by the Roman authorities, but only until it should be corrected. This
assured protection to the principal part of the work, and the warning
issued by the Roman Congregation in the year 1820 particularizes the
details that had to be corrected. It is interesting to note that
whenever Copernicus is spoken of in this Monitum it is always in
flattering terms as a "noble astrologer"--the word astrologer having
at that time no unworthy meaning. The whole work is praised and its
scientific quality acknowledged.
The passages requiring correction were not many. In the first book, at
the beginning of the {36} fifth chapter, Copernicus made the
declaration that "the immobility of the earth was not a decided
question, but was still open to discussion." In place of these words
it was suggested that the following should be inserted: "In order to
explain the apparent motions of the celestial bodies, it is a matter
of indifference whether we admit that the earth occupies a place in
the middle of the heavens or not."
In the eighth chapter of the first book, Copernicus said: "Why, then,
this repugnance to concede to our globe its own movement as natural to
it as is its spherical form? Why prefer to make the whole heavens
revolve around it, with the great danger of disturbance that would
result, instead of explaining all these apparent movements of the
heavenly bodies by the real rotation of the earth, according to the
words of AEneas, 'We are carried from the port, and the land and the
cities recede'?" This passage was to be modified as follows: "Why not,
then, admit a certain mobility of the earth corresponding to its form,
since the whole universe of which we know the bounds is moved,
producing appearances which recall to the mind the well-known saying
of AEneas in Virgil, 'The land and the cities recede'?"
Toward the end of the same chapter Copernicus, continuing the same
train of thought, says: "I do not fear to add that it is incomparably
more unreasonable to make the immense vault of the heavens revolve
than to admit the {37} revolution of our little terrestrial globe."
This passage was to be modified as follows: "In one case as well as in
the other--that is, whether we admit the rotation of the earth or that
of the heavenly spheres--we encounter the same difficulties."
The ninth chapter of the first book begins with these words: "There
being no difficulty in admitting, then, the mobility of the earth, let
us proceed to see whether it has one or a number of movements, and
whether, therefore, our earth is a simple planet like the other
planets." The following words were to be substituted: "Supposing,
then, that the earth does move, it is necessary to examine whether
this movement is multiple or not."
Toward the middle of the tenth chapter Copernicus declares: "I do not
hesitate to defend the proposition that the earth, accompanied by the
moon, moves around the sun;" while the wording of this proposition had
to be changed so as to substitute the term "admit" for "defend." The
title of the eleventh chapter, "Demonstration of the Triple Movement
of the Earth," was modified to read as follows: "The Hypothesis of the
Triple Movement of the Earth, and the Reasons Therefor." The title of
the twentieth chapter of the fourth book originally read: "On the Size
of the Three Stars [_Sidera_], the sun, the moon, and the earth." The
word "stars" was removed from this title, the earth not being
considered as a star. The concluding words of {38} the tenth chapter
of the first book, "So great is the magnificent work of the Omnipotent
Artificer," had to be cancelled, because they expressed an assurance
of the truth of his system not warranted by knowledge. With these few
unimportant changes, any one might read and study Copernicus's work
with perfect freedom.
Traditions to the contrary notwithstanding, Galileo, because of the
friendship and encouragement of the churchmen in Italy, had been
placed in conditions eminently suited for study and investigation.
Several popes and a number of prominent ecclesiastics were his
constant friends and patrons. The perpetual secretary of the Paris
Academy of Sciences, M. Bertrand, himself a great mathematician and
historian, declares that the long life of Galileo was one of the most
enviable that is recorded in the history of science. "The tale of his
misfortunes has confirmed the triumph of the truth for which he
suffered. Let us tell the whole truth. This great lesson was learned
without any profound sorrow to Galileo; and his long life, considered
as a whole, was one of the most serene and enviable in the history of
science."
Copernicus, like Galileo, had clerical friends to thank for an
environment that proved the greatest possible aid to his scientific
work. His position as Canon of the Cathedral of Frauenburg provided
him with learned leisure, while his clerical friends took just enough
interest in his investigations and the preliminary {39} announcements
of his discoveries to make his pursuit of astronomical studies to some
definite conclusion a worthy aim in life. It was this assistance that
enabled him to publish his book eventually and bring his great theory
before the world.
Copernicus, far from having any leanings toward the so-called "reform"
movement (as has often been asserted), was evidently a staunch
supporter of his friend and patron Bishop Maurice Ferber, of Ermland,
who kept his see loyal to Rome at a time when the secularization of
the Teutonic order and the falling away of many bishops all around him
make his position as a faithful son of the Church and that of his
diocese noteworthy in the history of that time and place. It may well
be said that under less favorable conditions Copernicus's work might
never have been finished. As it was, his book met with great
opposition from the Reformers, but remained absolutely acceptable even
to the most rigorous churchmen until Galileo's unfortunate insistence
on the points of it that were opposed to generally accepted theories.
During all his long life Copernicus remained one of the simplest of
men. Genius as he was, he could not have failed to realize how great
was the significance of the discoveries he had made in astronomy. In
spite of this he continued to exercise during a long career the simple
duties of his post as Canon of the Cathedral of Frauenberg, nor did he
fail to give such time as was asked of him for the medical treatment
of the {40} poor or of his friends, the ecclesiastics of the
neighborhood. These duties--as he seems to have considered them--must
have taken many precious hours from his studies, but they were given
unstintingly. When he came to die, his humility was even more
prominent than during life. It was at his own request that there was
graven upon his tombstone simply the prayer, "I ask not the grace
accorded to Paul, not that given to Peter: give me only the favor Thou
didst show to the thief on the cross." There is perhaps no better
example in all the world of the simplicity of true genius nor any
better example of how sublimely religious may be the soul that has far
transcended the bounds of the scientific knowledge of its own day.
The greatness of Copernicus's life-work can best be realized from the
extent to which he surpassed even well-known contemporaries in
astronomy and from his practical anticipation of the opinions of some
of his greatest successors. Even Tycho Brahe, important though he is
in the history of astronomical science, taught many years after
Copernicus's death the doctrine that the earth is the center of the
universe. Newton had in Copernicus a precursor who divined the theory
of universal gravitation; and even Kepler's great laws, especially the
elliptical form of the orbits of the planets, are at least hinted at
in Copernicus's writings. He is certainly one of the most original
geniuses of all times; and it is interesting to find that the
completeness of his {41} scholarly career, far from being rendered
abortive by friction with ecclesiastical superiors, as we might
imagine probable from the traditions that hang around his name, was
rather made possible by the sympathy and encouragement of clerical
friends and Church authorities. Copernicus, the scholar, astronomer,
physician, and clergyman, is a type of the eve of the Reformation
period, and his life is the best possible refutation of the slanders
with regard to the unprogressiveness of the Church and churchmen of
that epoch which have unfortunately been only too common in the
histories of the time.
{42}
{43}
III.
BASIL VALENTINE, FOUNDER OF MODERN CHEMISTRY.
{44}
Let us, then, banish into the world of fiction that affirmation so
long repeated by foolish credulity which made monasteries an asylum
for indolence and incapacity, for misanthropy and pusillanimity, for
feeble and melancholic temperaments, and for men who were no longer
fit to serve society in the world. Monasteries were never intended to
collect the invalids of the world. It was not the sick souls, but on
the contrary the most vigorous and healthful the human race has ever
produced, who presented themselves in crowds to fill
them.--MONTALEMBERT, _Monks of the West_.
{45}
III.
BASIL VALENTINE, FOUNDER OF MODERN CHEMISTRY.
The Protestant tradition which presumes a priori that no good can
possibly have come out of the Nazareth of the times before the
Reformation, and especially the immediately preceding century, has
served to obscure to an unfortunate degree the history of several
hundred years extremely important in every department of education.
Strange as it may seem to those unfamiliar with the period, it is in
that department which is supposed to be so typically modern
the--physical sciences--that this neglect is most serious. Such a hold
has this Protestant tradition on even educated minds that it is a
source of great surprise to most people to be told that there were in
many parts of Europe original observers in the physical sciences all
during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries who were
doing ground-breaking work of the highest value, work that was
destined to mean much for the development of modern science.
Speculations and experiments with regard to the philosopher's stone
and the transmutation of metals are supposed to fill up all the
interests of the alchemists of those days. As a matter of fact,
however, men were making original observations of very {46} profound
significance, and these were considered so valuable by their
contemporaries that, though printing had not yet been invented, even
the immense labor involved in copying large folio volumes by hand did
not suffice to deter them from multiplying the writings of these men
and thus preserving them for future generations, until the
printing-press came to perpetuate them.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, with some of the supposed
foundations of modern chemistry crumbling to pieces under the
influences of the peculiarly active light thrown upon older chemical
theories by the discovery of radium and the radio-active elements
generally, there is a reawakening of interest in some of the old-time
chemical observers whose work used to be laughed at as so unscientific
and whose theory of the transmutation of elements into one another was
considered so absurd. The idea that it would be impossible under any
circumstances to convert one element into another belongs entirely to
the nineteenth century. Even so distinguished a mind as that of
Newton, in the preceding century, could not bring itself to
acknowledge the modern supposition of the absurdity of metallic
transformation, but, on the contrary, believed very firmly in this as
a basic chemical principle and confessed that it might be expected to
occur at any time. He had seen specimens of gold ores in connexion
with metallic copper, and had concluded that this was a manifestation
of the natural transformation of one of these yellow metals into the
other.
{47}
With the discovery that radium transforms itself into helium, and that
indeed all the so-called radio-activities of the very heavy metals are
probably due to a natural transmutation process constantly at work,
the ideas of the older chemists cease entirely to be a subject for
amusement. The physical chemists of the present day are very ready to
admit that the old teaching of the absolute independence of something
over seventy elements is no longer tenable, except as a working
hypothesis. The doctrine of matter and form taught for so many
centuries by the scholastic philosophers which proclaimed that all
matter is composed of two principles, an underlying material
substratum and a dynamic or informing principle, has now more
acknowledged verisimilitude, or lies at least closer to the generally
accepted ideas of the most progressive scientists, than it has at any
time for the last two or three centuries. Not only the great
physicists, but also the great chemists, are speculating along lines
that suggest the existence of but one form of matter, modified
according to the energies that it possesses under a varying physical
and chemical environment. This is, after all, only a restatement in
modern terms of the teaching of St. Thomas of Aquin in the thirteenth
century.
It is not surprising, then, that there should be a reawakening of
interest in the lives of some of the men who, dominated by the earlier
scholastic ideas and by the tradition of the possibility of finding
the philosopher's stone, which would {48} transmute the baser metals
into the precious metals, devoted themselves with quite as much zeal
as any modern chemist to the observation of chemical phenomena. One of
the most interesting of these--indeed he might well be said to be the
greatest of the alchemists--is the man whose only name that we know is
that which appears on a series of manuscripts written in the High
German dialect of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the
sixteenth century. That name is Basil Valentine, and the writer,
according to the best historical traditions, was a Benedictine monk.
The name Basil Valentine may only have been a pseudonym, for it has
been impossible to trace it among the records of the monasteries of
the time. That the writer was a monk there seems to be no doubt, for
his writings in manuscript and printed form began to have their vogue
at a time when there was little likelihood of their being attributed
to a monk unless an indubitable tradition connected them with some
monastery.
This Basil Valentine (to accept the only name we have), as we can
judge very well from his writings, eminently deserves the designation
of the last of the alchemists and the first of the chemists. There is
practically a universal recognition of the fact now that he deserves
also the title of Founder of Modern Chemistry, not only because of the
value of the observations contained in his writings, but also because
of the fact that they proved so suggestive to certain {49} scientific
geniuses during the century succeeding Valentine's life. Almost more
than to have added to the precious heritage of knowledge for mankind
is it a boon for a scientific observer to have awakened the spirit of
observation in others and to be the founder of a new school of
thought. This Basil Valentine undoubtedly did.
Besides, his work furnishes evidence that the investigating spirit was
abroad just when it is usually supposed not to have been, for the
Thuringian monk surely did not do all his investigating alone, but
must have received as well as given many a suggestion to his
contemporaries.
In the history of education there are two commonplaces that are
appealed to oftener than any other as the sources of material with
regard to the influence of the Catholic Church on education during the
centuries preceding the Reformation. These are the supposed idleness
of the monks, and the foolish belief in the transmutation of metals
and the search for the philosopher's stone which dominated the minds
of so many of the educated men of the time. It is in Germany
especially that these two features of the pre-Reformation period are
supposed to be best illustrated. In recent years, however, there has
come quite a revolution in the feelings even of those outside of the
Church with regard to the proper appreciation of the work of the
monastic scholars of these earlier centuries. Even though some of them
did dream golden dreams over their alembics, the love of knowledge
meant {50} more to them, as to the serious students of any age, than
anything that might be made by it. As for their scientific beliefs, if
there can be a conversion of one element into another, as seems true
of radium, then the possibility of the transmutation of metals is not
so absurd as, for a century or more, it has seemed; and it is not
impossible that at some time even gold may be manufactured out of
other metallic materials.
Of course, a still worthier change of mind has come over the attitude
of educators because of the growing sense of appreciation for the
wonderful work of the monks of the Middle Ages, and even of those
centuries that are supposed to show least of the influence of these
groups of men who, forgetting material progress, devoted themselves to
the preservation and the cultivation of the things of the spirit. The
impression that would consider the pre-Reformation monks in Germany as
unworthy of their high calling in the great mass is almost entirely
without foundation. Obscure though the lives of most of them were,
many of them rose above their environment in such a way as to make
their work landmarks in the history of progress for all time.
Because their discoveries are buried in the old Latin folios that are
contained only in the best libraries, not often consulted by the
modern scientist, it is usually thought that the scientific
investigators of these centuries before the Reformation did no work
that would be worth while considering in our present day. It is only
some {51} one who goes into this matter as a labor of love who will
consider it worth his while to take the trouble seriously to consult
these musty old tomes. Many a scholar, however, has found his labor
well rewarded by the discovery of many an anticipation of modern
science in these volumes so much neglected and where such
treasure-trove is least expected. Professor Clifford Allbutt, the
Regius Professor of physics at the University of Cambridge, in his
address on "The Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery Down to
the End of the Sixteenth Century," which was delivered at the St.
Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences during the Exposition in 1904, has
shown how much that is supposed to be distinctly modern in medicine,
and above all in surgery, was the subject of discussion at the French
and Italian universities of the thirteenth century. William Salicet,
for instance, who taught at the University of Bologna, published a
large series of case histories, substituted the knife for the Arabic
use of the cautery, described the danger of wounds of the neck,
investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention,
and sutured divided nerves. His pupil, Lanfranc, who taught later at
the University of Paris, went farther than his master by
distinguishing between venous and arterial hemorrhage, requiring
digital compression for an hour to stop hemorrhage from the _venae
pulsatiles_--the pulsating veins, as they were called--and if this
failed because of the size of the vessel, {52} suggesting the
application of a ligature. Lanfranc's chapter on injuries to the head
still remains a noteworthy book in surgery that establishes beyond a
doubt how thoughtfully practical were these teachers in the medieval
universities. It must be remembered that at this time all the teachers
in universities, even those in the medical schools as well as those
occupied with surgery, were clerics. Professor Allbutt calls attention
over and over again to this fact, because it emphasizes the
thoroughness of educational methods, in spite of the supposed
difficulties that would lie in the way of an exclusively clerical
teaching staff.
In chemistry the advances made during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and
fifteenth centuries were even more noteworthy than those in any other
department of science. Albertus Magnus, who taught at Paris, wrote no
less than sixteen treatises on chemical subjects, and, notwithstanding
the fact that he was a theologian as well as a scientist and that his
printed works filled sixteen folio volumes, he somehow found the time
to make many observations for himself and performed numberless
experiments in order to clear up doubts. The larger histories of
chemistry accord him his proper place and hail him as a great founder
in chemistry and a pioneer in original investigation.
Even St. Thomas of Aquin, much as he was occupied with theology and
philosophy, found some time to devote to chemical questions. After
{53} all, this is only what might have been expected of the favorite
pupil of Albertus Magnus. Three treatises on chemical subjects from
Aquinas's pen have been preserved for us, and it is to him that we are
said to owe the origin of the word amalgam, which he first used in
describing various chemical methods of metallic combination with
mercury that were discovered in the search for the genuine
transmutation of metals.
Albertus Magnus's other great scientific pupil, Roger Bacon, the
English Franciscan friar, followed more closely in the physical
scientific ways of his great master. Altogether he wrote some eighteen
treatises on chemical subjects. For a long time it was considered that
he was the inventor of gunpowder, though this is now known to have
been introduced into Europe by the Arabs. Roger Bacon studied
gunpowder and various other explosive combinations in considerable
detail, and it is for this reason that he obtained the undeserved
reputation of being an original discoverer in this line. How well he
realized how much might be accomplished by means of the energy stored
up in explosives can perhaps be best appreciated from the fact that he
suggested that boats would go along the rivers and across the seas
without either sails or oars and that carriages would go along the
streets without horse or man power. He considered that man would
eventually invent a method of harnessing these explosive mixtures and
of utilizing their energies for his purposes without {54} danger. It
is curiously interesting to find, as we begin the twentieth century,
and gasolene is so commonly used for the driving of automobiles and
motor boats and is being introduced even on railroad cars in the West
as the most available source of energy for suburban traffic, that this
generation should only be fulfilling the idea of the old Franciscan
friar of the thirteenth century, who prophesied that in explosives
there was the secret of eventually manageable energy for
transportation purposes.
Succeeding centuries were not as fruitful in great scientists as the
thirteenth, and yet at the beginning of the fourteenth there was a
pope, three of whose scientific treatises--one on the transmutation of
metals, which he considers an impossibility, at least as far as the
manufacture of gold and silver was concerned; a treatise on diseases
of the eyes, of which Professor Allbutt [Footnote 4] says that it was
not without its distinctive practical value, though compiled so early
in the history of eye surgery; and, finally, his treatise on the
preservation of the health, written when he was himself over eighty
years of age--are all considered by good authorities as worthy of the
best scientific spirit of the time. This pope was John XXII, of whom
it has been said over and over again by Protestant historians that he
issued a bull forbidding chemistry, though he was himself one of the
enthusiastic students of chemistry {55} in his younger years and
always retained his interest in the science. [Footnote 5]
[Footnote 4: Address cited]
[Footnote 5: For the refutation of this calumny with regard to John
XXII, see "Pope John XXII and the supposed Bull forbidding
Chemistry," by James J. Walsh, Ph. D., LL. D., in the _Medical
Library and Historical Journal_, October, 1905.]