Libri, in his first Essai sur Galilee, p.

37, says that Oliva was summoned to Rome and so tortured by the Inquisition that, to escape further cruelty, he ended his life by throwing himself from a window.
For interference by Pope Gregory XVI with the Academy of the Lincei, and with public instruction generally, see Carutti, Storia della Accademia dei Lincei, p.126.Pius IX, with all his geniality, seems to have allowed his hostility to voluntary associations to carry him very far at times.

For his answer to an application made through Lord Odo Russell regarding a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals and his answer that "such an association could not be sanctioned by the Holy See, being founded on a theological error, to wit, that Christians owed any duties to animals," see Frances Power Cobbe, Hopes of the Human Race, p.

207.
A hostility similar in kind, though less in degree, was shown in Protestant countries.
Even after Thomasius in Germany and Voltaire in France and Beccaria in Italy had given final blows to the belief in magic and witchcraft throughout Christendom, the traditional orthodox distrust of the physical sciences continued for a long time.
In England a marked dislike was shown among various leading ecclesiastics and theologians towards the Royal Society, and later toward the Association for the Advancement of Science; and this dislike, as will hereafter be seen, sometimes took shape in serious opposition.
As a rule, both in Protestant and Catholic countries instruction in chemistry and physics was for a long time discouraged by Church authorities; and, when its suppression was no longer possible, great pains were taken to subordinate it to instruction supposed to be more fully in accordance with the older methods of theological reasoning.
I have now presented in outline the more direct and open struggle of the physical sciences with theology, mainly as an exterior foe.

We will next consider their warfare with the same foe in its more subtle form, mainly as a vitiating and sterilizing principle in science itself.
We have seen thus far, first, how such men as Eusebius, Lactantius, and their compeers, opposed scientific investigation as futile; next, how such men as Albert the Great, St.Thomas Aquinas, and the multitude who followed them, turned the main current of medieval thought from science to theology; and, finally, how a long line of Church authorities from Popes John XXII and Innocent VIII, and the heads of the great religious orders, down to various theologians and ecclesiastics, Catholic and Protestant, of a very recent period, endeavoured first to crush and afterward to discourage scientific research as dangerous.
Yet, injurious as all this was to the evolution of science, there was developed something in many respects more destructive; and this was the influence of mystic theology, penetrating, permeating, vitiating, sterilizing nearly every branch of science for hundreds of years.