The history of Father Kircher's career furnishes perhaps the best possible refutation of the oft-repeated slander that Jesuit education was narrow and was so founded upon and rooted in authority that original research and investigation, in scientific matters particularly, were impossible, and that it utterly failed to encourage new discoveries of any kind. As a matter of fact, Kircher was not only not hampered in his work by his superiors or by the ecclesiastical authorities, but the respect in which he was held at Rome enabled him to use the influence of the Church and of great churchmen all over the world, with the best possible effect, for the assembling at the Roman College of objects of the most various kinds, illustrating especially the modern sciences of archeology, ethnology, and paleontology, besides Egyptian and Assyrian history. Athanasius Kircher was born 2 May, 1602, at Geisa, near Fulda, in South Germany. He was educated at the Jesuit College of Fulda, and at {119} the early age of sixteen, having completed his college course, entered the Jesuit novitiate at Mainz. After his novitiate he continued his philosophical and classical studies at Paderborn and completed his years of scholastic teaching in various cities of South Germany--Munster, Cologne, and Coblenz--finally finishing his education by theological studies at Cologne and Mainz. Toward the end of the third decade of the seventeenth century he became Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at Würzburg. Here his interest in Oriental languages began, and he established a special course in this subject at the University of Würzburg. During the Thirty Years' War, however, the invasion of Germany very seriously disturbed university work, and finally in 1631 Father Kircher was sent by his superiors to Avignon in South France, where he continued his teaching some four years, attracting no little attention by his wide interest in many sciences and by various scientific works that showed him to be a man of very broad genius. In 1635, through the influence of Cardinal Barberini, he was summoned to Rome, where he became Professor of Mathematics and Oriental Languages in the famous Roman College of the Jesuits, which was considered at that time one of the greatest educational institutions in the world. His interest in science, however, was not lessened by teaching duties that would apparently have demanded all his time; and, as we shall see, he continued to issue books on the most diverse {120} scientific subjects, most of them illustrated by absolutely new experimental observations and all of them attracting widespread attention.