James J. Walsh

“ This scientist was Nicholas Stensen, the discoverer of the duct of the parotid gland, which conducts saliva into the mouth, and the founder, in the truest sense of the word, of the modern science of geology. Stensen's discovery of the duct which has since borne his name was due to no mere accident; for he was one of the really great anatomists of all time, and one distinguished particularly for his powers of original observation and investigation. ”

“ As love is the life of the heart, so is the endeavor after knowledge and truth the life of the mind. In the midst of the movements of time, of the daily work of life, of its perplexities and contradictions, we should lift our gaze fearlessly to the clear vault of heaven and seek ever to obtain a firmer grasp of, and keener insight into, the origin of all goodness and duty, the capacities of our own hearts and minds, {22} the intellectual fruits of mankind throughout the centuries, and the wondrous works of nature around us ”

“ It is no wonder that his contemporaries spoke of him as the Doctor centum artium--the teacher of a hundred arts--for there was practically no branch of scientific knowledge in his time in which he was not expert. Scientific visitors to Rome always considered it one of the privileges of their stay in the papal city to have the opportunity to meet Father Kircher, and it was thought a very great honor to be shown through his museum by himself.
Of course, it is difficult for present-day scientists to imagine a man exhausting the whole round of science in this way. ”

“ A common impression prevails that there is serious, if not invincible, opposition between science and religion. This persuasion has been minimized to a great degree in recent years, and yet sufficient of it remains to make a great many people think that, if there is not entire incompatibility between science and religion, there is at least such a diversity of purposes and aims in these two great realms of human thought that those who cultivate one field are not able to appreciate the labors of those who occupy themselves in the other. ”

“ To have the two distinctions, then, of a leader in anatomy and a founder in geology, stamps him as one of the supreme scientific geniuses of all time, a man not only of a fruitfully inquiring disposition of mind, but also one who possessed a very definite realization of how important for the cause of scientific truth is the necessity of testing all ideas with regard to things physical, by actual observations of nature and by drawing conclusions not wider than the observed facts. ”

“ There is perhaps no better example in all the world of the simplicity of true genius nor any better example of how sublimely religious may be the soul that has far transcended the bounds of the scientific knowledge of its own day.
The greatness of Copernicus's life-work can best be realized from the extent to which he surpassed even well-known contemporaries in astronomy and from his practical anticipation of the opinions of some of his greatest successors. ”

“ It breathes the spirit of the loftiest science in its clear-eyed vision of the nature of the problem he had to solve, the factors which make up the problem, and the experimental observations necessary to elucidate it. ”

“ Even Tycho Brahe, important though he is in the history of astronomical science, taught many years after Copernicus's death the doctrine that the earth is the center of the universe. Newton had in Copernicus a precursor who divined the theory of universal gravitation; and even Kepler's great laws, especially the elliptical form of the orbits of the planets, are at least hinted at in Copernicus's writings. He is certainly one of the most original geniuses of all times ”

“ As we begin the twentieth century, the most interesting question in biology is undoubtedly that of heredity. Just at the dawn of the century three distinguished scientists, working in different countries, rediscovered a law with regard to heredity which promises to be even more important for the science of biology in the twentieth century than was Lamarck's work for the nineteenth century. ”

“ The second half of the fifteenth century, the beginning of the Renaissance in Germany as well as Italy, is that wonderful time in history when somehow men's eyes were opened to see farther and their minds broadened to gather in more of the truth of {57} man's relation to the universe, than had ever before been the case in all the centuries of human existence, or than has ever been possible even in these more modern centuries, though supposedly we are the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time. ”

“ The ideas of Nicholas of Cusa with regard to knowledge and the liberty of judgment in things not matters of faith can be very well appreciated from some of his expressions. "To know and to think," he says in one passage, "to see the truth with the eye of the mind is always a joy. The older a man grows, the greater is the pleasure it affords him; and the more he devotes himself to the search after truth, the stronger grows his desire of possessing it. ”

“ Indeed, it is usually accepted as a truth that to follow science with assiduity is practically sure to lead to unorthodoxy in religion. This is supposed to be especially true if the acquisition of scientific knowledge is pursued along lines that involve original research and new investigation. Somehow, it is thought that any one who has a mind free enough from the influence of prejudice and tradition to become an original thinker or investigator, is inevitably prone to abandon the old orthodox lines of thought in respect to religion. ”

“ He discusses the question of deductive and inductive science, and considers that even those who depend on experience will not infrequently be found in error, because their conclusions are wider than their premises, and because it only too often happens that they admit principles as true for which they have no sure evidence. Stensen considered it important, therefore, not to hurry on in the explanation of things, but, so far as possible, to cling to old-time principles that had been universally accepted, since nearly always these would be found to contain fruitful germs of truth. ”

“ COPERNICUS AND HIS TIMES.
{13}
All the vast and most progressive systems that human wisdom has brought forth as substitutes for religion, have never succeeded in interesting any but the learned, the ambitious, or at most the prosperous and happy. But the great majority of mankind can never come under these categories. The great majority of men are suffering, and suffering from moral as well as physical evils. Man's first bread is grief, and his first want is consolation. ”

“ After centuries of neglect, his country at one bound found itself in the first rank in this department of natural science. In Haüy's book are united in the highest degree two qualities which are seldom associated. One of these is that it was founded on an original discovery which had sprung entirely from the genius of its author; and the other is that this discovery is pursued and developed with almost unheard-of persistence down even to the least important mineral variety. Everything in the work is great, both as regards conception and detail. It is as complete as the theory it announces. ”

“ All of this work was accomplished within the half century after Galileo's trial, for Father Kircher died in 1680, at the age of seventy-eight, having lived, as so many of the great scientists have done, a long life in the midst of the most persistent activity. Kircher, more than perhaps any other, can be said to be the founder of modern natural science. Before any one else, in a practical way, he realized the necessity for the collection of an immense amount of data, if science was to be founded on the broad, firm foundation of observed truth. ”

“ It is of the genius of the man that he should have been able to succeed in seeing the problem in simple terms while it is apparently so complex, and thus obtain results that are as far-reaching as the problem they solve is basic in its character.
Bateson, in his work Mendel's Principles of Heredity, says:--
It may seem surprising that a work of such importance should so long have failed to find recognition and to become current in the world of science. It is true that the Journal in which it appeared is scarce, but this circumstance has seldom long delayed general recognition. ”

“ Anything, however, of real importance in science took but a very short time to travel from one country to another in Europe in the seventeenth century, and the fact that scientific men generally used Latin as a common language made the spread of discoveries and speculations much easier even than at the present time. Our increased means of communication have really only served to allow sensational announcements of a progress in science--which is usually no progress at all--to be spread quite as effectually in modern times as were real advances in the older days. ”

“ Old species are not slowly changed into new ones, but a shaking up of the old organization takes place and the egg brings forth a new species. It is like the turning of the kaleidoscope, a slight shift and the new figure suddenly appears. It needs no great penetration to see that this point of view is entirely different from the conception of the formation of new species by accumulating individual variations, until they are carried so far that the new form may be called a new species. ”

“ He considers that recent demonstrations of the mathematical truth of Mendel's Law absolutely confirm Mendel's original observations, and the movement thus initiated, in Professor Morgan's eyes, gives the final coup de grace to the theory of natural selection. "If," he says, "we reject Darwin's theory of natural selection as an explanation of evolution, we have at least a new and promising outlook in another direction and are in a position to answer the oft-heard but unscientific query of those who must cling to some dogma: if you reject Darwin, what better have you to offer?" ”

“ This was the first time that any one had ever realized exactly the nature of the problems presented in, their naked simplicity. "To see a problem well is more than half to solve it," and this proved to be the case with Mendel's straightforward vision of the nature of the experiments required for advance in our knowledge of heredity. ”

“ Of course, a still worthier change of mind has come over the attitude of educators because of the growing sense of appreciation for the wonderful work of the monks of the Middle Ages, and even of those centuries that are supposed to show least of the influence of these groups of men who, forgetting material progress, devoted themselves to the preservation and the cultivation of the things of the spirit. The impression that would consider the pre-Reformation monks in Germany as unworthy of their high calling in the great mass is almost entirely without foundation. ”

“ Their lives illustrate the essential difference there is between theory and observation in science. The theorizer reaches conclusions that are popular as a rule in his own generation, and receives the honor due to a progressive scientist; the observer usually has his announcements of what he has actually seen scouted by those who are engaged in the same studies, and it is only succeeding generations who appreciate how much he really accomplished. ”

“ At the beginning of the twentieth century, with some of the supposed foundations of modern chemistry crumbling to pieces under the influences of the peculiarly active light thrown upon older chemical theories by the discovery of radium and the radio-active elements generally, there is a reawakening of interest in some of the old-time chemical observers whose work used to be laughed at as so unscientific and whose theory of the transmutation of elements into one another was considered so absurd. ”

“ There is, perhaps, no life in all the history of science which shows so clearly how absolutely untrue is the declaration so often made, that there is essential opposition between the intellectual disposition of the inquiring scientist and those other mental qualities which are necessary to enable the Christian to bow humbly before the mysteries of religion, acknowledge all that is beyond understanding in what has been revealed, and observe faithfully all the duties that flow from such belief. ”

“ Leibnitz considered that it took more than a century for geological science to reach the point at which it had been left by Steno's work, and which he had reached at a single bound. There is scarcely a single modern geologist interested at all in the history of the science who has not paid a worthy tribute to Steno's great basic discoveries in the science. It was not a matter for surprise, then, that the International Congress of Geologists which met at Bologna in 1881 assembled at his tomb in Florence in order to do him honor, after the regular sessions of the Congress had closed. ”

“ With regard to the composition of the various strata of the earth, the father of geology {156} considered that if in a layer of rock all the portions are of the same kind there is no reason to deny that such a layer came into existence at the time of creation, when the whole surface of the earth was covered with fluid. If, however, in any one stratum portions of another stratum are found, or if the remains of plants or animals occur, there is no doubt that such a stratum had not its origin at the time of creation, but came into existence later. ”

“ While we do not know the absolute date of either the birth or the death of Basil Valentine and are not sure even of the exact period in which he lived and did his work, we are sure that a great original observer about the time of the invention of printing studied mercury and sulphur and various salts, and above all, introduced antimony to the notice of the scientific world, and especially to the favor of practitioners of medicine. His book, "The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony," is full of conclusions not quite justified by his premises nor by his observations. ”

“ It is very evident that a man of whose work so many authorities are agreed that it is the beginning of a new era in biology, and especially in that most interesting of all questions, heredity, must be worthy of close acquaintance. Hence the present sketch of his career and personality, as far as they are ascertainable, for his modesty, and the failure of the world to recognize his worth in his lifetime, have unfortunately deprived us of many details that would have been precious. ”

“ Joseph Benedict Sinibaldus, who was the Professor of the Practice of Medicine in the Roman University at the time, says that "Father Kircher's book not only contains an excellent resume of all that is known about the pest or plague, but also as many valuable hints and suggestions on the origin and spread of the disease, which had never before been made." He considers it a very wonderful thing that a non-medical man should have been able to place himself so thoroughly in touch with the present state of medicine in respect to this disease and then point out the conditions of future progress. ”