Probably there is no more serious blot on the history of education and, above all, the history of science, than the fact that men supposed to be scholarly have been so ready to accept absolutely ignorant statements with regard to the state of science during the Middle Ages. It would be amusing, if it were not so amazing, to recall the utter lack of scholarship that characterized the men who wrote such things, but above all the generations that accepted such history as solemn truth and even conferred academic dignities and degrees on such men. Take a book like Dr. Draper's "Conflict of Science and Religion." It {150} is founded on the uttermost lack of knowledge of the subjects of which he speaks. It is true that he has consulted historical writers. They were all secondary authorities. He had never gone back to look up a single original document of any kind. He was a physician; supposedly at least, then, he should know the history of medicine. He knows nothing at all about the great medical schools of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; of the great period of surgery that occurred at this time he has no inkling. Had he cared really to know anything about the period he could have seen some of the text-books written by these men. Instead we have an exhibition, in his book, of the most consummate assumption of knowledge associated with sublime ignorance and bitter condemnation for old institutions, educational and ecclesiastical, in matters of which he knows nothing, though if he did know, his opinion would surely be just the opposite to that he has expressed. To a great degree this is true of President White's "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology." Secondary authorities constantly figure in it, and they are quoted from, as a rule, with the definite idea of proving a particular thesis--that theology is opposed to science. Of course it is very different to that of Draper, there is much more of true scholarship in it, but it is sad to think that the prestige of a president of a great university who had been a professor of {151} history should have been lent to statements so egregiously misleading as those which are constantly to be found in his work. Even sadder it is to think that this has been accepted by many people as a scholarly work and as representing the last word on the subject.