502 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
their spiritual pastors and masters. It expresses the pro- 
foundest dissatisfaction with the curriculum marked out 
for the students of the University; setting forth the extra- 
ordinary fact that the lecture-list for the faculty of science, 
published a month before they wrote, did not contain the 
name of a single professor of the physical or natural 
sciences. 
The memorialists forcibly deprecate this, and dwell 
upon the necessity of education in science: "The distin- 
guishing mark of this age is its ardor for science. The 
natural sciences have, within the last fifty years, become 
the chiefest study in the world; they are in our time pur- 
sued with an activity unparalleled in the history of man- 
kind. Scarce a year now passes without some discovery 
being made in these sciences which, as with the touch of 
the magician's wand, shivers to atoms theories formerly 
deemed unassailable. It is through the physical and natural 
sciences that the fiercest assaults are now made on our 
religion. Xo more deadly weapon is used against our faith 
than the facts incontestably provecf by modern researches 
in science.'" 
Such statements must be the reverse of comfortable to a 
number of gentlemen who, trained in the philosophy of 
Thomas Aquinas, have been accustomed to the unquestion- 
ing submfsslon" of all other sciences to their divine science 
of theology. But this is not all: " One thing seems cer- 
tain," say the memorialists, viz., "that if chairs for the 
physical and natural sciences be not soon founded in the 
Catholic University, very many young men will have their 
faith exposed to dangers which the creation of a school of 
science in the University would defend them from. For 
our generation of Irish Catholics are writhing under the 
sense of their inferiority in science, and are determined 
that such inferiority shall not long continue; ami so, if 
scientific training be unattainable at our University, they 
will seek it at Trinity or at the Queen's Colleges, in not 
one of which is there a Catholic professor of science." 
Those who imagined the Catholic University of 
Kensington to be due to the spontaneous recognition, on 
the part of the Roman hierarchy, of the intellectual needs 
of the age, will derive enlightenment from this, and still 
more from what follows: for the most formidable threat 
remains. To the picture of Catholic students seceding 
