artments and little doors, were to be more like jails than refuges.
Some of the worst hospitals ever built in modern history had been
erected in Professor Draper's own lifetime. Some of the most beautiful
hospitals in the world had been erected in Italy and other countries
during the later medieval and Renaissance period, before the
Reformation, under religious influence,--but Professor Draper knows
nothing of them. The history of hospitals here in America is as
largely religious as it was in other countries and times.

{510}

Professor Draper seems to have known nothing of the fine hospitals and
foundling institutions and the great surgery of the later Middle Ages,
but he thinks he knows enough to be quite sure that any such
developments were impossible. Certain incidents that he accepts as
historical showed him what fools the Popes and all near them were in
matters of science, and, therefore, it would be quite impossible that
they could have any sympathy for scientific progress and quite easy to
understand their opposition. It is from conclusions and assumptions in
history that we need to be saved. A hundred years ago it used to be
said with pride that if you gave a zoologist a single bone he could
reconstruct the entire animal for you. We know that such
reconstruction worked much harm to science. Many of the animals
possess structures that even important portions of their anatomy in
other parts of the body would give no hint of. History that is built
up from single incidents is likely to be even more false because human
conduct is much more complex than any animal body. What could be
expected of the zoologist's reconstruction, however, if the original
bone handed to him was factitious, what a curious result might be
expected from his deduced skeleton.

This is what happened with Professor Draper's reconstruction of
history from certain incidents that he accepted. The story of the
Papal Bull against Halley's comet seemed enough to him to make it
quite clear that for centuries the Popes must have been buried in the
profoundest ignorance of science,--but then the story of the Papal
Bull against Halley's comet is all a modern invention. Draper said:
"But when Halley's comet came in 1456 so tremendous was its apparition
that it was necessary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised
and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of
space terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III, and did