156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



before the twentieth, century. Thousands of precious lives shall 

 be lost in this century, tens of thousands shall suffer discomfort, 

 privation, sickness, poverty, ignorance, for lack of discoveries and 

 methods which, but for this mistaken dealing with Roger Bacon 

 and his compeers, would now be blessing the earth. 



In two recent years sixty thousand children died in England 

 and in Wales of scarlet fever ; probably quite as many died in the 

 United States. Had not Bacon been hindered, we should have 

 had in our hands, by this time, the means to save two thirds of 

 these victims ; and the same is true of typhoid, typhus, cholera, 

 and that great class of diseases of whose physical causes science 

 is just beginning to get an inkling. Put together all the efforts 

 of all the atheists who have ever lived, and they have not done so 

 much harm to Christianity and the world as has been done by 

 the narrow-minded, conscientious men who persecuted Roger 

 Bacon, and closed the path which he gave his life to open. 



But despite the persecution of Bacon and the defection of those 

 who ought to have followed him, champions of the experimental 

 method rose from time to time during the succeeding centuries. 

 We know little of them personally ; our main knowledge of their 

 efforts is derived from the endeavors of their persecutors. 



In 1317 Pope John XXII issued his bull, Spondent pariter, 

 leveled at the alchemists, but really dealing a terrible blow at 

 the beginnings of chemical science. That many alchemists were 

 knavish is no doubt true, but no infallibility in separating the 

 evil from the good was shown by the papacy in this matter. In 

 this and in sundry other bulls and briefs we find Pope John, by 

 virtue of his infallibility as the world's instructor in all that per- 

 tains to faith and morals, condemning real science and pseudo- 

 science alike. In two of these documents, supposed to be inspired 

 by wisdom from on high, he complains that both he and his flock 

 are in danger of their lives by the arts of sorcerers ; he declares 

 that such sorcerers can send devils into mirrors and finger- 

 rings, and kill men and women by a magic word ; that they had 

 tried to kill him by piercing his waxen image with needles, in the 

 name of the devil. He, therefore, called on all rulers, secular and 

 ecclesiastical, to hunt down the miscreants who thus afflicted the 

 faithful, and he especially increased the powers of inquisitors in 

 various parts of Europe for this purpose. 



The impulse thus given to childish fear and hatred against the 

 investigation of Nature was felt for centuries. More and more 

 chemistry came to be known as one of the " seven devilish arts." 



These declarations of Pope John were echoed for generation 

 after generation, until nearly three hundred years later there 

 came the yet more terrible bull of Pope Innocent VIII, known as 

 Summis Desider antes ; which let inquisitors loose upon Germany, 



