from Paris, and forbade them to live in towns or enter places of public resort.[1]
At the middle of the eighteenth century, Buffon made another attempt to state simple and fundamental geological truths. The theological faculty of the Sorbonne immediately dragged him from his high position, forced him to recant ignominiously and to print his recantation.
It required a hundred and fifty years for Science to carry the day fairly against this single preposterous theory. The champion who dealt it the deadly blow was Scilla, and his weapons were facts revealed by the fossils of Calabria.
But the advocates of tampering with scientific reasoning now retired to a new position. It was strong, for it was apparently based on Scripture, though, as the whole world now knows, an utterly false interpretation of Scripture. The new position was that the fossils were produced by the deluge of Noah.
In vain had it been shown, by such devoted Christians as Bernard Palissy, that this theory was utterly untenable; in vain did good men protest against the injury sure to result to religion by tying it to a scientific theory sure to be exploded: the doctrine that fossils were the remains of animals drowned at the flood continued to be upheld by the great majority as "sound doctrine," and as a blessed means of reconciling science with Scripture.[2]
To sustain this "scriptural view," so called, efforts were put forth absolutely herculean, both by Catholics and Protestants. Mazurier declared certain fossil remains of a mammoth, discovered in France, to be bones of giants mentioned in Scripture. Father Torrubia did the same thing in Spain. Increase Mather sent similar remains, discovered in America, to England, "with a similar statement. Scheuchzer made parade of the bones of a great lizard discovered in Germany, as the homo diluvii testis, the fossil man, proving the reality of the deluge.[3]
In the midst of this appears an episode very comical but very instructive; for it shows that the attempt to shape the deductions of science to meet the exigencies of theology may mislead heterodoxy as absurdly as orthodoxy.
- ↑ Morley, "Life of Palissy the Potter," vol. ii., p. 315, et seq.
- ↑ Audiat, "Vie de Palissy," p. 412. Cantu, "Hist. Universelle," vol. xv., p. 492.
- ↑ For ancient beliefs regarding giants, see Leopardi, "Saggio sopra gli errori popolari," etc., chapter xv. For accounts of the views of Mazurier and Scheuchzer, see Büchner, "Man in Past, Present, and Future," English translation, pp. 235, 236. For Increase Mather's views, see "Philosophical Transactions," xxiv., 85. For similar fossils sent from New York to the Royal Society as remains of giants, see Weld, "History of the Royal Society," vol. i., p. 421. For Father Torrubia and his Giganiologia Española, see D'Archiac, "Introduction à l'Etude de la Paléontologie stratiographique," Paris, 1864, p. 202. For admirable summaries, see Lyell, "Principles of Geology," London, 1867; D'Archiac, "Géologie et Paléontologie," Paris, 1866; Pictet, "Traité de Paléontologie," Paris, 1853; Vezian, "Prodrome de la Géologie," Paris, 1863; Haeckel, "History of Creation," New York, 1876, chapter iii.
