It may very well indeed be
said that visitors to Rome with scientific tendencies found as much
that was suggestive in Father Kircher's museum--the "Kircherianum," as
it came to be called--as artists and sculptors and architects found in
the Vatican collections of the papal city.

All of this work was accomplished within the half century after
Galileo's trial, for Father Kircher died in 1680, at the age of
seventy-eight, having lived, as so many of the great scientists have
done, a long life in the midst of the most persistent activity.
Kircher, more than perhaps any other, can be said to be the founder of
modern natural science. Before any one else, in a practical way, he
realized the necessity for the collection of an immense amount of
data, if science was to be founded on the broad, firm foundation of
observed truth. The principle which had been announced by Bacon in the
"Novum Organon"--"to take all that comes rather than to choose, and to
heap up rather than to register"--was never carried out as fully as by
Father Kircher. As Edmund Gosse said in the June number of _Harper's_,
1904, "Bacon had started a great idea, but he had not carried it out.
He is not the founder, he is the prophet {114} of modern physical
science. To be in direct touch with nature, to adventure in the
unexplored fields of knowledge, and to do this by carrying out an
endless course of slow and sure experiments, this was the counsel of
the 'Novum Organon.'" Bacon died in 1626, and scarcely more than a
decade had passed before Kircher was carrying out the work thus
outlined by the English philosopher in a way that was surprisingly
successful, even looked at from the standpoint of our modern science.
Needless to say, however, it was not because of Bacon's suggestion
that he did so, for it is more than doubtful whether he knew of
Bacon's writings until long after the lines of his life-work had been
traced by his own inquiring spirit. The fulness of time had come. The
inductive philosophy was in the air. Bacon's formulae, which the
English philosopher never practically applied, and Father Kircher's
assiduous collection of data, were but expressions of the spirit of
the times. How faithfully the work of the first modern inductive
scientist was accomplished we shall see.

It may be easily imagined that a certain interest in Father Kircher,
apart from his scientific attainments and the desire to show how much
and how successful was the attention giv