monstrative parts of his various books on chemistry, physics, music,
magnetism, and mechanics, as well as acoustics and optics. This formed
the groundwork of most text-books of science for a full century
afterwards. Indeed, until the beginning of the distinctly modern
science of chemistry with the discoveries of Priestley and Lavoisier,
there was to be little added of serious import in science.

Perhaps the most commendable feature of Father Kircher's books is the
fact that he himself seems never to have considered that he had {125}
exhausted a subject. The first work he published was on magnetism.
Some twelve years later he returned to the subject, and wrote a more
extensive work, containing many improvements over the first volume.
The same thing is true of his studies in sound. In 1650, when not
quite fifty years of age, he issued his "Musurgia Universalis," a
sub-title of which stated that it contains the whole doctrine of sound
and the practical and theoretical philosophy of music. A little over
twenty years later, however, he published the "Phonurgia Nova," the
sub-title of which showed that it was mainly concerned with the
experimental demonstration of various truths in acoustics and with the
development of the doctrine he had originally stated in the
"Musurgia."

It is no wonder that his contemporaries spoke of him as the _Doctor
centum artium_--the teacher of a hundred arts--for there was
practically no branch of scientific knowledge in his time in which he
was not expert. Scientific visitors to Rome always considered it one
of the privileges of their stay in the papal city to have the
opportunity to meet Father Kircher, and it was thought a very great
honor to be shown through his museum by himself.

Of course, it is difficult for present-day scientists to imagine a man
exhausting the whole round of science in this way. Many who have read
but little more than the titles of Father Kircher's many books are
accordingly prone to speak of him as a mine of information, but
without any {126} proper critical judgment. He has succeeded,
according to them, in heaping together an immense amount of
information, but it is of the most disparate value. There is no doubt
that he took account of many things in science that are manifestly
absurd. Astrology, for instance, had not, in his time, gone out of
fashion entirely, and he refers many events in men's lives to the
influence of the stars. He even made rules for astrologic