"This will all come right, I hope," growled Beatty, as he took his hat and

cane.

"It has all come right, sir," smiled the Master, as the man passed out.

Margaret hurried away with her aching heart and hid herself in her room. "Poor, disillusioned child!" sighed her father.

Yet, was there music in the Master's house that night-wild, exultant music of jubilee and rejoicing. And the Master sang

"Far dearer the grave or the prison,

Illumed by one patriot name, Than the triumphs of all who have risen On liberty's ruins to fame."

Two days later Samuel Beatty, R. I. C., vanished from Derreen, whither no one knew. Rumor had it that a paternal Government had spirited him to Canada, there to forget the past, if he could.

But the same Government, through its Chief Secretary for Ireland, under the merciless questioning of the Member, repudiated Beatty with all his works and pomps, promising prompt reparation to Shawn Conlan for the wrong done him.

Death, however, anticipated the Government. Death had no red tape to hamper his merciful movements, and, on the day that orders for his release reached the jail where he was confined, John Conlan passed away in his prison cell.

"Vindicated!" commented the Master, when he read of the Government's action. "Vindicated! yet as truly a martyr of freedom as Emmet or Tone or Lord Edward."

And it was he who, by the open grave in Kilcoleman, voiced the popular mind: "Blessed are they who suffer persecution for justice' sake. Theirs is the kingdom of Heaven!"

I

T is only what might have been expected however, from Roger Bacon's training that he should have made great progress in the physical sciences. At the University of Paris his favorite teacher was Albertus Magnus, who was himself deeply interested in all the physical sciences, though he was more concerned with the study of chemical problems than of the physical questions which were to occupy his greatest pupil. There is no doubt at all that Albertus Magnus accomplished a great amount of experimental work in chemistry and lad made a large series of actual observations. He was a theologian as well as a philosopher and a scientist. Some idea of the immense industry of the man can be obtained from the fact that his complete works as published consist of twentyone large folio volumes, each one of which contains on the average at least 500,000 words.

Among these works are many treatises relating to chemistry. The titles of some of them will serve to show how explicit was Albert in his consideration of various chemical subjects. He has treatises "Concerning Metals and Minerals;" "Concerning Alchemy;" "A Treatise on the Secret of Chemistry;" "A Concordance," that is, a collection. of observations from many sources with regard to the Philosopher's Stone; "A Brief Compend on the Origin of the Metals;" "A Treatise on Compounds." Most of these are to be found in his works under

of chemistry very accurately and showed that he understood exactly what the subject and methods of investigation must be in order that advance should be made in it. Of chemistry he speaks in his "Opus Tertium" in the following words: "There is a science which treats of the generation of things from their elements and of all inanimate things, as of the elements and liquids, simple and compound, common stones, gems and marbles, gold and other metals, sulphur, salts, pigments, lapis lazuli, minium and other colors, oils, bitumen, and infinite more of which we find nothing in the books of Aristotle; nor are the natural philosophers nor any of the Latins acquainted with these things."

In physics Albertus Magnus was, if possible, more advanced and progressive even than in chemistry. His knowledge in the physical sciences was not merely speculative, but partook to a great degree of the nature of what we now call applied science. Humboldt, the distinguished German natural philosopher of the beginning of the nineteenth century, who was undoubtedly the most important leader in scientific thought in his time, and whose own work was great enough to have an enduring influence in spite of the immense progress of the nineteenth century, has summed up Albert's work and given the headings under which his scientific research must be considered. He says: "Albertus Magnus was equally active and influential in promoting the study of natural science and of the Aristotelian philosophy. * * His works contain some exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants. One of his works, bearing the title, 'Liber Cosmographicus de Natura Locorum,’

"Theatrum Chemicum."

It is not surprising for those who know of Albert's work to find that his pupil, Roger Bacon, defined the limits

represented in many minds by the term. scholastic.

"He decides that the Milky Way is a vast assemblage of stars, but supposed, naturally enough, that they occupy the orbit which receives the light of the sun. 'The figures visible on the moon's disc are not,' he says, 'as hitherto has been supposed, reflections of the seas and mountains of the earth, but configurations of her own surface.' He notices, in order to correct it, the assertions of Aristotle that lunar rainbows appear only twice in fifty years. 'I myself,' he says, 'have observed two in a single year.' He has something to say on the refraction of a solar ray, notices certain crystals which have a power of refraction, and remarks that none of the ancients and few moderns were acquainted with the properties of mirrors."

Albert's great pupil, Roger Bacon, is rightly looked upon as the true father of inductive science, an honor that history. has unfortunately taken from him to confer it undeservedly on his namesake of four centuries later, but the teaching out of which Roger Bacon was to develop the principles of experimental science can be found in many places in the Master's writings. In Albert's tenth book, wherein he catalogues and describes all the trees, plants, and herbs known in his time, he observes: "All that is here set down is the result of our own experience, or has been borrowed from authors whom we know have written what their personal experience has confirmed for in these matters experience alone can give certainty." "Such an expression," says his biographer, "which might have proceeded from the pen of (Francis) Bacon, argues in itself a prodigious scientific progress, and shows that the medieval friar was on the track so successfully pursued by modern natural philosophy. He had fairly fairly shaken off the shackles which had hitherto tied up discovery, and was the slave neither of Pliny nor Aristotle."

Botany is supposed to be a very modern science, and to most people Humboldt's expression that he found in the writings of Albertus Magnus some "exceedingly acute remarks on the organic structure and physiology of plants" will come as a supreme surprise. A few details with regard to Albert's botanical knowledge, however, will serve to heighten that surprise and to show that the foolish tirades of modern sciolists, who have often expressed their wonder that with all the beauties of nature around them these scholars of the Middle Ages did not devote themselves to nature study, are absurd, because if the critics but knew it there was profound interest in nature and all her manifestations, and a series of discoveries that anticipated not a little of what we consider most important in our modern sciences. The story of Albert's botanical knowledge has been told in a single very full paragraph by his biographer, who also quotes an appreciative opinion from a modern German botanist which will serve to dispel any doubts with regard to Albert's position in botany that modern students might perhaps continue to harbor unless they had good authority to support their opinion; though of course it will be remembered that the main difference between the medieval and the modern mind is only too often said to be, that the medieval required an authority while the modern makes its opinions for itself. Even the most sceptical of modern minds, however, will probably be satisfied by the following paragraph:

"He was acquainted with the sleep of plants, with the periodical opening and closing of blossoms, with the diminution of a sap through evaporation from the cuticle of the leaves, and with the influence of the distribution of the bundles of vessels on the folial indentations. His minute observations on the forms and variety of plants intimate an exquisite sense of floral beauty. He dis

*

tinguishes the star from the bell-flower, tells us that a red rose will turn white when submitted to the vapor of sulphur, and makes some very sagacious observations on the subject of germination. * The extraordinary erudition and originality of this treatise (his tenth book) has drawn from M. Meyer the following comment: 'No botanist who lived before Albert can be compared to him, unless Theophrastus, with whom he was not acquainted; and after him. none has painted nature in such living colors or studied it so profoundly until the time of Conrad, Gesner, and Cesalpino.' All honor, then, to the man who made such astonishing progress in the science of Nature as to find no one, I will not say to surpass, but even to equal him for the space of three centuries."

This wonderful thirteenth century contributed also much to the knowledge of geographical science. Even before the great explorers of this time had accomplished their work, this particular branch of science had made such great progress as would bring it quite within the domain of what we call the science of geography at the present time. When we remember how much has been said about the ignorance of the men of the later Middle Ages as regards the shape of the earth, the inhabitants of it, and how many foolish notions they are supposed to have accepted with regard to the limitation of possible residents of the world, and their queer ideas as to the antipodes, the following passages, taken from Albert's biographer, will serve better than anything else to show how absurdly the traditional opinions with regard to this time and its knowledge have been permitted by educators to tinge what are supposed to be serious. opinions with regard to the subjects of education in that time:

"He treats as fabulous the commonlyreceived idea, in which Bede had acquiesced, that the region of the earth south of the equator was uninhabitable,

and considers that, from the equator to the south pole, the earth was not only habitable, but in all probability actually inhabited, except directly at the poles, where he imagines the cold to be excessive. If there be any animals there, he says, they must have very thick skins. to defend them from the rigor of the climate, and they are probably of a white color. The intensity of cold is, however, tempered by the action of the sea. He describes the antipodes and the countries they comprise, and divides the climate of the earth into seven zones. He smiles with a scholar's freedom at the simplicity of those who suppose that persons living at the opposite region of the earth must fall off-an opinion that can only rise out of the grossest ignorance, 'for when we speak of the lower hemisphere, this must be understood merely as relatively to ourselves.' It is as a geographer that Albert's superiority to the writers of his own time chiefly appears. Bearing in mind the astonishing ignorance which then prevailed on this subject, it is truly admirable to find him correctly tracing the chief mountain chains of Europe, with the rivers which take their source in each; remarking on portions of coast which have in later times been submerged by the ocean, and islands which have been raised by volcanic action above the level of the sea; noticing the modification of climate caused by mountains, seas and forests, and the division of the human race, whose differences he ascribes to the effect upon them of the countries they inhabit! In speaking of the British Isles, he alludes to the commonly-received idea that another distant island called Tile, or Thule, existed far in the Western Ocean, uninhabitable by reason of its frightful climate, but which, he says, has perhaps not yet been visited by man.

Nothing will so seriously disturb the complacency of modern minds as to the wonderful advances that have been made