that some of his mischievous students prepared baked-clay fossils of fish, flesh, and fowl, most fearfully and wonderfully made—and even specimens with Hebrew and Syriac inscriptions upon them—and buried them in the professor’s favorite digging places. Illustrations of the miraculous fossils appear on the plates of his curious work,[1] which the author was very zealous in suppressing when the deception became known; but what was the fate of the students history telleth not. Now these fossil views seem to us not merely disproved, but absurd; not merely weakly supported, but distorted. We cannot without serious effort assume the point of view under which they might be considered as remotely plausible. The prepossessions that opened men’s ears to such hypotheses are not only foreign to present-day conceptions, but—and this has been frequently overlooked—are antagonistic to the essential spirit of scientific verifiability. The philosophers to whom Charles II. propounded his problem—why a bowl filled with water to the brim would not overflow when a live fish was put into it—were not merely credulous, but were innocent of the habit of thinking that resorts promptly and naturally to verification. It is not easy to reach a decision in regard to the erroneous views of the past, as to how far prepossession blinded men to actual evidence, how far decisive facts were not available, how far logical methods were weakly handled; each of these was frequently present and acted both as cause and effect. This, however, is deserving of emphasis: that when the method of science is put in the first place, significant facts will be observed and looked for, arguments pro and con will be weighed, the dangers of prepossession will be realized. Not that this will always be done wisely and well, nor that error will necessarily be avoided; but that the steps that are taken, even tho they be small and tentative and meandering, are more likely than on any other method to be in the right direction. Our scales may be crude, our weights only approximate; but even so, the result is more likely to be trustworthy than if we abandon them and resort to guesswork, or, retaining them, put down our own fist on one end of the beam.
- ↑ The affaire Beringer is described in White, A History of the warfare of science with theology, I: 216.
