o this disease and then point
out the conditions of future progress.

Dr. Paul Zachias, who was a distinguished Roman physician of the time,
said that he had long known Father Kircher as an eminent writer on
other subjects, but that after reading his book on the pest he must
consider him also distinguished in medical writing. He says: "While he
has set his hand at other's harvests, he has done it with so much
wisdom and prudence as to win the admiration of the harvesters already
in the field." He adds that there can be no doubt that it would be a
source of profit for medical men to read this little book and that it
will undoubtedly prove beneficial to future generations. Testimony of
another kind to the value of Father Kircher's book is to be found in
the fact {117} that within a half-year after its publication in Latin
it appeared in several other languages. It is too much the custom of
these modern times to consider that scientific progress in the
centuries before our own and its immediate predecessor was likely to
attract little attention for many years, and was especially slow to
make its way into foreign countries. Anything, however, of real
importance in science took but a very short time to travel from one
country to another in Europe in the seventeenth century, and the fact
that scientific men generally used Latin as a common language made the
spread of discoveries and speculations much easier even than at the
present time. Our increased means of communication have really only
served to allow sensational announcements of a progress in
science--which is usually no progress at all--to be spread quite as
effectually in modern times as were real advances in the older days.

There is no good account of Father Kircher's life available in
English, and it has seemed only proper that the more important at
least of the details of the life of the man who thus anticipated the
beginnings of modern bacteriology and of the relations of
micro-organisms to disease, should not be left in obscurity. His life
history is all the more interesting and important because it
illustrates the interest of the churchmen of the time, and especially
of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities, in all forms of science; for
Father Kircher is undoubtedly one of the greatest scholars of {118}
history and one of the scientific geniuses in whose works can be
found, as the result of some wonderful principles of intuition
incomprehensible to the slower