The eighteenth century was not behind the seventeenth in original contributions made to science by clergymen. About the middle of the century, a Premonstratensian monk, Procopius Dirwisch by name, of the little town of Prenditz in Bohemia, demonstrated the identity of electrical phenomena with lightning, thus anticipating the work of our own Franklin. Dirwisch dared to set up a lightning-conductor, by which during thunderstorms he obtained sparks from clouds, and also learned to appreciate the danger involved in this experiment. When, in 1751, he printed his article on this subject, he pointed out this danger. His warning, however, was not always heeded, and at least one subsequent experimenter was struck dead by a charge of electricity. Just at the junction of the last two centuries, Father Piazzi enriched the realm of science by one of the most important of modern discoveries in astronomy. On the night of 31 December, 1800--1 January, 1801, he discovered the little planet Ceres. This was the first of the asteroids, so many more of which were to be revealed to astronomical study during the next half-century. Father Piazzi's discovery was made, not by accident, but as the result of detailed astronomical work of the most painstaking character. He {171} had set out to make a map of the heavens, and to determine and locate the absolute position of all the visible stars. He had succeeded in cataloguing over 7,000 stars when his attention was called to one, hitherto supposed to be fixed, which he found had moved, during the interval between two observations, from its original position. He made still other observations, and thus determined the fact that it was a planetoid and not a fixed star with which he had to deal. Needless to say, his discovery proved a strong incentive to patient astronomical study of the same kind; and it is to these, rather than to great single discoveries, that we owe whatever progress in astronomy was made during the nineteenth century. Contemporary with both of these last-mentioned men, and worthy to share in the scientific honors that were theirs, was the Abbé Haüy, who toward the end of the second half of the eighteenth century founded the science of crystallography; made a series of observations the value of which can never be disputed, originated theories some of which have served down to our own time as the basis of crystal knowledge, and attracted the attention of many students to the new science because of his charming personal character and his winning teaching methods. His life is a typical example of the value of work done in patient obscurity, founded on observation, and not on brilliant theories; and what he accomplished stamps him as one of the great {172} scientific geniuses of all time--one of the men who widened the bounds of knowledge in directions hitherto considered inaccessible to the ordinary methods of human investigation.