intellectual operations of ordinary
men, anticipations of many of the discoveries of the after-time. There
is scarcely a modern science he did not touch upon, and nothing that
he touched did he fail to illuminate. His magnificent collections in
the museum of the Roman College demonstrate very well his extremely
wide interests in all scientific matters.

The history of Father Kircher's career furnishes perhaps the best
possible refutation of the oft-repeated slander that Jesuit education
was narrow and was so founded upon and rooted in authority that
original research and investigation, in scientific matters
particularly, were impossible, and that it utterly failed to encourage
new discoveries of any kind. As a matter of fact, Kircher was not only
not hampered in his work by his superiors or by the ecclesiastical
authorities, but the respect in which he was held at Rome enabled him
to use the influence of the Church and of great churchmen all over the
world, with the best possible effect, for the assembling at the Roman
College of objects of the most various kinds, illustrating especially
the modern sciences of archeology, ethnology, and paleontology,
besides Egyptian and Assyrian history.

Athanasius Kircher was born 2 May, 1602, at Geisa, near Fulda, in
South Germany. He was educated at the Jesuit College of Fulda, and at
{119} the early age of sixteen, having completed his college course,
entered the Jesuit novitiate at Mainz. After his novitiate he
continued his philosophical and classical studies at Paderborn and
completed his years of scholastic teaching in various cities of South
Germany--Munster, Cologne, and Coblenz--finally finishing his
education by theological studies at Cologne and Mainz.

Toward the end of the third decade of the seventeenth century he
became Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at Wuerzburg. Here his
interest in Oriental languages began, and he established a special
course in this subject at the University of Wuerzburg. During the
Thirty Years' War, however, the invasion of Germany very seriously
disturbed university work, and finally in 1631 Father Kircher was sent
by his superiors to Avignon in South France, where he continued his
teaching some four years, attracting no little attention by his wide
interest in many sciences and by various scientific works that showed
him to be a man of very broad genius.

In 1635, through the influence of Cardinal Barberini, he was summoned
to Ro