After his death the Medici family asked for and obtained the privilege of having his body buried in San Lorenzo at Florence, with the members of the princely Medici house. More and more do visitors realize that the tablet over his remains chronicles the death of a man who was undoubtedly one of the world's great scientists, and one of the most original thinkers of his time, and that time a period greatly fertile in the history of science. {167} VII. ABBÉ HAÜY, FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY. {168} They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number and measure and weight, and from the ineffaceable characters impressed on them we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, truth in statement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are essential constituents of the image of Him who in the beginning created not only heaven and earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.--CLERK MAXWELL _On the Molecule_, "Nature," Vol. VIII. 1873. [Illustration: RÉNÉ JUST HAÜY] {169} VII. ABBÉ HAÜY, [Footnote 13] FATHER OF CRYSTALLOGRAPHY [Footnote 13: Pronounced a-ue (Century Dictionary), Nearly Represented By _ah-we_.] Modern learning is gradually losing something of the self-complacency that characterized it in so constantly harboring the thought that the most important discoveries in physical science came in the nineteenth century. A more general attention to critical history has led to the realization that many of the primal discoveries whose importance made the development of modern science possible, came in earlier centuries, though their full significance was not then fully appreciated. The foundations of most of our modern sciences were, indeed, laid in the eighteenth century, but some of them came much earlier. It is genius alone that is able to break away from established traditions of knowledge, and, stepping across the boundary into the unknown, blaze a path along which it will be easy for subsequent workers to follow. Only in recent years has the due meed of appreciation for these great pioneers become part of the precious traditions of scientific knowledge. We have seen that clergymen were great original investigators in science in the older times and we shall find, though it may be a source of {170} astonishment to most people that even our modern science has had some supreme original workers, during the last two centuries, in the ranks of the Catholic clergy.