'216 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



every tendency to free mental productiveness.' It is, 

 indeed, in Catholic countries that the weight of Ultra- 

 montanism has been most severely felt. It is in such 

 countries that the very finest spirits, who have dared, 

 without quitting their faith, to plead for freedom or 

 reform, have suffered extinction. The extinction, how- 

 ever, was more apparent than real, and Hermes, Hirscher, 

 and Giinther, though individually broken and subdued, 

 prepared the way, in Bavaria, for the persecuted but 

 unflinching Frohschammer, for Dollinger, and for the 

 remarkable liberal movement of which Dollinger is the 

 head and guide. 



Though moulded for centuries to an obedience un- 

 paralleled in any other country, except Spain, the Irish 

 intellect is beginning to show signs of independence ; 

 demanding a diet more suited to its years than the 

 pabulum of the Middle Ages. As for the recent mani- 

 festo in which Pope, Cardinal, Archbishops, and Bishops 

 are united in one grand anathema, its character and 

 fate are shadowed forth by the Vision of Nebuchadnezzar 

 recorded in the Book of Daniel. It resembles the 

 image, whose form was terrible, but the gold, and silver, 

 and brass, and iron of which rested upon feet of clay. 

 And a stone smote the feet of clay ; and the iron, and 

 the brass, and the silver, and the gold, were broken 

 in pieces together, and became like the chaff of the 

 summer threshing-floors, and the wind carried them 

 away. 



Monsignor Capel has recently been good enough 

 to proclaim at once the friendliness of his Church 

 towards true science, and her right to determine what 

 true science is. Let us dwell for a moment on the 

 proofs of her scientific competence. When Halley's 

 comet appeared in 1456 it was regarded as the har- 

 binger of God's vengeance, the dispenser of war, pesti- 



