especially one at Mantua, where, after the manner of the time, he
successfully defended several hundred theses against all comers,
attracted wide attention, so that the Bishop gave him a
professorship, and the Duke, who, like some other crowned heads
of those days,--notably Henry VIII. and James I.,--liked to
dabble in theology, made him a court theologian. But the duties
of this position were uncongenial: a flippant duke, fond of
putting questions which the wisest theologian could not answer,
and laying out work which the young scholar evidently thought
futile, apparently wearied him. He returned to the convent of the
Servites at Venice, and became, after a few years' novitiate, a
friar, changing, at the same time, his name; so that, having been
baptized Peter, he now became Paul.

His career soon seemed to reveal another and underlying cause of
his return: he evidently felt the same impulse which stirred his
contemporaries, Lord Bacon and Galileo; for he began devoting
himself to the whole range of scientific and philosophical
studies, especially to mathematics, physics, astronomy, anatomy,
and physiology. In these he became known as an authority, and
before long was recognized as such through out Europe. It is
claimed, and it is not improbable, that he anticipated Harvey in
discovering the circulation of the blood, and that he was the
forerunner of noted discoveries in magnetism. Unfortunately the
loss of the great mass of his papers by the fire which destroyed
his convent in 1769 forbids any full estimate of his work; but it
is certain that among those who sought his opinion and advice
were such great discoverers as Acquapendente, Galileo,
Torricelli, and Gilbert of Colchester, and that every one of
these referred to him as an equal, and indeed as a master. It