory of evolution some- 

 how came to be looked on as anti-Catholic. The truth of the 

 matter is that long before Darwin, the Catholic Lamarck had 

 proposed evolution to account for our present species of plants 

 and animals. It is interesting to note that the chief opponent 

 of evolution at that time, and probably the one who did most to 

 put off its acceptance until after Darwin's publication, was the 

 Protestant, Cuvier. Some of Darwin's followers, notably Hux- 

 ley and Spenser in England and Hackel in Germany, made 

 unwarranted extensions of the theory into fields of philosophy 

 and ethics. In the words of Wheeler, " Evolution, only a scien- 



