f the relations between science and religion. There
has scarcely been a single important advance in the history of applied
science especially, that has not brought down upon the devoted head of
the discoverer, for a time at least, the ill-will of his own
generation. Take the case of medicine, for instance. Vesalius was
persecuted, but not by the ecclesiastical authorities. The bitter
opposition to him and to his work came from his colleagues in
medicine, who thought that he was departing from the teaching of
Galen, and considered that a cardinal medical heresy not to be
forgiven. Harvey, the famous discoverer of the circulation of the
blood, lost much of his lucrative medical practice after the
publication of his discovery, because his medical contemporaries
thought the notion of the heart pumping blood through the arteries to
be so foolish that they refused to {7} admit that it could come from a
man of common sense, much less from a scientific physician. Nor need
it be thought that this spirit of opposition to novelty existed only
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost in our own time
Semmelweis, who first taught the necessity for extreme cleanliness in
obstetrical work, met with so much opposition in the introduction of
the precautions he considered necessary that he was finally driven
insane. His methods reduced the mortality in the great lying-in
hospitals of Europe from nearly ten per cent for such cases down to
less than one per cent, thus saving many thousands of lives every
year.

Despite this very natural tendency to decry the value of new
discoveries in science and the opposition they aroused, it will be
found that the lives of these clergymen scientists show us that they
met with much more sympathy in their work than was usually accorded to
original investigators in science in other paths in life. This is so
different from the ordinary impression in the matter that it seems
worth while calling it to particular attention. While we have selected
lives of certain of the great leaders in science, we would not wish it
to be understood that these are the only ones among the clergymen of
the last four centuries who deserve an honorable place high up in the
roll of successful scientific investigators. Only those are taken who
illustrate activity in sciences that are supposed to have been
especially forbidden to clergymen. It {8} has been said over and over
again, for instance, that there was distinct ecc