sorcery. The small
but mighty nation, which had emancipated itself from the tyranny of
Philip and of the Holy Inquisition, was foremost to shake off the fetters
of superstition. Out of Holland came the first voice to rebuke one of the
hideous delusions of the age. While grave magistrates and sages of other
lands were exorcising the devil by murdering his supposed victims, John
Wier, a physician of Grave, boldly denounced the demon which had taken
possession, not of the wizards, but of the judges.

The age was lunatic and sick, and it was fitting that the race which had
done so much for the physical and intellectual emancipation of the world,
should have been the first to apply a remedy for this monstrous madness.
Englishmen and their descendants were drowning and hanging witches in New
England, long after John Wier had rebuked and denounced the belief in
witchcraft.

It was a Zeelander, too; who placed the instrument in the hand of Galileo
by which that daring genius traced the movements of the universe, and
who, by another wondrous invention, enabled future discoverers to study
the infinite life which lies all around us, hidden not by its remoteness
but it's minuteness. Zacharias Jansens of Middelburg, in 1590, invented
both the telescope and the microscope.

The wonder-man of Alkmaar, Cornelius Drebbel, who performed such
astounding feats for the amusement of Rudolph of Germany and James of
Britain, is also supposed to have invented the thermometer and the
barometer. But this claim has been disputed. The inventions of Jansens
are proved.

Willebrod Snellius, mathematical professor of Leyden, introduced the true
method of measuring the degrees of longitude and latitude, and Huygens,
who had seen his manuscripts, asserted that Snellius had invented, before
Descartes, the doctrine of refraction.

But it was especially to that noble band of heroes and martyrs, the great
navigators and geographical discoverers of the republic, that science is
above all indebted.

Nothing is more sublime in human story than the endurance and audacity
with which those pioneers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
confronted the nameless horrors of either pole, in the interests of
commerce, and for the direct purpose of enlarging the bounds of the human
intellect.

The achievements, the sufferings, and the triumphs of Barendz and Cordes,
Heemskerk, Van der Hagen, and many others, have been slightly indicated
in these pages. The