nce during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. It is
particularly surprising to have them talk of Church opposition to the
medical sciences. The universities of the world all had their charters
from the Popes at this time, and were all ruled by ecclesiastics, and
most of the students and practically all of the professors down to the
end of the sixteenth century belonged to the clerical order. The
universities of Italy were all more directly under the control of
ecclesiastical authority than anywhere else, and nearly all of them were
dominated by papal influence. Bologna, while doing much of the best
graduate work in science, especially in medicine, was, in the Papal
States, absolutely under the rule of the Popes. The university was,
practically, a department of the Papal government. The medical school at
the University of Rome itself was for several centuries, at the end of
the Middle Ages, the teaching-place where were assembled the pick of the
great medical investigators, who, having reached distinction by their
discoveries elsewhere, were summoned to Rome in order to add prestige to
the Papal University. All of them became special friends of the Popes,
dedicated their books to them, and evidently looked to them as
beneficent patrons and hearty encouragers of original scientific
research.

While this is so strikingly true of medical science as to make contrary
declarations in the matter utterly ridiculous, and to suggest at once
that there must be some motive for seeing things so different to the
reality, the same story can be told of graduate science in other
departments. It was to Italy that men came for special higher studies
in mathematics and astronomy, in botany, in mineralogy, and in applied
chemistry, so far as it related to the arts of painting, illuminating,
stained-glass making, and the like. No student of science felt that he
had quite exhausted the opportunities for study that were possible for
him until he had been down in Italy for some time. To meet the great
professors in Italy was looked on as sure to be a source of special
incentive in any department of science. This is coming to be generally
recognized just in proportion as our own interest in the arts and
crafts, and in the history of science, leads us to go carefully into the
details of these subjects at first hand. The editors of the "Cambridge
Modern History," in their preface, declared ten years ago that we can no
longer accept with confiden