i88o.] 
The Martyrdom of Science, 
159 
III. THE MARTYRDOM OF SCIENCE .* 
By J. W. Slater. 
'iJpHE history of human progress presents no feature more 
r ||L^ interesting yet more commonly overlooked and mis- 
represented than the treatment of discoverers and 
inventors. That these men have, as a rule, fared ill at the 
hands of their species is carelessly or grudgingly admitted. 
But the questions by whom have they been persecuted, and 
what may have been the motive of their enemies, are avoided 
even in works where we might expect them to be carefully 
discussed and fully answered. Such omission may be 
especially charged against Sir D. Brewster. His treatise 
is merely a biography of certain astronomers who have been, 
for anything the reader learns to the contrary, incidentally 
and casually afflicted by their contemporaries, and it omits 
the most striking instances of persecution. Nay, the very 
term “ martyrs of science ” is applied quite vaguely, and is 
made, e.g., in the work of M. Tissandier, to include three 
distinct classes of men. We have on the one hand per- 
sonages whose love for research has cost them health and 
even life itself. We find physicists like Richmann, chemists 
like Gehlen, Mansfield, Chapman, who have been struck 
dead whilst engaged in some hazardous experiment. We 
read of naturalists like Marcgrave and the elder Wallace ; 
geographers, navigators, and travellers, such as Cook, La 
Perouse, Franklin, Livingstone; meteorologists like Croce- 
Spinelli, who in their ardour for discovery have succumbed 
to ungenial climates, to the attacks of savages, to hunger, 
tempest, or to an irrespirable atmosphere. All honour to 
these men, and to the noble army of which they may be 
taken as representatives. They have fallen in the cause of 
science, but they have undergone no persecution, and may 
hence be regarded as victims rather than martyrs. 
We turn to another class : illustrious inventors and dis- 
coverers not a few have been clearly and decidedly perse- 
cuted ; hunted down by mob-violence, imprisoned, or even 
judicially murdered ; but these inflictions are to be traced 
* Les Martyrs de la Science. By Gaston Tissandier. Paris: Maurice 
Dreyfous. 
Heroes of Invention and Discovery. Edinburgh: W. P. Nimmo and Co. 
The Martyrs of Science. By Sir D. Brewster. 
History of the Indudtive Sciences. By Prof. W. Whewell. 
Hypatia. By the Rev. C. Kingsley. 
