CHAPTER VII.

Among the Jesuit scholars of the last decades mention should have been made of the sinologist Father Angelo Zottoli, who died in the College of Zi-ka-wei, near Shanghai, November 9, 1902. In 1876, Baron von Richthofen, in his work on China, expressed his regret that the Jesuit missionaries of recent times had not succeeded in regaining the scientific prestige of the Old Society. But a few years after, in 1879, the first volumes of a work appeared which inaugurated a new period in the scientific activity of the Jesuits in China. This was Father Zottoli’s _Cursus Literaturae Sinicae_. When the work had been completed in five volumes, it put the humble religious in the front rank of sinologists. It has been styled “a landmark in the history of Chinese philology,” and received the great prize of the _Académie des Inscriptions et des belles Lettres_. Mr. Legge, formerly a Protestant missionary in China, and one of the foremost sinologists of our age, declares that in Father Zottoli’s _Cursus_ “the scholarship of the earlier Jesuit missionaries has revived.” (In vol. XXVII of the _Sacred Books of the East_, Preface, p. XIII.) In Father Zottoli’s school some able Jesuit sinologists were trained, who now publish their researches in a special review, the _Variétés Sinologiques_, whose scholarly character has been frequently attested to by the foremost orientalists. Father Zottoli was engaged for thirty years in writing a gigantic Chinese dictionary. The ablest of his pupils are now completing this work. (See _Kölnische Volkszeitung_, Wochenausgabe, January 1, 1903.)

Some readers may be surprised at the list of Jesuit writers--we have enumerated only a small fraction of the number of scholars that well deserve to be known better than is the case--, and ask why so little is said about them in works that treat of the history of the various sciences. It is not because their works are not of great importance for science. The explanation may be found in a remarkable utterance of the celebrated Kepler, the prince of astronomers: “Alas for prejudice and hatred! If a Jesuit writes anything, it is completely ignored by the adherents of Scaliger.” Allusion is made to the famous controversy on chronology between the Protestant Scaliger and the Jesuit Petavius (see page 160). The same may be said of many another scientific discussion. Kepler himself, though a Protestant, was not afraid of being a friend of Jesuit scholars, nor of asking their opinion on many of the important questions which he was investigating. (See _Johann Kepler, der Gesetzgeber der neueren Astronomie_, by Adolph Müller, S. J., Professor of astronomy in the Gregorian University in Rome [Herder, 1903]; see especially chapters 12 and 17, and page 166.)