It was not till 1620 that Fienus, a physician of Louvain, in Belgium, published the first book of modern times that came near the truth. He maintained that the human soul was created and infused into the embryo three days after conception. Nearly forty years later, in 1658, a religious priest, called Florentinius, wrote a book in which he taught that, for all we know, the soul may be intellectual or human from the first moment of conception; and the Pope's physician Zachias soon after maintained the thesis as a certainty that the human embryo has from the very beginning a human soul. Great writers applauded Fienus and his successors; universities favored their views; the Benedictines, the Dominicans, and the Jesuits supported them. Modern science claims to have proved beyond all doubt that the same soul animates the man that animated the fœtus from the very moment of conception. The "Medical Jurisprudence" of Wharton and Stillé quotes Dr. Hodge of the Pennsylvania University as follows (p. 11): "In a most mysterious manner brought into existence, how wonderful its formation! Imperfect in the first instance, nay, even invisible to the naked eye, the embryo is nevertheless endowed, at once, with the principles of vitality; and although retained in the system of its mother, it has, in a strict sense, an independent existence. It immediately manifests all the phenomena of _organic_ life; it forms its own fluids and circulates them; it is nourished and developed; and, very rapidly from being a _rudis indigestaque moles_, apparently an inorganic drop of fluid, its organs are generated and its form perfected. It daily gains strength and grows; and, while still within the organ of its mother, manifests some of the phenomena of animal life, especially as regards mobility. After the fourth month its motions are perceptible to the mother, and in a short period can be perceived by other individuals on close investigation. "The usual impression," the authors add, "and one which is probably still maintained by the mass of the community, is that the embryo is perfected at the period of quickening--say the one hundred and twelfth or one hundred and twentieth day. When the mother first perceives motion, is considered the period when the fœtus becomes animated--when it receives its spiritual nature into union with its corporeal. "These and similar suppositions are, as has been already shown, contrary to all fact, and, if it were not for the high authorities--medical, legal, and theological--in opposition, we might add, to common-sense." At present, gentlemen, there seems to be no longer any authority to the contrary. But many people, and some Doctors, seem to be several generations behind the times; for they still act and reason as if in the first weeks of pregnancy no immortal or human soul were in question.