NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 739 



The explorations in Australia and neighboring islands made 

 matters still worse, for there was found in those regions a whole 

 realm of animals differing widely from those of other parts of the 

 earth. 



The problem before the strict theologians became, for exam- 

 ple, how to explain the fact that the kangaroo can have been in 

 the ark and be now only found in Australia ; his saltatory powers 

 are indeed great, but how could he by any series of leaps have 

 sprung across the intervening mountains, plains, and oceans to 

 that remote continent; and, if the theory were adopted that at 

 some period a causeway extended across the vast chasm separat- 

 ing Australia from the nearest mainland, why did not lions, 

 tigers, camels, and camelopards force or find their way across it ? 



The theological theory, therefore, had by the end of the last 

 century gone to pieces. The wiser theologians waited ; the un- 

 wise indulged in exhortations to " root out the wicked heart of 

 unbelief," in denunciation of "science falsely so called,'' and in 

 frantic declarations that "the Bible is true'' by which they 

 meant that the limited understanding of it which they had hap- 

 pened to inherit is true. 



By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theological 

 theory of creation though still preached everywhere as a mat- 

 ter of form was clearly seen by all thinking men to be hope- 

 lessly lost ; such strong men as Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman 

 Church, Dean Buckland in the Anglican, and Hugh Miller in the 

 Scottish Church, made heroic efforts to save something from it, 

 but all to no purpose. That sturdy Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon 

 honesty, which is the best legacy of the middle ages to Christen- 

 dom, asserted itself in the old strongholds of theological thought 

 the universities. Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler 

 nor the nimble reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed. Just as 

 the line of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had 

 destroyed the old astronomy, in which the earth was the center, 

 and the Almighty sitting above the firmament the agent in mov- 

 ing the heavenly bodies about it with his own hands, so now a 

 race of biological thinkers had destroyed the old idea of a Cre- 

 ator minutely contriving and fashioning all animals to suit the 

 needs and purposes of man. They had developed a system of a 

 very different sort, and of this we shall speak in the next chapter.* 



* For Abraham Milius, see his De Ongine Animalium et Migratione Populorum, 

 Geneva, 1667; also Kosmos, IS?*?, H. 1, S. 36; for Linnseus's declaration regarding spe- 

 cies, see the Phil. Bot., 99, 157 ; for Calmet and Linnaeus, see Zoeckler, vol. ii, p. 237. As 

 to the enormously increasing numbers of species in zoology and botany, see President. D. S. 

 Jordan, Science Sketches, pp. 176, 177 ; also, for pithy statement, Laing's Problems of the 

 Future, chap. vi. 



