[March, 
3-60 The Martyrdom of Science . 
not to their scientific discoveries, speculations, and writings, 
but to their religious or political opinions. When the house 
of Priestley was sacked and burnt by the rabble of Birming- 
ham, and when his very life was endangered it was not the 
chemist and physicist but the so-called “ Jacobin and 
Socinian whom Midland roughdom sought to crush. It is 
not, we believe, generally known that the attack on 
Priestley’s house was headed by the town-crier, a man 01 
the name of Sugar, who rang his bell and exclaimed 
“ Pile up the wood higher, 
I am Sugar, the crier ; 
By my desire 
This place was set on fire !” 
This man and his doggerel are only worth our notice as 
proof of the official countenance lent to the outrage. It is 
utterly incredible that a town crier would thus avowedly a 6 t 
as the ringleader of a mob unless sure of the connivance of 
his superiors. 
If Campanella was put seven times to the torture, on one 
occasion for forty hours in succession ; if he passed twenty- 
seven of the best years of his life in loathsome dungeons ; 
if, after his release, he narrowly escaped the rage of a brutal 
populace, it was not as the champion of the Copernican 
system of astronomy, the refuter of mediaeval Aristotelianism, 
but as a patriot who longed to deliver southern Italy from 
the tyranny of Spain, that he suffered. Still we may con- 
cede that like all the reformers of science he must have 
aroused the hatred and jealousy of many of the learned, who 
would doubtless use against him whatever influence they 
^ Servetus was certainly a learned physician, and is by 
some ranked as one of the forerunners of Harvey. But his 
judicial murder by Calvin was due solely to his theological 
opinions. The merits of Bernard Palissy, not merely as the 
creator of modern fidtile art, but as an able physicist, 
chemist, and geologist, cannot be contested. He shocked 
the philosophasters and sophists of his day by maintaining 
that fossil shells were not, as was then supposed, mere 
freaks of nature, but the remains of extindt animals. He 
dared to deny that stones were capable of growth. He 
pointed out the possibility of artesian wells. With an 
almost prophetic insight he foretold the evil consequences 
of the destruftion of forests, and in our day not merely 
meteorologists and farmers, but governments find that he 
was in the right. But in spite of all his innovations in 
science and in industrial art— or rather in consequence of 
