Harvey’s discoveries were generally ignored during his life, and Meibomius of Lubeck rejected his discovery in a book published after Harvey’s death.
When Newton’s investigations of light and colors were first published, “A host of enemies appeared (says Playfair), each eager to obtain the unfortunate pre-eminence of being the first to attack conclusions which the unanimous voice of posterity was to confirm.” Some, like Mariotte, professed to repeat his experiments, and succeeded in making a failure, which was published; like certain professors who at different times have undertaken to make unsuccessful experiments in mesmerism and spiritualism, and have always succeeded in making the failure they desired.
Voltaire remarks, and Playfair confirms it as a fact, “that though the author of the Principia survived the publication of that great work nearly forty years, he had not at the time of his death, twenty followers out of England.”
If educated bigotry could thus resist the mathematical demonstrations of Newton, and the physical demonstrations of Harvey, has human nature sufficiently advanced to induce us to expect much better results from the colleges of to-day—from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest? If such a change has occurred, I have not discovered it.
Neglect and opposition has ever been the lot of the original explorer of nature. Kepler, the greatest astronomical genius of his time, continually struggled with poverty, and earned a scanty subsistence by casting astrological nativities.
Eustachius, who in the 16th century discovered the Eustachian tube and the valves of the heart, was about 200 years in advance of his time, but was unable, from poverty, to publish his anatomical tables, which were published by Lancisi 140 years later, in 1714.
Not only in science do we find this stolid indifference or active hostility to new ideas, but in matters of the simplest character and most obvious utility. For example, this country is now enjoying the benefits of fish culture, but why did we not enjoy it a hundred years ago? The process was discovered by the Count De Goldstein in the last century, and was published by the Academy of Sciences, and also fully illustrated by a German named Jacobi, who applied it to breeding trout and salmon. This seems to have been forgotten until in 1842 two obscure and illiterate fishermen rediscovered and practised this process. The French government was attracted by the success of these fisherman, Gehin and Remy, and thus the lost art was revived.
Even so simple an invention as the percussion cap, invented in 1807, was not introduced in the British army until after the lapse of thirty years.
The founder of the kindergarten system, Friedrich Froebel, is one of the benefactors of humanity. How narrowly did he escape from total failure and oblivion.
The “Reminiscences of Frederich Froebel,” translated from the German of the late Mrs. Mary Mann, gives an interesting account of his life and labors, upon which the following notice is based: