stration: RENE JUST HAUeY]

{169}

VII.

ABBE HAUeY, [Footnote 13] FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY

[Footnote 13: Pronounced a-ue (Century Dictionary), Nearly
Represented By _ah-we_.]

Modern learning is gradually losing something of the self-complacency
that characterized it in so constantly harboring the thought that the
most important discoveries in physical science came in the nineteenth
century. A more general attention to critical history has led to the
realization that many of the primal discoveries whose importance made
the development of modern science possible, came in earlier centuries,
though their full significance was not then fully appreciated. The
foundations of most of our modern sciences were, indeed, laid in the
eighteenth century, but some of them came much earlier. It is genius
alone that is able to break away from established traditions of
knowledge, and, stepping across the boundary into the unknown, blaze a
path along which it will be easy for subsequent workers to follow.
Only in recent years has the due meed of appreciation for these great
pioneers become part of the precious traditions of scientific
knowledge.

We have seen that clergymen were great original investigators in
science in the older times and we shall find, though it may be a
source of {170} astonishment to most people that even our modern
science has had some supreme original workers, during the last two
centuries, in the ranks of the Catholic clergy.

The eighteenth century was not behind the seventeenth in original
contributions made to science by clergymen. About the middle of the
century, a Premonstratensian monk, Procopius Dirwisch by name, of the
little town of Prenditz in Bohemia, demonstrated the identity of
electrical phenomena with lightning, thus anticipating the work of our
own Franklin. Dirwisch dared to set up a lightning-conductor, by which
during thunderstorms he obtained sparks from clouds, and also learned
to appreciate the danger involved in this experiment. When, in 1751,
he printed his article on this subject, he pointed out this danger.
His warning, however, was not always heeded, and at least one
subsequent experimenter was struck dead by a charge of electricity.

Just at the junction of the last two centuries, Father Piazzi enriched
the realm of science by one of the most important of modern
discoveries in astronomy. On the night of 31 December, 1800--1
January, 1801, he discovered the little pl