Owing to the Galileo controversy, astronomy is ordinarily supposed to have been another of the sciences to which it was extremely indiscreet at least, not to say dangerous, for a clergyman to devote himself. The great founder of modern astronomy, however, Copernicus, was not only a clergyman, but one indeed so faithful and ardent that it is said to have been owing to his efforts that the diocese in which he lived did not go over to Lutheranism during his lifetime, as did most of the other dioceses in that part of Germany. The fact that Copernicus's book was involved in the Galileo trial has rendered his {9} position still further misunderstood, but the matter is fully cleared up in the subsequent sketch of his life. As a matter of fact, it is in astronomy particularly that clergymen have always been in the forefront of advance; and it must not be forgotten that it was the Catholic Church that secured the scientific data necessary for the correction of the Julian Calendar, and that it was a pope who proclaimed the advisability of the correction to the world. Down to our own day there have always been very prominent clergymen astronomers. One of the best known names in the history of the astronomy of the nineteenth century is that of Father Piazzi, to whom we owe the discovery of the first of the asteroids. Other well-known names, such as Father Secchi, who was the head of the papal observatory at Rome, and Father Perry, the English Jesuit, might well be mentioned. The papal observatory at Rome has for centuries been doing some of the best work in astronomy accomplished anywhere, although it has always been limited in its means, has had inadequate resources to draw on, and has succeeded in accomplishing what it has done only because of the generous devotion of those attached to it. To go back to the Galileo controversy for a moment, there seems no better answer to the assertion that his trial shows clearly the opposition between religion, or at least ecclesiastical authorities, and science, than to recall, as we have done, in writing the accompanying sketch of the {10} life of Father Kircher, S.J., that just after the trial Roman ecclesiastics very generally were ready to encourage liberally a man who devoted himself to all forms of physical science, who was an original thinker in many of them, who was a great teacher, whose writings did more to disseminate knowledge of advances in science than those of any man of his time, and whose idea of the collection of scientific curiosities into a great museum at Rome (which still bears his name) was one of the fertile germinal suggestions in which modern science was to find seeds for future growth.