Father Joseph Fischer, a professor at Feldskirch, is known in all the learned societies of the world for his "Die Entdeckungen der Normannen in America" and also for his "Cosmographiæ introductio" of Martin Waldseemüller, on whose map the name "America" first appeared. The maps and studies of old Huronia by Father Jones have been published by the Canadian Government.
John Baptist Belot, who died in 1904, won a reputation as an Orientalist, as did his associate Father Cheiko by his "Chrestomathia Arabica," in five volumes, and also by his Arabic Lexicon. Their fellow-worker Father Lammens is now a professor in the Biblical Institute in Rome. As they lived a considerable time in Syria they have a distinct advantage over other Europeans in this particular study.
Andrew Zottoli is an authority as a sinologist. The misfortune of being exiled from Italy in 1848 gave him the advantage, which he would not otherwise have had, of becoming proficient in Chinese, for he lived fifty-four years in Kiang-nan. Besides his Chinese catechism and grammar, he has published a complete course of Chinese literature in five volumes, and a universal dictionary of the Chinese language in twelve.
To this list may be added what a recent critic called the monumental work of the illustrious Father Beccari, known as "Scriptores rerum ægyptiacarum." It consists of sixteen volumes, and includes the entire period of Egyptian history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In this category, Father Strassmaier represents the Society by his works on Assyriology and cuneiform inscriptions. With him is Father Dahlman whose "Das Mahabharata als Epos und Rechtbuch," "Nirvana," "Buddha," and "Mahabharata Studien" have won universal applause.
Luigi Lanzi, the Italian archæologist, was born at Olmo near Macerata in 1732, and entered the Society in 1749. At its Suppression, the Grand Duke of Tuscany made him the assistant director of the Florentine Museum. He devoted himself to the study of ancient and modern literature, and was made a member of the Arcadians. The deciphering of monuments, chiefly Etruscan, was one of his favorite occupations and resulted in his writing his "Saggio di lingua etrusca" in 1789. Four years later he produced his noted "History of Painting in Italy." His other works included a critical commentary on Hesiod's "Works and Days," with a Latin and an Italian translation in verse; three books of "Inscriptiones et carmina," translations of Catullus, Theocritus and others, besides two ascetic works on St. Joseph and the Sacred Heart respectively. He died in 1810 four years before the Restoration.
Angelo Mai is one of the very attractive figures at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He had studied at the seminary of Bergamo and had as professor, Father Mozzi, a member of the suppressed Society. When the saintly Pignatelli opened the novitiate at Parma in 1799, Mozzi joined him and young Angelo who was then seventeen years old went there as a novice. He was sent to Naples in 1804 to teach humanities, but was obliged to leave when the French occupied the city. He was then summoned to Rome, and ordained a priest. While there, he met two exiled Jesuits from Spain: Monero and Monacho, who besides teaching him Hebrew and Greek, gave him his first instructions in paleography, showing him how to manipulate and decipher palimpsests. In 1813 he was compelled by the order of the duke to return to his native country, and was appointed custodian of the Ambrosian Library at Milan. There he made his first great discoveries of a number of precious manuscripts, which alone sufficed to give him an important place in the learned world. In 1819 at the suggestion of Cardinals Consalvi and Litta, the staunchest friends of the Society, Pius VII appointed him librarian of the Vatican, with the consent of the General.
From all this it is very hard to understand how Mai is generally set down as having left the Society. Albers says so in his "Liber sæcularis," Hurter in his "Nomenclator," as does Sommervogel in his "Bibliotheca," and his name does not appear in Terrien's list of those who died in the Society. In spite of all this, however, the expression "left the Society" seems a somewhat cruel term to apply to one who was evidently without reproach and who was asked for by the Sovereign Pontiff. He was made a cardinal by Gregory XVI, a promotion which his old novice master Father Pignatelli had foretold when Angelo was summoned to be librarian at Milan. He continued his work in the Vatican and gave to the world the unpublished pages of three hundred and fifty ancient authors which he had discovered.
Father Hugo Hurter calls Francesco Zaccaria of the old Society the most industrious worker in the history of literature. This praise might well be applied to himself if it were only for his wonderful "Nomenclator literarius theologiæ catholicæ." It is a catalogue of the names and works of all Catholic theological writers from the year 1564 up to the year 1894. Nor is it merely a list of names for it gives an epitome of the lives of the authors and an appreciation of their work and their relative merit in the special subject to which they devoted themselves; it thus covers the whole domain of scholastic, positive and moral theology, as well as of patrology, ecclesiastical history and the cognate sciences such as epigraphy, archæology and liturgy. It consists of five volumes with two closely printed columns on each page. The last column in the second volume is numbered 1846. After that come fifty-three pages of indexes and a single page of corrigenda in that volume alone. It is worth while noting that there are only six errors in all this bewildering mass of matter; there are, besides, three additions, not to the text, but to the index, from which the names of three writers were accidentally omitted.
So condensed is the letterpress that only a dash separates one subject from another. Nevertheless, thanks to the ingenious indexes, both of persons and subjects, the subject sought for can be found immediately. Finally, between the text and the indexes are two marvellous chronological charts. By means of the first, the student can follow year by year the growth of the various branches of theology and know the names of all the authors in each. The second chart takes the different countries of Europe — Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Germany, England, Poland and Hungary — and as you travel down the years in the succeeding centuries you can see what studies were most in favor in different parts of the world and the different stages of their history. Not only that, but a style of type, varying from a large black print, down to a very pale and small impression, gives you the relative prominence of every one of the vast multitude of authors. Such a work will last to the end of time and never lose its value, and how Father Hurter, who was the beloved spiritual father of the University of Innsbruck, whose theological faculty he entered in 1858, and who, besides publishing his unusually attractive theology and editing fifty-eight volumes of the Fathers of the Church, could find time and strength to produce his encyclopedic "Nomenclator" is almost inconceivable.
In the year 1907, the scheme of a Catholic Encyclopedia was launched in New York. The editors chosen were Dr. Charles Herbermann, for more than fifty years professor of Latin and the most distinguished member of the College of the City of New York; Mgr. Thomas Shahan, the rector of the Catholic University at Washington, and later raised to the episcopal dignity; Dr. Edward A. Pace, professor of philosophy in the same university; Dr. Condé Benoist Pallen, a well-known Catholic publicist, and Father John J. Wynne of the Society of Jesus.