limited in its
means, has had inadequate resources to draw on, and has succeeded in
accomplishing what it has done only because of the generous devotion
of those attached to it.

To go back to the Galileo controversy for a moment, there seems no
better answer to the assertion that his trial shows clearly the
opposition between religion, or at least ecclesiastical authorities,
and science, than to recall, as we have done, in writing the
accompanying sketch of the {10} life of Father Kircher, S.J., that
just after the trial Roman ecclesiastics very generally were ready to
encourage liberally a man who devoted himself to all forms of physical
science, who was an original thinker in many of them, who was a great
teacher, whose writings did more to disseminate knowledge of advances
in science than those of any man of his time, and whose idea of the
collection of scientific curiosities into a great museum at Rome
(which still bears his name) was one of the fertile germinal
suggestions in which modern science was to find seeds for future
growth.

It is often asserted that geology was one of the sciences that was
distinctly opposed by churchmen; yet we shall see that the father of
modern geology, one of the greatest anatomists of his time, was not
only a convert to Catholicity, but became a clergyman about the time
he was writing the little book that laid the foundation of modern
geology. We shall see, too, that, far from religion and science
clashing in him, he afterwards was made a bishop, in the hope that he
should be able to go back to his native land and induce others to
become members of that Church wherein he had found peace and
happiness.

In the modern times biology has been supposed to be the special
subject of opposition, or at least fear, on the part of ecclesiastical
authorities. It is for this reason that the life of Abbot Mendel has
been introduced. While working in {11} his monastery garden in the
little town of Bruenn in Moravia, this Augustinian monk discovered
certain precious laws of heredity that are considered by progressive
twentieth-century scientists to be the most important contributions to
the difficult problems relating to inheritance in biology that have
been made.

These constitute the reasons for this little book on Catholic
clergymen scientists. It is published, not with any ulterior motives,
but simply to impress certain details of truth in the history of
science that have been neglected