of his sacred office. One often found the old white-haired man on his knees reading his breviary; he said Mass every day, as long as he retained sufficient strength for anything." He was buried in the Jesuithabit which he had worn for half a century 1.

3

4

We could find among botanists a wealth of names friendly to religion as e. g. Jussieu 2 († 1836); Benjamin Delessert († 1847); F. H. Link († 1851); Karl Adolf Agardh († 1859), who was the first to undertake the study of seaweeds and who as Swedish Bishop of Karlstad 5 wrote against D. F. Strauss; Adalbert Schnizlein 6 († 1868); H. G. L. Reichenbach († 1879); L. R. Tulasne († 1885); P. E. Boissier († 1885); M. Willkomm († 1895). One of the most distinguished of the more recent Botanists was Alexander Braun († 1877).

"What distinguishes Braun's scientific works", writes a biographer, "is not merely their vast range though there is no department of botanical science which he has not mastered and developed and the depth and penetration of his mind, but also the steadiness with which he keeps his eye fixed on a higher goal. He is never content with the study of particular phenomena, master though he is of observational methods; his eye is ever fixed on the totality of nature, the living interrelation of all its parts, the great general laws through which we reach back to the ultimate

1 Allgemeine Zeitung 1836, 94.

2 A.-M. Ampère, Essai sur la philosophie des sciences II, Paris 1843, XXXIV.

3 Flourens, Recueil des éloges II, Paris 1857, 325-386.

4 v. Martius in Bulletin der k. Akademie der Wissenschaften,

München 1851, 218-220.

5 H. Steffens, Was ich erlebte IX, Breslau 1844, 144.

Allgemeine deutsche Biographie XXXII, 178.

7 Leopoldina XVII, Halle 1881, 35.

8 Ib. XIII, Halle 1877, 68-69.

...

source of being. . . In all his writings and addresses we find him insisting that all true science must lead from the created to the Creator. To him ‘Nature is not dead matter, not a cunning mechanism kept in motion by unknown forces, but the ordered history of the evolution of life, life coming from that Creator, Whom through analysis of his own life he finds to be the source of all being and all force, and to Whom he reverently prays'"1.

In his address on "The Significance of Morphology' (1862) and "The Significance of Evolution in the History of Nature" (1872) the freedom of mind with which he discusses Darwinism, not rejecting it, but pleading for a deepening of the theory so as to harmonise it with morphological laws, is very notable.

Of Braun's private life his biographer writes 2:

"Under all these trials (family losses) he showed patience and humility; his profoundly religious mind accepted joy and sorrow as coming alike from the hand of God, Whose love is shown in taking away as in giving."

Johannes Hanstein († 1880), the Bonn botanist, maintained that "physico-chemical forces are quite insufficient to explain organic life". "Organic life becomes intelligible only when interpreted teleologically, and from the point of view of purpose.” 3

If Hanstein appealed to Botany against Darwinism it was from the same science that the most uncompromising and convinced opponent of that form of the theory of evolution drew his chief arguments. J. W. Albert Wigand († 1886), Professor in Marburg, may have

1 A. Braun, Über den Zusammenhang der naturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen unter sich und mit der Wissenschaft im allgemeinen, Leipzig 1855, 23.

2 Leopoldina XIII, Halle 1877, 71.

3 Ib. XVII, Halle 1881, 77-78.

HANSTEIN. WIGAND. VON MÜLLER. LEUNIS. HLADNIK. 361

borne himself a little too savagely in polemics, but he certainly showed the inadequacy of the Darwinian theory to explain the actual facts of development. Wigand was a fervent Christian as well as a leader of science, and he died in the conviction that between science and religion there is no enmity or antithesis 1. Ferdinand Von Müller († 1896), Professor of the Australian Geographical Society, and "admittedly the first authority on the flora of Australia" 2 distinguished above all as a "systematiser" "made it a practice to enrich his works with carefully chosen Latin mottoes, commonly drawn from the Bible, declaring the glory of the Almighty as manifested in the creation" 3.

Johannes Leunis († 1873), who won considerable distinction in Botany, was a Catholic priest 1. His celebrated "Synopsis of the three Kingdoms of Nature" gives a survey of the subject, so exhaustive and systematic, that, brought down to date by various editors, it still holds its ground as a standard text-book. . . . Leunis' "Guide to Nature-study" gave a great impulse in that respect to his generation in Germany.

With Leunis we may associate an Austrian savant, Franz de Paula Hladnik († 1844 at Laibach). He was at once priest, professor, and botanist. As a teacher he raised scientific teaching in the Laibach

1 Berichte der deutschen botanischen Gesellschaft V (1887), XLIX. 2 Leopoldina XXXIII, Halle 1897, 15.

3 Ib. 149.

4 L. Kellner, Lebensblätter 2, Freiburg 1892, 19-23. K. L. Grube, Joh. Leunis nach seinem Leben und Wirken, Hannover 1876. Natur u. Schule I, Leipzig u. Berlin 1902, 257-264. Frankfurter Zeitung vom 6. Juni 1902 (Wochenausgabe) Nr. 23, p. 362 (only School Anecdotes).

Gymnasium to a very high standard; he "held a foremost place in Botany", and enjoyed the friendship of all the masters of that science. His writings scientific, spiritual, and ascetic were never given to the public 1.

"One of the first, probably the very first", to combine photography with the microscope, was Francesco Castracane degli Antelminelli († 1899). He specialised on the diatoms, one of the minutest of the algae. The collection of diatoms obtained by the celebrated Challenger Expedition was sent to him for examination; he discovered three new genera, 225 new species, and some 30 varieties. His contributions to the biological study of his subject were perhaps of even greater importance than those made from the point of view of systematisation. Castracane was a Catholic priest, and a man of the most remarkable piety 2.

Equally fervent and simple in his Catholicity was Philipp Parlatore († 1877). His principal work in Botany was a Flora Italiana, six volumes of which had been completed at his death. He wrote the sections on Gnetaceae and Conifers for De Candolle's Prodromus, and those on umbellates and grasses for Webb's "Natural History of the Canary Islands" and published descriptions of the flora of the Mont-Blanc range and of Lapland founded on original observation. In his

1 C. v. Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon des Kaisertums Österreich IX, Wien 1863, 60.

2 Biologisches Zentralblatt XX, Leipzig 1900, 401-412 433-451. A short memoir by P. Damanti, I contributi del Clero italiano alla scienza botanica nel secolo XIX, Palermo 1902, enumerates some twenty members of the italian clergy, who have done good work in botany.

scientific works we find numerous passages in which he breaks out into reverent praise of the Author of creation 1.

Of the more recently deceased masters of Botany we may cite Max Westermaier († 1903), Professor at Freiburg (in Switzerland) from 1896, as an example of a scientist who combined the scientific with the religious temper 2. On the religious significance of scientific research he writes as follows:

"Radical errors in science in other words, a falsification of what stands written in the book of nature is all the more capable of corrupting the human mind inasmuch as the reward set on a true knowledge of the physical universe is no other and no less than a true knowledge of God. This path to God is open to all men, even to those who have never heard of Christ or Christianity, and all reasonable men must perceive and pursue it. And it is because true science is so great and noble a thing, that false science must produce such bitter and fatal fruits."

XI. THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION.

"It is evident", writes the celebrated zoologist Richard Owen at the end of his work "The Principles of Zoology", "that there is a manifest progress in the succession of beings on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an increasing similarity to the living fauna, and among the verte

1 Gedenkrede von Kard. L. Haynald in Literarische Berichte aus Ungarn, herausgeg. von P. Hunfalvy III, Budapest 1879. Auszug in Natur und Offenbarung XXVI, Münster 1880, 177–183. Cf. Allgemeine Zeitung 1854, 1577; 1877, 3974.

2 Kölnische Volkszeitung 1903, Nr. 502. Rev. de Fribourg XXXIV, Fribourg 1903, 296 f; XXXV (1904) 73 f.

3 Jahresbericht der Görres-Gesellschaft für das Jahr 1895, Köln 1896, 19.