542 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



he could acquaint himself with the- strongest arguments in favor of 

 evolution. I wrote back in all good faith and simplicity, recommend- 

 ing him to go through a course of comparative anatomy and physi- 

 ology, and then to study development. I am sorry to say he was 

 very much displeased, as people often are with good advice. Not- 

 withstanding this discouraging result, I venture, as a parting word, 

 to repeat the suggestion, and to say to all the more or less acute 

 lay and clerical " paper-philosophers " ' who venture into the regions 

 of biological controversy Get a little sound, thorough, practical, 

 elementary instruction in biology. 



--- 



HOW THE EARTH WAS REGARDED IN OLD TIMES. 2 



FROM THE FRENCH OF FLAMMARION. 



WE are too apt in these times of popular education, and the cheap 

 diffusion of knowledge, to forget the cost of scientific truth. 

 We formulate a fact or principle, and administer it in the school-room, 

 with but little regard to the circumstance that it may have cost 

 thousands of years of toil to discover and establish it. We have 

 found out, for example, a great deal about the figure, motions, and 

 astronomical relations of the earth, with such exactness that, as Prof. 

 Young tells us, we know the semi-diameter of our globe at the 

 equator within two hundred feet while to go "around the world" 

 is now a mere frolic ; and all this knowledge is given to children in 



7 DO 



an hour's lesson. But how few appreciate the long struggle of the 

 human intellect in arriving at these simple results ! Let us hastily 

 glance at the early efforts of the human mind in trying to find out 

 what sort of thing this earth is, in its form, extent, and relation to 

 the heavenly bodies that surround it. 



The history of the growth of any branch of knowledge has a 

 double interest : that which comes from the knowledge itself, and its 

 relation to the history of the operations of the human mind. Men 

 think under the limitations of their times both as regards the extent 



1 Writers of this stamp are fond of talking about the Baconian method. T beg them, 

 therefore, to lay to heart these two weighty sayings of the herald of Modern Science: 



" Syllogismus ex propositionibus constat, propositiones ex verbis, verba notionum tes- 

 serae sunt. Itaque si notiones ipsae (id quod bask rei est) confusse sint et temere a rebus 

 abstracts?, nihil in iis quae superstruuntur est firmitudinis." (" Novum Organon," ii., 14.) 



" Huic auteni vanitati nonnulli ex modernis summa levitate ita indulserunt, ut in 

 primo capitulo Geneseos et in libro Job et aliis scripturis sacris, philosophiam naturalcm 

 fundare conati sint ; inter vivos quarentes mortna." (Hid., 65.) 



2 The cuts of this article are from Flammarion's "History of the Heavens," and we 

 have made free use of the text of Blake's " Astronomical Myths," which is based on 

 Flammarion's work. 



