The monastic buildings required for public purposes have been made over to the communal and provincial authorities, while the same authorities have been entrusted with the administration of the ecclesiastical revenues previously set apart for charity and education, and objects of art and historical interest have been consigned to public libraries and museums. By these laws the reception of novices was forbidden in the existing conventual establishments the extinction of which had been decreed, and all new foundations were forbidden, except those engaged in instruction and the care of the sick.
The majority are consigned to the trade auction sales in London ready dressed and worked into cross-shaped coats, and the remainder, a fourth of the total, come as dressed skins.
But the zeal of the Portuguese took too often a one-sided direction, repressing the Syrian Christians on the Malabar coast, and interfering with the Abyssinian Church,3 while the fanatic temper of the Spaniard consigned, in Mexico and Peru, multitudes who would not renounce their heathen errors to indiscriminate massacre or abject slavery.'
The Fraticelli spiritualists, and similar sects who fed their imagination with his doctrine, expired in the flames to which Fra Dolcino Longino and Margharita were consigned.
The World was consigned to his desk; and although doctrines in all essential respects the same constitute the physical portion of his Principia, it was not till after the death of Descartes that fragments of the work, including Le Monde, or a treatise on light, and the physiological tracts L'Momme and La Formation du foetus, were given to the world by his admirer Claude Clerselier (1614-1684) in 1664.
