of Science.

To those who believed that the earth was flat it was somewhat startling to
be told that there were antipodes. This elementary truth of cosmology
Bishop Virgil of Salzbourg was courageous enough to assert as early as
A.D. 764. He wrote a book in which he stated that men of another race, not
sprung from Adam, lived in the world beneath our feet. This work aroused
the anger of Pope Zacharias II, who wrote to the King of Bavaria that
Virgil should be expelled from the temple of God and the Church, and
deprived of God and the Church, and deprived of his office, unless he
confessed his perverse errors. In spite of the censure and sentence of
excommunication pronounced upon him, Bishop Virgil was canonised by Pope
Gregory XI.; thus, in spite of his misfortunes brought about by his book,
his memory was revered and honoured by the Western Church.

If the account of his imprisonment be true (of which there is no
contemporary evidence) our own celebrated English philosopher, Roger
Bacon, is one of the earliest scientific authors whose works proved fatal
to them. In 1267 he sent his book, _Opus Majus_, together with his _Opus
Minus_, an abridgement of his former work, to Pope Clement IV. After the
death of that Pope Bacon was cited by the General of the Franciscan order,
to which he belonged, to appear before his judges at Paris, where he was
condemned to imprisonment. He is said to have languished in the dungeon
fourteen years, and, worn out by his sufferings, to have died in his
beloved Oxford during the year of his release, 1292. The charge of magic
was freely brought against him. His great work, which has been termed "the
_Encyclopaedia_ and the _Novum Organum_ of the thirteenth century,"
discloses an unfettered mind and judgment far in advance of the spirit of
the age in which he lived. In addition to this he wrote _Compendium
Philosophiae_, _De mirabili Potestate artis et naturae, Specula