We need not
refer again to the cases of Bruno, Galileo, and others, (6)
persecuted because of the supposed heterodoxy of their views. But
there have been other unfortunates amongst men of science, whose
genius has been unable to save them from the fury of their
enemies. Thus Bailly, the celebrated French astronomer (who had
been mayor of Paris), and Lavoisier, the great chemist, were both
guillotined in the first French Revolution. When the latter,
after being sentenced to death by the Commune, asked for a few
days' respite, to enable him to ascertain the result of some
experiments he had made during his confinement, the tribunal
refused his appeal, and ordered him for immediate execution--one
of the judges saying, that "the Republic had no need of
philosophers." In England also, about the same time, Dr.
Priestley, the father of modern chemistry, had his house burnt
over his head, and his library destroyed, amidst shouts of "No
philosophers!" and he fled from his native country to lay his
bones in a foreign land.
The work of some of the greatest discoverers has been done in the
midst of persecution, difficulty, and suffering. Columbus, who
discovered the New World and gave it as a heritage to the Old, was
in his lifetime persecuted, maligned, and plundered by those whom
he had enriched. Mungo Park's drowning agony in the African river
he had discovered, but which he was not to live to describe;
Clapperton's perishing of fever on the banks of the great lake, in
the heart of the same continent, which was afterwards to be
rediscovered and described by other explorers; Franklin's
perishing in the snow--it might be after he had solved the long-
sought problem of the North-west Passage--are among the most
melancholy events in the history of enterprise and genius.
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