ins;, is to receive the truth, whether agreeable or the COn- 

 trary, with all its train of consequences, however repulsive 

 or discouraging.' ' He had himself been the victim of relig- 

 ious intolerance and bigotry. In one of his lectures on 

 the " Method of Creation," he said, " When science was 

 raised above contempt, she became the object of a dread 

 almost fatal to free development. Her boundaries were 

 prescribed by theology . and limited by the generally ac- 

 cepted creeds. Indeed this phase of persecution has hard- 

 ly yet passed away. I remember well, when a young 

 man, being called before the Board of Education of Neuf- 

 chatel, the town where I then taught as professor, to be 

 reprimanded for inculcating infidel doctrines: and this be- 

 cause I did not hesitate to speak of geology as revealing, 

 approximately at least, the age of the world, and show- 

 ing it to be far older than church creeds had supposed." 



Agassiz before this little board of bigots reminds us of 

 Galileo in penitential garb before the Pope begging par- 

 don for the sin of proving that the earth moved around 

 the sun. It recalls Bruno flying from kingdom to king- 

 dom, seeking safety for a similar heresy — caught at last 

 and paying for the great crime of Astronomy by death at 

 the stake. He was burnt at Rome, February 16, A. D. 

 1600, two hundred and seventy-four years ago to-day, a 

 victim of religious intolerance, a martyr to truth. A his- 

 torian says that " with both present and prophetic truth 

 he nobly responded, when the atrocious sentence was 

 passed upon him : ' Perhaps it is with greater fear that 

 ye passthis sentence upon me than I receive it.' ' Science 

 canonizes no saints and makes no pilgrimages, but in 

 view of the perfect establishment of the truths for which 

 Pome burnt Bruno, its devotees might without much su- 

 perstition believe that, as was said of another martyr, his 

 ashes w-re cast into the Tiber, which bore them to the 

 Tuscan Sea and the Tuscan Sea carried them to the wide 

 Ocean, so that his ashes like his doctrines might be scat- 

 tered over the whole world. 



Agassiz's arrest also suggests Columbus before the 

 eongregrated wisdom of the fifteenth century at Salaman- 



