geology as he originally intended. Had he succeeded in gathering
together all of his original observations, illustrated by the material
he had collected, his work would have had much greater effect. As it
was, the golden truth which he had expressed in such {160} few words,
without being able always to state just how he had come to his
conclusions, was only of avail to science in a limited way. Men had to
repeat his observations long years afterwards in order to realize the
truth of what he had laid down. Leibnitz considered that it took more
than a century for geological science to reach the point at which it
had been left by Steno's work, and which he had reached at a single
bound. There is scarcely a single modern geologist interested at all
in the history of the science who has not paid a worthy tribute to
Steno's great basic discoveries in the science. It was not a matter
for surprise, then, that the International Congress of Geologists
which met at Bologna in 1881 assembled at his tomb in Florence in
order to do him honor, after the regular sessions of the Congress had
closed. They erected to his memory a tablet with the following
scription:
"Nicolae Stenonis imaginem vides hospes quam aere collato docti
amplius mille ex universo terrarum orbe insculpendam curarunt in
memoriam ejus diei IV cal. Octobr. an. MDCCCLXXXI quo geologi post
conventum Bononiae habitum praeside Joanne Capellinio equite hue
peregrinati sunt atque adstantibus legatis flor Municipii et R.
Instituti Altiorum doctrinarum cineres viri inter geologos et
anatomicos praestantissimi in hujus templi hypogaeo laurea corona
honoris gratique animi ergo honestaverunt." [Footnote 12]
[Footnote 12: You behold here, traveller, the bust of Nicholas
Steno as it was set up by more than a thousand scientists from all
over the world, as a memorial to him, on the fourth of the Kalends
of October, 1881. The geologists of the world, after their meeting
in Bologna, under the presidency of Count John Capellini, made a
pilgrimage to his tomb, and in the presence of the chosen
representatives of the municipality, and of the learned professors
of the University, honored the mortal ashes of this man,
illustrious among geologists and anatomists.]
{161}
Stensen's work brought him in contact with some of the distinguished
men of the seventeenth century, all of whom learned to appreciate his
breadth of intelligence and acuity of judgment. We have already
mentioned his epistolary relation with Spinoza, and have said
something about the controversy with Leibnitz, into which, in spite of
his disinclination to controversy generally, he was drawn by the
circumstances of the time and the solicitation of friends. Another
great thinker of the century with whom he was brought into intimate
relationship was Des Cartes, the distinguished philosopher. In fact,
Des Cartes's system of thought influenced Stensen not a little, and he
felt, when describing the function of muscles in the human body, and
especially when he demonstrated that the heart was a muscle, that the
mechanical notions he was thus introducing into anatomy were likely to
prove confirmatory of Des Cartes's philosophic speculations. Almost
more than any other, Stensen was the father of many ideas that have
since become common, with regard to the physics of the human body and
its qualities as a machine.
With his breadth of view, from familiarity {162} with the progress of
science generally in his time, Steno's discussions of the reason for
the lack of exact knowledge and for the prevalence of error, in spite
of enthusiastic investigation, are worth while appreciating. He
considered that the reason why so many portions of natural science are
still in doubt is that in the investigation of natural objects no
careful distinction is made between what is known to a certainty and
what is known only with a certain amount of assurance. He discusses
the question of deductive and inductive science, and considers that
even those who depend on experience will not infrequently be found in
error, because their conclusions are wider than their premises, and
because it only too often happens that they admit principles as true
for which they have no sure evidence. Stensen considered it important,
therefore, not to hurry on in the explanation of things, but, so far
as possible, to cling to old-time principles that had been universally
accepted, since nearly always these would be found to contain fruitful
germs of truth.
He was universally acknowledged as one of the greatest original
thinkers of his time, and his conversion to the Church did much to
dissipate religious prejudices among those of German nationality. His
influence over distinguished visitors who came to Florence, and who
were very glad to have the opportunity of making his acquaintance, was
such that not a few Northern visitors became, like himself, converts
to the Church.
{163}
It was in the midst of this that the request of the Duke of Hanover
came that he should consent to become the bishop of his capital city.
It was only after Stensen had been put under holy obedience that he
would consent to accept the proffered dignity. His first thought was
to distribute all his goods among the poor, and betake himself even
without shoes on his feet, on a pedestrian journey to Rome. First,
however, he made a pilgrimage to Loretto, where he arrived so overcome
by the fatigue of the journey that the clergyman who took care of him
while there, insisted on his accepting a pair of shoes from him,
though he could not prevail upon him to travel in any other way than
on foot.
His first action, after his consecration as bishop, was to write a
letter, sending his episcopal benediction to Sister Maria Flavia, to
whom he felt he owed the great privilege of his life. His lasting
sense of satisfaction and consolation in his change of religion may be
appreciated from what is, perhaps, the most interesting personal
document that we have from Stensen's own hand, in which, on the
eighteenth anniversary of his conversion, he writes to a friend to
describe his feelings. "To-morrow," he says, "I shall finish, God
willing, the eighteenth year of my happy life as a member of the
Church. I wish to acknowledge once more my thankfulness for the part
which you took under God in my conversion. As I hope to have the grace
to be grateful to Him forever, so I sigh for the opportunity to
express {164} my thankfulnes to you and your family. I can feel that
my own ingratitude toward God, my slowness in His service, make me
unworthy of His graces; but I hope that you who have helped me to
enter his service will not cease to pray, so that I may obtain pardon
for the past and grace for the future, in order in some measure to
repay all the favors that have been conferred on me."
The distinguishing characteristic of his life as a bishop was his
insistence on poverty as the principal element of his existence. He
refused to enter his diocese in state in the carriage which the Duke
offered to provide for him, but proceeded there on foot. No question
of supposed dignity could make him employ a number of servants, and
his only retainers were converts made by himself, who helped in the
household and whom he treated quite as equals. He became engaged in
one controversy on religious matters, but said that he did not
consider that converts had ever been made by controversies. He
compared it, indeed, to the gladiatorial contests in which the
contestants had their heads completely enveloped in armor, so as to
prevent any possible penetration of the weapons of an opponent. He
insisted especially that in religious controversies the contending
parties do not realize the significance given to words by each other,
and that therefore no good can result.
After a time, Stensen did not find his work in Hamburg very
satisfactory, because it was typically a missionary country, and the
Jesuit {165} missionaries who had been introduced were accomplishing
all that could be hoped for. Accordingly, when the Duke of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin became a convert to the Catholic Church, and
asked that Stensen should be sent as a bishop into his dukedom, the
request was complied with. Here, in the hardest kind of labor as a
missionary, and in the midst of poverty that was truly apostolic,
Stensen worked out the remaining years of his life. At his death he
was looked upon as almost a saint. Notwithstanding his close
relationship with two reigning princes, he did not leave enough
personal effects to defray the expenses of his funeral. Besides his
bishop's ring, and the very simple episcopal cross he wore, he had
nothing of any value except some relics of St. Francis Xavier, St.
Ignatius Loyola, and St. Philip Neri, which he had prized above all
other treasures.
His missionary labors had not been marked by any very striking success
in the number of converts made. In this his life would seem to have
been a bitter personal disappointment. He never looked upon it as
such, however, but continued to be eminently cheerful and friendly
until the end. As a matter of fact, the influence of his career was to
be felt much more two centuries after his death than during his
lifetime. At the present moment, his life is well known in northern
Germany, thanks to the biographic sketch written by Father Plenkers
for the _Stimmen aus Maria Laach_, which has been very widely {166}
circulated since its appearance in 1884. Something of the reaction
among scientific minds in Germany toward a healthier orthodoxy of
feeling, with regard to great religious questions, is undoubtedly due
to the spread of the knowledge of the career of the great anatomist
and geologist who gave up his scientific work for the sake of the
spread of the higher truth.
After his death the Medici family asked for and obtained the privilege
of having his body buried in San Lorenzo at Florence, with the members
of the princely Medici house. More and more do visitors realize that
the tablet over his remains chronicles the death of a man who was
undoubtedly one of the world's great scientists, and one of the most
original thinkers of his time, and that time a period greatly fertile
in the history of science.
{167}
VII.
ABBE HAUeY, FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY.
{168}
They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number and
measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on
them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in
measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we
reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are
essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning
created not only heaven and earth, but the materials of which heaven
and earth consist.--CLERK MAXWELL _On the Molecule_, "Nature," Vol.
VIII. 1873.
[Illustration: 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 planet Ceres. This was the
first of the asteroids, so many more of which were to be revealed to
astronomical study during the next half-century. Father Piazzi's
discovery was made, not by accident, but as the result of detailed
astronomical work of the most painstaking character. He {171} had set
out to make a map of the heavens, and to determine and locate the
absolute position of all the visible stars. He had succeeded in
cataloguing over 7,000 stars when his attention was called to one,
hitherto supposed to be fixed, which he found had moved, during the
interval between two observations, from its original position. He made
still other observations, and thus determined the fact that it was a
planetoid and not a fixed star with which he had to deal. Needless to
say, his discovery proved a strong incentive to patient astronomical
study of the same kind; and it is to these, rather than to great
single discoveries, that we owe whatever progress in astronomy was
made during the nineteenth century.
Contemporary with both of these last-mentioned men, and worthy to
share in the scientific honors that were theirs, was the Abbe Hauey,
who toward the end of the second half of the eighteenth century
founded the science of crystallography; made a series of observations
the value of which can never be disputed, originated theories some of
which have served down to our own time as the basis of crystal
knowledge, and attracted the attention of many students to the new
science because of his charming personal character and his winning
teaching methods. His life is a typical example of the value of work
done in patient obscurity, founded on observation, and not on
brilliant theories; and what he accomplished stamps him as one of the
great {172} scientific geniuses of all time--one of the men who
widened the bounds of knowledge in directions hitherto considered
inaccessible to the ordinary methods of human investigation.
It is a commonplace of the lecturer on popular science at the present
day, that the impulse to the development of our modern scientific
discoveries which became so marked toward the end of the eighteenth
century, was due in a noteworthy degree to the work of the French
Encyclopedists. Their bringing together of all the details of
knowledge in a form in which it could be readily consulted, and in
which previous progress and the special lines of advance could be
realized, might be expected to prove a fruitful source of suggestive
investigation. As a matter of fact, however, a detailed knowledge of
the past in science often seems to be rather a hindrance than a help
to original genius, always prone to take its own way if not too much
disturbed by the conventional knowledge already gained. Most of the
great discoverers in science were comparatively young men when they
began their careers as original investigators; and it was apparently
their freedom from the incubus of too copious information that left
their minds untrammelled to follow their own bent in seeking for
causes where others had failed to find any hints of possible
developments.
This was certainly the case with regard to many of those distinguished
founders who lived in centuries prior to the nineteenth. Most of {173}
them were men under thirty years of age, and not one of them had been
noted, before he began his own researches, for the extent of his
knowledge in the particular department of science in which his work
was to prove so fruitful. Their lives illustrate the essential
difference there is between theory and observation in science. The
theorizer reaches conclusions that are popular as a rule in his own
generation, and receives the honor due to a progressive scientist; the
observer usually has his announcements of what he has actually seen
scouted by those who are engaged in the same studies, and it is only
succeeding generations who appreciate how much he really accomplished.
This was especially exemplified in the case of the Abbe Hauey, whose
work in crystallography was to mean so much. What he learned was not
from books, but from contact with the actual objects of his department
of science; and it is because the example of a life like this can
scarcely fail to serve a good purpose for the twentieth-century
student, in impressing the lesson of the value of observation as
opposed to theory, that its details are retold.
Rene Just Hauey was born 28 February, 1743, in the little village of
Saint-Just, in the Department of Oise, somewhat north of the center of
France. Like many another great genius, he was the son of very poor
parents. His father was a struggling linen-weaver, who was able to
support himself only with difficulty. At first {174} there seemed to
be no other prospect for his eldest son than to succeed to his
father's business. Certainly there seemed to be no possibility that he
should be able to gain his livelihood by any other means than by the
work of his hands.
Fortunately, however, there was in Hauey's native town a
Premonstratensian monastery, and it was not long before some of the
monks began to notice that the son of the weaver was of an especially
pious disposition and attended church ceremonies very faithfully. The
chance was given to him to attend the monastery school, and he
succeeded admirably in his studies. As a consequence, the prior had
his attention directed to the boy, and found in him the signs of a
superior intelligence. He summoned the lad's parents and discussed
with them the possibility of obtaining for their son an education.
There were many difficulties in the way, but the principal one was
their absolute financial inability to help him. If the son was to
obtain an education, it must be somehow through his own efforts, and
without any expense to his parents.
The prior thereupon obtained for young Hauey a position as a member of
a church choir in Paris; and, later, some of those to whom he had
recommended the boy secured for him a place in the college of Navarre.
Here, during the course of a few years, he made such an impression
upon the members of the faculty that they asked him to become one of
the teaching corps of the institution. It was a very modest position
that he {175} held, and his salary scarcely more than paid for his
board and clothes and a few books. Hauey was well satisfied, however,
because his position provided him with opportunities for pursuing the
studies for which he cared most. At this time he was interested mainly
in literature, and succeeded in learning several languages, which were
to be of considerable use to him later on in his scientific career.
After some years spent in the college of Navarre he was ordained
priest, and not long afterward became a member of the faculty of the
college of Cardinal Lemoine. Here his position was somewhat better,
and he was brought in contact with many of the prominent scholars of
Paris. He seems, however, to have been quite contented in his rather
narrow circle of interests, and was not specially anxious to advance
himself. It is rather curious to realize that a man who was later to
spend all his time in the pursuit of the physical sciences, knew
practically nothing at all about them, and certainly had no special
interest in any particular branch of science, until he reached the age
of almost thirty years.
Even then his first introduction to serious science did not come
because of any special interest that had been aroused in his own mind,
but entirely because of his friendship for a distinguished old
fellow-professor, whose walks he used to share, and who was deeply
interested in botany. This was the Abbe Lhomond, a very {176}
well-known scholar, to whom we owe a number of classic text-books
arranged especially for young folk.
The Abbe's recreation consisted in botanizing expeditions; and Hauey,
who had chosen the kindly old priest as his spiritual director, was
his most frequent companion. Occasionally, when M. Lhomond was ailing,
and unable to take his usual walks, Hauey spent the time with him. He
rather regretted the fact that he did not know enough about botany to
be able to make collections of certain plants to bring to the
professor at such times, in order that the latter might not entirely
miss his favorite recreation. Accordingly, one summer when he was on
his vacation at his country home, he asked one of the
Premonstratensian monks, who was very much interested in botany, to
teach him the principles of the science, so as to enable him to
recognize various plants. Of course his request was granted. He
expected to have a pleasant surprise for Abbe Lhomond on his return,
and to draw even closer in his friendly relations with him, because of
their mutual interest in what the old Abbe called his _scientia
amabilis_ (lovely science). His little plan worked to perfection, and
there was won for the study of physical science a new recruit, who was
to do as much as probably any one of his generation to extend
scientific knowledge in one department, though that department was
rather distant from botany.
Hauey's interest in botany, however, was to {177} prove only temporary.
It brought him in contact with other departments of natural history,
and it was not long before he found that his favorite study was that
of minerals, and especially of the various forms of crystals. So
absorbed did he become in this subject that nothing pleased him better
than the opportunity to spend long days in the investigation of the
comparative size and shape of the crystals in the museum at Paris. A
friend has said of him that, whether they were the most precious
stones and gems or the most worthless specimens of ordinary minerals,
it was always only their crystalline shape that interested Hauey.
Diamonds he studied, but only in order to determine their angles; and
apparently they had no more attraction for him than any other
well-defined crystal--much less, indeed, than some of the more complex
crystalline varieties, which attracted his interest because of the
difficulty of the problems they presented.
Like many another advance in science, Hauey's first great original step
in crystallography was the result of what would be called a lucky
accident. These accidents, however, be it noted, happen only to
geniuses who are capable of taking advantage of them. How many a man
had seen an apple fall from a tree before this little circumstance
gave Newton the hint from which grew, eventually, the laws of gravity!
Many a man, doubtless, had seen little boys tapping on logs of wood,
to hear how well sound was {178} carried through a solid body, without
getting from this any hint, such as Laennec derived from it, for the
invention of the stethoscope. So, too, many a person before Hauey's
time had seen a crystal fall and break, leaving a smooth surface,
without deriving any hint for the explanation of the origin of
crystals.
According to the familiar story, Hauey was one day looking over a
collection of very fine crystals in the house of Citizen Du Croisset,
Treasurer of France. He was examining an especially fine specimen of
calcspar, when it fell from his hands and was broken. Of course the
visitor was much disturbed by this accident. His friend, however, in
order to show him that he was not at all put out at the breaking of
the crystal, insisted on Hauey's taking it with him for purposes of
study, as they had both been very much interested in the perfectly
smooth plane of the fracture. As Hauey himself says, this broken
portion had a peculiarly brilliant lustre, "polished, as it were by
nature," as beautifully as the outer portions of the crystal; thus
demonstrating that in building up of so large a crystal there must
have been certain steps of progress, at any of which, were the
formation arrested, smooth surfaces would be found.