used in both cases. One {121} might
reasonably have expected that the ingenuity of writers would have
enabled them to find another basis for the story on the second
occasion. Still more might it have been expected that when the error
with regard to the tenor of the Papal document was pointed out to
them, a different form of response would be made in the latter
instance. The whole subject indicates a dearth of originality that
would be amusing if it were on a less serious matter, and does very
little credit either to those who are responsible for the first draft
of the story, but still less to those who have swallowed it so readily
and given it currency.

The story of the Supposed Papal Prohibition of Chemistry was
characteristically told by William J. Cruikshank, M. D., of Brooklyn,
New York, in an address bearing the title, "Some Relations of the
Church and Scientific Progress," published in The Medical Library and
Historical Journal of Brooklyn for July, 1905. The writer called
emphatic attention to the fact that chemistry, during the Middle Ages,
had come under the particular ban of the ecclesiastical authorities,
who effectually prevented its cultivation or development. "The
chemist," Dr. Cruikshank says, "was called a miscreant, a sorcerer,
and was feared because of his supposed partnership with the devil. He
was denounced by Pope and priest and was persecuted to the full extent
of Papal power. Pope John XXII. was especially energetic in this
direction, and in the year 1317 A.D., issued a bull calling on all
rulers, secular and ecclesiastical, to hunt down the miscreants who
were afflicting the faithful, and he thereupon increased the power of
the Inquisition in various parts of Europe for this purpose."

At the suggestion of the editor of the Medical Library {122} and
Historical Journal, I answered these assertions of Dr. Cruikshank,
pointing out that the Papal document which he mentioned had no such
purport as he declared, and that the history of chemistry or alchemy
presented no such break as his assertions would demand. Dr. Cruikshank
immediately appealed by letter to his authority on the subject, whose
words, in the History of the Warfare of Theology with Science in
Christendom, though I did not realize it at the time, he had repeated
almost literally. In his chapter on From Magic to Chemistry and
Physics, Dr. Andrew D. White says: "In 1317, Pope John XXII. issued
his bull _Spondent pariter,_ levelled at th