24 NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 



Such was tlie struggle of the physical sciences in general. Let 

 us now look briefly at one special example out of many, which 

 reveals, as well as any, the beginning, continuance, and end of 

 theological interference with the evolution of them. 



It will doubtless seem amazing to many that for ages the 

 weight of theological thought in Christendom was thrown against 

 the idea of the suffocating properties of certain gases, and espe- 

 cially of carbonic acid. Although in antiquity we see men form- 

 ing a right theory of gases in mines, we find that, early in the 

 history of the Church, St. Clement of Alexandria put forth the 

 theory that these gases are manifestations of diabolic action, and 

 that, throughout Christendom, suffocation in caverns, wells, and 

 cellars was attributed to the direct action of evil spirits. Evi- 

 dences of this view abound through the mediaeval period, and 

 even as late as the Reformation period a great authority, Agri- 

 cola, one of the most earnest and truthful of investigators, still 

 adheres to the belief that these gases in mines are manifestations 

 of devils, and specifies two classes one of malignant imps, who 

 blow out the miners' lamps, and the other of friendly imps, who 

 simply tease the workmen in various ways. He goes so far as to 

 tell us that one of these spirits in the Saxon mine of Annaberg 

 destroyed twelve workmen at once by the power of his breath. 



At the end of the sixteenth century we find a writer on min- 

 eralogy complaining that the mines in France and Germany had 

 been in large part abandoned on account of the " evil spirits of 

 metals which had taken possession of them." 



But at various periods glimpses of the truth had been gained. 

 The ancient view had not been entirely forgotten; and as far 

 back as the first part of the thirteenth century Albert the Great 

 suggested a natural cause in the possibility of exhalations from 

 minerals causing a "corruption of the air"; but he, as we have 

 seen, was driven or dragged off into theological studies, and the 

 world relapsed into the theological view. 



Toward the end of the fifteenth century there came a great 

 genius laden with important truths in chemistry, but for whom 



attached to Borelli's investigations by Newton and Huygens, see Brewster's Life of Sir 

 Isaac Newton, London, 1876, pp. 128, 129. Libri, in his Essai sur Galilee, p. 37, says that 

 Oliva was summoned to Rome and so tortured by the Inquisition that, to escape further 

 cruelty, he ended his life by throwing himself from a window. For interference by Pope 

 Gregory XVI with the Academy of the Lincei, and with public instruction generally, see 

 Carutti, Storia della Accademia dei Lincei, p. 126. Pius IX, with all his geniality, seems to 

 have allowed his hostility to voluntary associations to carry him very far at times. For his 

 answer to an application made through Lord Odo Russell regarding a society for the pre- 

 vention of cruelty to animals and his answer that " such an association could not be sanc- 

 tioned by the Holy See, being founded on a theological error, to wit, that Christians owed 

 any duties to animals," see Frances Power Cobbe, Hopes of the Human Race, p. 20*7. 



