3 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rality. Heavy missiles were hurled — such phrases as " sapping 

 the foundations/' etc., " breaking down the bulwarks," etc., and, 

 withal, a new missile was used with much effect — the epithet 

 " materialist." 



The results can be easily guessed : crowds came to the lecture- 

 rooms of the attacked professors, and the lecture-room of Prof. 

 See, the chief offender, was crowded to suffocation. 



A siege was begun in due form. A young physician was sent 

 by the cardinal's party into the heterodox camp as a spy. Having 

 heard one lecture of Prof. See, he returned with information that 

 seemed to promise easy victory to the besieging party ; he 

 brought a terrible statement — one that seemed enough to over- 

 whelm Se'e, Vulpian, Duruy, and the whole hated system of 

 public instruction in France — the statement that Se'e had denied 

 the existence of the human soul. 



Good Cardinal Bonnechose seized the tremendous weapon. 

 Rising in his place in the Senate, he launched a most eloquent 

 invective against the Minister of State who could protect such a 

 fortress of impiety as the College of Medicine ; and, as a climax, 

 he asserted, on the evidence of his spy fresh from Prof. See's 

 lecture-room, that the professor had declared, in his lecture of the 

 day before, that so long as he had the honor to hold his professor- 

 ship he would combat the false idea of the existence of the soul. 

 The weapon seemed resistless, and the wound fatal ; but M. Duruy 

 rose and asked to be heard. 



His statement was simply that he held in his hand docu- 

 mentary proofs that Prof. Se'e never made such a declaration. 

 He held the notes used by Prof. Se'e in his lecture. Prof. Se'e, it 

 appeared, belonged to a school in medical science which combated 

 certain ideas regarding medicine as an art. The inflamed im- 

 agination of the cardinal's heresy-hunting emissary had, as the 

 lecture notes proved, led him to mistake the word "art" for 

 " dme " and to exhibit Prof. Se'e as treating a theological when he 

 was discussing a purely scientific question. Of the existence of 

 the soul the professor had said nothing. 



The forces of the enemy were immediately turned ; they re- 

 treated in confusion, amid the laughter of all France; and a 

 quiet, dignified statement as to the rights of scientific instructors 

 by Wurtz, Dean of the Faculty, completed their discomfiture. 

 Thus a well-meant attempt to check science simply ended in 

 bringing ridicule on religion, and thrusting still deeper into the 

 minds of thousands of men that most mistaken of all mistaken 

 ideas — the conviction that religion and science are enemies.* 



* For a general account of the Vulpian and See matter, see Revue des Deux Mondes, 31 

 mai, 1868 ; Chronique de la Quinzaine, pp. 1&3-165. As to the result on popular though t, 



