1880.] The Martyrdom of Science . 161 
those very innovations — he was honoured and protected by 
Catherine of Medicis and Henry III. That he was at last 
arrested, condemned to death, and allowed to die in the 
Bastille, was the consequence of his firm adherence to the 
doCtrines of the Huguenots. Had it not been for his scientific 
greatness he would have perished earlier. 
If Lavoisier perished on the scaffold amidst the storms of 
the first Revolution, he merely shared the fate of his col- 
leagues the fermiers generaux, none of whom were men of 
science. It is true that “ the brutish idiot into whose 
hands the destinies of France had then fallen ” — as Prof. 
Whewell justly remarks — declared that “ the republic had 
no need of chemists.” But these foolish words give us no 
right to assert, as a modern writer has done, that Lavoisier 
suffered death for his chemical ideas. 
If Bailly likewise perished upon the scaffold, and if Con- 
dorcet poisoned himself to escape a similar fate, they died 
not as philosophers and mathematicians, but as victims of 
indiscriminate popular frenzy. 
There are many other men whose names we are thus 
compelled to erase from the list of the martyrs of science — 
men whose inventions and discoveries have been of the 
highest order, but whose sufferings and death cannot be 
justly looked on as a consequence of their achievements. 
But there still remains a third and a too numerous class : 
thinkers and discoverers who have been persecuted in many 
cases to the death, not incidentally but because of the very 
services they have rendered to science. Their persecutions 
have differed very much in nature and degree according to 
the age and the country in which they lived. In the dark 
ages it was practicable to arrest a troublesome thinker, and 
to put an end to his researches, or at least to their promul- 
gation, by the straightforward means of imprisonment, 
torture, banishment, and even death at the stake. Hypatia 
of Alexandria was seized by a mob of infuriated monks, who 
literally tore the flesh from her bones with fragments of pots, 
dragged her mangled remains outside the city, and there 
burnt them. The Bishop Cyril, who had instigated the 
outrage, endeavoured to screen the malefactors from justice. 
Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg, was burnt by Boniface, the 
Papal legate, for asserting the existence of antipodes. Cor- 
nelius Agrippa, after much persecution, died at last of aCtual 
famine. Roger Bacon, perhaps the mightiest philosopher 
of the middle ages, of whom it has even been said that 
could he revisit the earth he would shake his head at the slow- 
ness of our progress since his death, suffered bitterly. He was 
VOL. ii. (third series). n 
