THE LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND OF SCIENCE. 631 



vellum in the museum, painted from life by M. Bocourt, and rep- 

 resents one of two individuals brought from Damascus in 1855, 

 by M. Bourgoing, which lived for some time at the menagerie of 

 the Paris Museum. — Translated for the Popular Science Monthly 

 from La Nature. 



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THE LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND THE LIGHT OF 



SCIENCE. 



By Prof. T. H. HUXLEY, F. R. S. 



THERE are three ways of regarding any account of past 

 occurrences, whether delivered to us orally or recorded in 

 writing. 



The narrative may be exactly true. That is to say, the words 

 taken in their natural sense, and interpreted according to the rules 

 of grammar, may convey to the mind of the hearer, or of the 

 reader, an idea precisely correspondent with one which would 

 have remained in the mind of a witness. For example, the state- 

 ment that King Charles I was beheaded at Whitehall on the 

 30th day of January, 1649, is as exactly true as any proposition 

 in mathematics or physics ; no one doubts that any person of 

 sound faculties, properly placed, who was present at Whitehall 

 throughout that day, and who used his eyes, would have seen the 

 king's head cut off ; and that there would have remained in his 

 mind an idea of that occurrence which he would have put into 

 words of the same value as those which we use to express it. 



Or the narrative may be partly true and partly false. Thus, 

 some histories of the time tell us what the king said, and what 

 Bishop Juxon said ; or report royalist conspiracies to effect a res- 

 cue ; or detail the motives which induced the chiefs of the Com- 

 monwealth to resolve that the king should die. One account de- 

 clares that the king knelt at a high block, another that he lay 

 down with his neck on a mere plank. And there are contempo- 

 rary pictorial representations of both these modes of procedure. 

 Such narratives, while veracious as to the main event, may and 

 do exhibit various degrees of unconscious and conscious misrep- 

 resentation, suppression, and invention, till they become hardly 

 distinguishable from pure fictions. Thus, they present a transi- 

 tion to narratives of a third class, in which the fictitious element 

 predominates. Here, again, there are all imaginable gradations, 

 from such works as Defoe's giiasi-historical account of the plague 

 year, which probably gives a truer conception of that dreadful 

 time than any authentic history, through the historical novel, 

 drama, and epic, to the purely phantasmal creations of imagina- 



