he would often shake his head with an air of doubt, as he smiled and
murmured: "_transeat_." In regard to chemistry, no common knowledge
was attributed to him after he had taken as a premise the statement of
St. Thomas that water is a mixture and proved plainly that the Angelic
Doctor had long forestalled Berzelius, Gay-Lussac, Bunsen, and other
more or less presumptuous materialists. Moreover, in spite of having
been an instructor in geography, he still entertained certain doubts as
to the rotundity of the earth and smiled maliciously when its rotation
and revolution around the sun were mentioned, as he recited the verses


"El mentir de las estrellas
Es un cómodo mentir." [29]


He also smiled maliciously in the presence of certain physical
theories and considered visionary, if not actually insane, the
Jesuit Secchi, to whom he imputed the making of triangulations on
the host as a result of his astronomical mania, for which reason it
was said that he had been forbidden to celebrate mass. Many persons
also noticed in him some aversion to the sciences that he taught,
but these vagaries were trifles, scholarly and religious prejudices
that were easily explained, not only by the fact that the physical
sciences were eminently practical, of pure observation and deduction,
while his forte was philosophy, purely speculative, of abstraction
and induction, but also because, like any good Dominican, jealous
of the fame of his order, he could hardly feel any affection for a
science in which none of his brethren had excelled--he was the first
who did not accept the chemistry of St. Thomas Aquinas--and in which
so much renown had been acquired by hostile, or rather, let us say,