communication with the Protestant savants of Switzerland and Germany,
among whom the knowledge of nature was progressing as it never had
progressed before. For--it is a fact always to be remembered--it was
only in the free air of Protestant countries the natural sciences could
grow and thrive. They sprung up, indeed, in Italy after the restoration
of Greek literature in the fifteenth century; but they withered there
again only too soon under the blighting upas shade of superstition.
Transplanted to the free air of Switzerland, of Germany, of Britain, and
of Montpellier, then half Protestant, they developed rapidly and surely,
simply because the air was free; to be checked again in France by the
return of superstition with despotism super-added, until the eve of the
great French Revolution.

So Rondelet had been for some years Protestant. He had hidden in his
house for a long while a monk who had left his monastery. He had himself
written theological treatises: but when his Bishop Pellicier was
imprisoned on a charge of heresy, Rondelet burnt his manuscripts, and
kept his opinions to himself. Still he was a suspected heretic, at last
seemingly a notorious one; for only the year before his death, going to
visit patients at Perpignan, he was waylaid by the Spaniards, and had to
get home through bypasses of the Pyrenees, to avoid being thrown into the
Inquisition.

And those were times in which it was necessary for a man to be careful,
unless he had made up his mind to be burned. For more than thirty years
of Rondelet's life the burning had gone on in his neighbourhood;
intermittently it is true: the spasms of superstitious fury being
succeeded, one may charitably hope, by pity and remorse: but still the
burnings had gone on. The Benedictine monk of St. Maur, who writes the
history of Languedoc, says, quite _en passant_, how some one was burnt at
Toulouse in 1553, luckily only in effigy, for he had escaped to Geneva:
but he adds, "next year they burned several heretics," it being not worth
while to mention their names. In 1556 they burned alive at Toulouse Jean
Escalle, a poor Franciscan monk, who had found his order intolerable;
while one Pierre de Lavaur, who dared preach Calvinism in the streets of
Nismes, was hanged and burnt. So had the score of judicial murders been
increasing year by year, till it had to be, as all evil scores have to be
in this world, paid off with interest, and paid off especially against