century we find that among the crimes for which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to have his tongue torn out and to be burned alive was his belief that there is a gradation extending upward from the lowest to the highest form of created beings.
In the eighteenth century we find this same idea of an upward progress, especially through the three ages of stone, bronze, and iron, cropping out in scientific form still more definitely from beneath the vast mass of theological reasoning in Germany, France, and England.
The investigations of the last forty years have shown that Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius has been now thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and arranged; until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archæologists, have brought these prophecies to evident fulfillment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron; and arraying vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a fall, there has been a rise of man from the earliest indications in the Quaternary or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.[1]
The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the fall" came, as we have seen, from geology. According to that doctrine, as held quite generally from its beginnings among the fathers and doctors of the primitive Church down to its culmination in
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- ↑ For Vanini, see Topinard, Éléments d'Anthropologie, p. 52. For a brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in Germany, Goguet in France, Hoare in England, and others in various parts of Europe, as regards this development of the scientific view during the eighteenth century, see Mortillet, Le Préhistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i. And for a shorter summary see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern archæologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works cited in this article. For a generous statement regarding the great services of the Danish archæologists in this field, see Quatrefages, Introduction to Cartailhac, Les Ages Préhistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal
of Genesis, with the account of the "Fall" as given in the former, see Lenormant, La Génèse, Paris, 1883, pp. 166–168. Of the lines of Lucretius—
"Anna antiqua, manus, ungues, dentesque fuerunt,
Et lapides, et item sylvarum fragmina rami,
Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta,
Sed prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus"—
the translation given is that of Good. For a more exact prose translation, see Munro's Lucretius, fourth edition, which is much more careful, at least in the proof-reading, than the first edition. As regards Lucretius's prophetic insight into some of the greatest conclusions of modern science, see Munro's Translation and Notes, fourth edition, Book V, Notes II, p. 335. On the relation of several passages in Horace to the ideas of Lucretius, see Munro as above.
