however, forget that the Roman Church has never formally retracted her claim to adjudicate upon scientific truth. An "Index" of proscribed books is still issued, and within the present century Pope Gregory, in an encyclical letter, characterized the freedom of the press as "deterrima ilia ac nunquam satis execranda et detestabilis libertas artis literariæ."
In Britain the anti-scientific spirit still lingers more decidedly than elsewhere. Its chief lurking-places are sometimes said to be among the clergy and country gentlemen. We are not sure that this view is correct. Passing through a street in one of our northern manufacturing towns, the present writer once heard a demagogue addressing a crowd on something which he contended must be put down. That something was science! We are bound to say that his listeners gave every mark of sympathy and approval. The manner in which inventors have often been treated in different parts of England seems to show that such feelings are widely spread. The country which first wins over her working-classes to favor invention and to become themselves inventors will command the industrial supremacy of the world. America is fast attaining this object by her patent system, which enables even a poor man to secure his property in an invention. Our statesmen, Whig and Tory alike, can scarcely be restrained from laying additional difficulties in the way of patent right.
If we now, summing up, seek to know who have been the chief persecutors of science, we shall find the conventional answers too narrow. Many persons have laid the chief blame upon Roman Catholicism. It is very questionable, however, whether other churches, if they had been as widely spread, and had possessed as great civil power and authority, might not have equaled or even exceeded Rome. The religious bodies of Britain, established or dissenting, have certainly been unsurpassed in the virulence of their attacks upon geology and upon the new natural history. We strongly suspect that the Church of Rome will be the first religious body to admit that the doctrines of evolution and of the high antiquity of the human race are not necessarily opposed to the teachings of the Scriptures. So-called infidels of various grades of opinion have contended that Christianity in any and every form is the persecutor of science. We would submit, on the contrary, that discovery was persecuted in heathen and democratic Athens, where all the influence of Pericles barely sufficed to save his friend the philosopher Anaxagoras from a worse fate than banishment. Nay, we may even venture to predict that modern "free-thought" will before long appear as the adversary of Science, and, if sufficiently powerful, as her persecutor.
The jealousy of the industrial classes we have already glanced at.
Lest we should feel tempted to ridicule the suicidal folly of the working-classes in thus seeking to repress improvement, let us remember that Science is sometimes her own persecutor. Men who have
