562 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



scholars in our own country as Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitch- 

 cock and Louis Agassiz. 



But it is a duty and a pleasure to state here that one great Christian 

 scholar did honor to religion and to himself by standing up for the 

 claims of science, despite all these clamors. That man was Nicholas 

 Wiseman, better known afterward as Cardinal Wiseman. The con- 

 duct of this pillar of the Roman Catholic Church contrasts nobly with 

 that of timid Protestants who were filling England with shrieks and 

 denunciations.* 



And here let me note that one of the prettiest skirmishes in this 

 war was made in New England. Prof. Stuart, of Andover, justly 

 honored as a Hebrew scholar, virtually declared that geology was be- 

 coming dangerous ; that to speak of six periods of time for the crea- 

 tion was flying in the face of Scripture ; that Genesis expressly speaks 

 of six days, each made up of an evening and a morning, and not six 

 periods of time. 



To him replied a j)rofessor in Yale College, James Kingsley. In an 

 article admirable for keen wit and kindly temper, he showed that 

 Genesis speaks just as clearly of a solid firmament as of six ordinary 

 days, and that if Prof. Stuart had got over one difficulty and accepted 

 the Copei'nican theory, he might as well get over another and accept 

 the revelations of .geology. The encounter was quick and decisive, 

 and the victory was with science and our own honored Yale.'' 



But perhaps the most singular attempt against geology was made 

 by a fine specimen of the English Don Dean Cockburn, of York to 

 scold its champions out of the field. Without, aj)parently, the simplest 

 elementary knowledge of geology, he opened a battery of abuse. He 

 gave it to the world at large, by pulpit and press ; he even inflicted it 

 apon leading statesmen by private letters.' 



From his pulpit in Yoi'k Minster, Mary Somerville was denounced 

 coarsely, by name, for those studies in physical geography which have 

 made her honored throughout the world. ^ 



But these weapons did not succeed. They were like Chinese 

 gongs and dragon-lanterns against rifled cannon. Buckland, Pye 



' Wiseman, " Twelve Lectures on the Connection between Science and Revealed Re- 

 ligion," first American edition, New York, 1837. 



^ See Silliman^s Journal, vol. xxx., p. 114. 



3 Prof. Goldwin Smith informs me that the papers of Sir Robert Peel, yet unpub- 

 lished, contain very curious specimens of these epistles. 



* See "Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville," Boston, 1 874, pp. 139 and 375. 

 Compare with any statement of his religious views that Dean Cockburn was able to make, 

 the following from Mrs. Somerville : "Nothing has afforded me so convincing a proof of 

 the Deity as these purely mental conceptions of numerical and mathematical science 

 which have been, by slow degrees, vouchsafed to man and are still granted in these 

 latter times, by the differential calculus, now superseded by the higher algebra all of 

 which must have existed in that sublimely omniscient mind from eternity." See " Per- 

 sonal Recollections," pp. 140, 141. 



