J. W. Slater

“ As we approach modern times a change becomes manifest. Ecclesiastical bodies in the more civilized parts of Europe were deprived of civil power, and could no longer imprison, torture, or burn inventors and discoverers. But the old spirit faded away very slowly, and even in our days it still occasionally comes to light. Men of science, scientific works, and learned societies were, and still are, traduced, denounced, and held up to public hatred. Scarcely a capital step has been taken in any branch of research but it has been branded as atheistic. ”

“ In the same vein as Davy and Whewell, teleologists and natural theologians, when enlarging upon the marvels of instinct, have seldom failed to "trot out" the colt, the calf, or the lamb, to invite our consideration to the chickens and the "young ducks," and to erect upon the precocity of these creatures—as compared with the tedious development of our own species—a fancied wall of demarkation between man and beast. ”

“ If we now, summing up, seek to know who have been the chief persecutors of science, we shall find the conventional answers too narrow. Many persons have laid the chief blame upon Roman Catholicism. It is very questionable, however, whether other churches, if they had been as widely spread, and had possessed as great civil power and authority, might not have equaled or even exceeded Rome. The religious bodies of Britain, established or dissenting, have certainly been unsurpassed in the virulence of their attacks upon geology and upon the new natural history. ”

“ 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 can not be justly looked on as a consequence of their achievements. ”

“ The Mias, like a very young baby, lying on its back quite helpless, rolling lazily from side to side, stretching out his hands into the air, wishing to grasp something, but hardly able to guide its fingers to any definite object, and when dissatisfied opening wide its almost toothless mouth, and expressing its wants by an almost infantile scream. ”

“ 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 promulgation, by the straightforward means of imprisonment, torture, banishment, and even death at the stake. ”

“ Thus we see that the condition of the young of the lower animals is, after all, analogous to that of the human infant. The child, indeed, is still slower in learning to walk than the kitten or the young ape, not because he has to learn in a different manner, but because the development of his muscles and joints is much more gradual; because his head is relatively heavier; because he has to support himself on one pair of limbs only, thus rendering his base much narrower and his center of gravity higher from the ground ”

“ In like manner, and even more truth, it might be said that we know not with how little accurate thorough knowledge books are compiled, the world is misinstructed, and imposing reputations are built up. ”

“ Lest we should feel tempted to ridicule the suicidal folly of the working-classes in thus seeking to repress improvement, let us remember that Science is sometimes her own persecutor. Men who have gained a high official position in universities and academies are often actuated by a jealousy very similar to that which we have traced among ecclesiastics. ”

“ That something was science! We are bound to say that his listeners gave every mark of sympathy and approval. The manner in which inventors have often been treated in different parts of England seems to show that such feelings are widely spread. The country which first wins over her working-classes to favor invention and to become themselves inventors will command the industrial supremacy of the world. America is fast attaining this object by her patent system, which enables even a poor man to secure his property in an invention. ”

“ To begin, then: the slow bodily development of the human infant and its prolonged helplessness are matters far too familiar to require proof, or even illustration. No less familiar and universally admitted is the rapidity with which foals, calves, lambs, kids, chickens, and ducklings acquire the use of their limbs and other organs. ”

“ Thus, then, we see that in the mammalia, instead of man standing alone, sharply contrasted to the rest of the class, he merely occupies one extremity of a series toward the other end of which stand our much-talked-of friends the lamb and the foal, while the carnivorous animals and the apes occupy intermediate positions. ”

“ They establish a certain scientific orthodoxy, based often to a great extent on mere conjecture and assertion, and seek to frown down and to silence the unknown outsider who calls in question one of their dogmas, or who discovers a truth which they have overlooked. ”

“ THE history of human progress presents no feature more interesting yet more commonly overlooked and misrepresented 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. ”

“ The lamb, almost immediately after its birth, follows its mother, accommodating the action of its muscles to the form of the ground. The chick just emerged from the shell picks up a minute insect, directing its beak with the greatest accuracy. Even the human infant seeks the breast and exerts its muscles in sucking almost as soon as it is born. ”

“ 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 personages whose love for research has cost them health and even life itself. ”

“ Had they done so they would have seen that such nestlings, instead of being able to "direct the beak with the greatest accuracy," can merely sit in the nest with open mouth waiting to be fed! A young canary, so far from being able to stand or walk, seldom fails to break its legs if startled and induced by fright to attempt leaving the nest. Such facts as these are known to every bird-fancier—nay, we might say to every rustic youth, who has ever robbed a nest and has attempted to bring up the callow young by hand. ”

“ But surely every man in Europe, though he may never have met with infant apes, must have seen how kittens, when beginning to walk, totter, stagger, and roll over, just like young children; how they pat at, and endeavor to touch, objects beyond their reach ”

“ We strongly suspect that the Church of Rome will be the first religious body to admit that the doctrines of evolution and of the high antiquity of the human race are not necessarily opposed to the teachings of the Scriptures. ”

“ Are they all able, as soon as hatched, to direct the beak with perfect accuracy, to select suitable nourishment, and to flutter about awaiting merely the growth of their wing-feathers before they can take flight? ”

“ The late Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, the London University, and the British Association, have each in turn passed through a tempest of abuse. The last-mentioned body, indeed, is still regularly "preached at" in every town which it visits. ”

“ Young birds can not fly as soon as they are hatched, because they have no wing-feathers; but, as soon as these are developed, and even before they are perfectly strong, they use their wings, fly, and quit the nest without any education from their parents." [3]
Very similar assertions are found in a laborious attempt made by the late Professor Whewell [4] to set aside the palpable fact that man, like every other animal, has an instinctive—or we might perhaps better say an hereditary—knowledge of the functions of his voluntary organs. ”

“ We find physicists like Richmann, chemists like Gehlen, Mansfield, Chapman, who have been struck dead while engaged in some hazardous experiment. We read of naturalists like Marcgrave and the elder Wallace, geographers, navigators, and travelers, such as Cook, La Perouse, Franklin, Livingstone, meteorologists like Crocé-Spinelli, who in their ardor for discovery have succumbed to ungenial climates, to the attacks of savages, to hunger, tempest, or to an irrespirable atmosphere. ”

“ More recently the freedom of science seems to be recognized in France, Germany, and even in Italy. We must not, however, forget that the Roman Church has never formally retracted her claim to adjudicate upon scientific truth. ”

“ Surely, therefore, the helplessness of the human infant can no longer be regarded as an exceptional phenomenon, and all conclusions based upon it by rhetoricians may be safely dismissed to dream-land, whence they came.—Journal of Science.
↑ "Lessons from Nature." ↑ To speak of acquiring a power by habit is scarcely rational. The power must exist before the habit can be formed. ”

“ Yet this strange error has actually been committed, not merely by men of words, like Addison, Paley, and Whewell—which is surely sad enough—but even by a man of things, like Sir Humphry Davy. The great chemist attempts to show that man does not use his limbs instinctively, like other animals. Says he:
"Man is so constituted that his muscles acquire their power by habit, [2] but in the colt and the chicken the limbs are formed with the power of motion, and these animals walk as soon as they have quitted the womb or the egg. ”

“ ONE of the attempts which have been made to establish the existence of a "great gulf" between man and beast may be pronounced exceptionally curious as an instance alike of careless and defective observation and of rash conclusions. That by such arguments men of eminence could really mislead themselves, and succeed for a length of time in misleading the outside public, is deeply humiliating. ”

“ If the child can not judge of the position and distance of objects, till it has by considerable practice learned to refer its sensations to appropriate "ideas," the same must be said of the young Mias. ”

“ They are not known, it appears, to men of erudition. It was, we think, the Prime Minister of Gustavus Adolphus, of Sweden, who said to his son, "Thou knowest not with how little wisdom the world is governed." ”

“ But, who could have imagined that the said facts would be, without further inquiry, at once seized hold of as a theme for stilted declamation, and be elevated to the rank of a fundamental distinction between man and the lower animals? ”

“ 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 discoverers not a few have been clearly and decidedly persecuted ”

“ Had they been really actuated by a scientific spirit, they would have felt it their bounden duty to ascertain whether all the lower animals were, in contrast to man, able to use their limbs soon after their birth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was urged that experimental philosophy was likely to lead to the overthrow of Christianity, and even to atheism. Among these writers a prominent place belongs to Henry Stubbs, of Warwick, and the Rev. Richard Cross, of Somerset, the latter of whom charged the Fellows of the Royal Society with "undermining the universities, destroying Protestantism, and introducing Popery"! ”