d
which yet continues to be one of the noteworthy collections.

During the decade in which the condemnation of Galileo and the
invitation of Father Kircher to Rome took place, there was born, at
{138} Copenhagen, a man whose career of distinction in science was to
prove even more effectively than that of Kircher, if possible, that
there was no opposition in ecclesiastical circles in Italy, during
this century, to the development of natural science even in
departments in respect to which the Church has, over and over again,
been said to be specially intolerant. This scientist was Nicholas
Stensen, the discoverer of the duct of the parotid gland, which
conducts saliva into the mouth, and the founder, in the truest sense
of the word, of the modern science of geology. Stensen's discovery of
the duct which has since borne his name was due to no mere accident;
for he was one of the really great anatomists of all time, and one
distinguished particularly for his powers of original observation and
investigation. To have the two distinctions, then, of a leader in
anatomy and a founder in geology, stamps him as one of the supreme
scientific geniuses of all time, a man not only of a fruitfully
inquiring disposition of mind, but also one who possessed a very
definite realization of how important for the cause of scientific
truth is the necessity of testing all ideas with regard to things
physical, by actual observations of nature and by drawing conclusions
not wider than the observed facts.

Notwithstanding this characteristically scientific temper of mind,
which, according to most modern ideas, at least, would seem to be sure
to lead him away from religious truth, Stensen at the {139} very
height of his career as a scientist, while studying anatomy and
geology in Italy, became a convert from Lutheranism, in which he had
been born, to Catholicity, and thereafter made it one of the prime
objects of his life to bring as many others as possible of the
separated brethren into the fold of the Church. When he accepted the
professorship of anatomy at the University of Copenhagen, it was with
the definite idea that he might be able to use the influence of his
position to make people realize how much of religious truth there was
in the old Church from which they had been separated in the preceding
century. After a time, however, his zeal led him to resign his
position, and ask to be made a priest, in order that he might be able
more effec