Perhaps no better answer to this unfortunate, because absolutely untrue, impression could be in {112} formulated than is to be found in a sketch of the career of Father Athanasius Kircher, the distinguished Jesuit who for so many years occupied himself with nearly every branch of science in Rome, under the fostering care of the Church. He had been Professor of Physics, Mathematics, and Oriental Languages at Würzburg, but was driven from there by the disturbances incident to the Thirty Years' War, in 1631. He continued his scientific investigation at Avignon. From here, within two years after Galileo's trial in 1635, he was, through the influence of Cardinal Barberini, summoned to Rome, where he devoted himself to mathematics at first, and then to every branch of science, as well as the Oriental languages, not only with the approval, but also with the most liberal pecuniary aid from the ecclesiastical authorities of the papal court and city. Some idea of the breadth of Father Kircher's scientific sympathy and his genius for scientific observation and discovery, which amounted almost to intuition, may be gathered from the fact that to him we owe the first definite statement of the germ theory of disease; and he seems to have been the first to recognize the presence of what are now called microbes. At the same time his works on magnetism contained not only all the knowledge of his own time, but also some wonderful suggestions as to the possibilities of the development of this science. His studies with regard to light are almost as epochal as those with regard to magnetism. Besides these, he {113} was the first to find any clue to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and yet found time to write a geographical work on Latium, the country surrounding Rome, and to make collections for his museum which rendered it in its time the best scientific collection in the world. It may very well indeed be said that visitors to Rome with scientific tendencies found as much that was suggestive in Father Kircher's museum--the "Kircherianum," as it came to be called--as artists and sculptors and architects found in the Vatican collections of the papal city.