Ateneo of the Jesuits, where
science is taught practically in the laboratory itself, its utility
does not come to be so great as it would be if it could be utilized by
the two hundred and fifty who pay their matriculation fees, buy their
books, memorize them, and waste a year to know nothing afterwards. As
a result, with the exception of some rare usher or janitor who has
had charge of the museum for years, no one has ever been known to
get any advantage from the lessons memorized with so great effort.

But let us return to the class. The professor was a young Dominican,
who had filled several chairs in San Juan de Letran with zeal and
good repute. He had the reputation of being a great logician as well
as a profound philosopher, and was one of the most promising in his
clique. His elders treated him with consideration, while the younger
men envied him, for there were also cliques among them. This was the
third year of his professorship and, although the first in which he
had taught physics and chemistry, he already passed for a sage, not
only with the complaisant students but also among the other nomadic
professors. Padre Millon did not belong to the common crowd who each
year change their subject in order to acquire scientific knowledge,
students among other students, with the difference only that they
follow a single course, that they quiz instead of being quizzed,
that they have a better knowledge of Castilian, and that they are not
examined at the completion of the course. Padre Millon went deeply
into science, knew the physics of Aristotle and Padre Amat, read
carefully his "Ramos," and sometimes glanced at "Ganot." With all that,
he would often shake his head with an air of doubt, as he smiled and
murmured: "_transeat_." In regard to chemistry, no common knowledge
was attributed to him after he had taken as a premise the statement of
St. Thomas that water is a mixture and proved plainly that the Angelic
Doctor had long forestalled Berzelius, Gay-Lussac, Bunsen, and other
more or less presumptuous materialists. Moreover, in spite of having
been an instructor in geography, he still entertained certain doubts as
to the rotundity of the earth and smiled maliciously when its rotation
and revolution around the sun were mentioned, as he recited the verses

"El mentir de las estrellas
Es un comodo mentir." [29]

He also smiled maliciously in the presence of certain physical
theories and considered visiona