THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 563 



Smith, Lyell, Silliman, Hitchcock, Murchison, Agassiz, Dana, and a 



host of noble champions besides, press on, and the battle for truth is 



won. 



And was it won merely for men of science ? The whole civilized 



world declares that it was won for religion that thereby was infi- 

 nitely increased the knowledge of the power and goodness of God. 



Did time permit, we might go over other battle-fields no less in- 

 structive than those we have seen. We might go over the battle- 

 fields of Agricultural Progress, and note how, by a most curious per- 

 version of a text of Scripture, great masses of the peasantry of Russia 

 were prevented from raising and eating potatoes,* and how in Scotland 

 at the beginning of this century the use of fanning-raills for win- 

 nowing grain was denounced as contrary to the text " the wind 

 bloweth where it listeth," etc., as leaguing with Satan, who is " prince 

 of the powers of the air," and as suflicient cause for excommunication 

 from the Scotch Church." 



We might go over the battle-fields of Industrial Science, and note 

 how the introduction of railways into France was declared, by the 

 Archbishop of Besangon, an evidence of the divine displeasure against 

 country innkeepers who set meat before their guests on fast-days, and 

 now were punished by seeing travelers carried by their doors ; and 

 how raih'oad and telegraph were denounced from a noted pulpit as 

 " heralds of Antichrist." And then we might pass to Protestant Eng- 

 land and recall the sermon of the Curate of Rotherhithe at the break- 

 ing in of the Thames Tunnel, so destructive to life and property, de- 

 claring that "it was but a just judgment upon the presumptuous 

 aspirations of mortal man." ' 



We might go over the battle-fields of Ethnology and note how a 

 few years since an honored American investigator, proposing in a 

 learned society the discussion of the question between the origin of 

 the human race from a single pair and from many pairs, was called to 

 order and silenced as atheistic, by a Protestant divine whose memory 

 is jvistly dear to thousands of us.* 



Interesting would it be to look over the field of Meteorology 

 beginning with the conception, supposed to be scriptural, of angels 

 opening and shutting " the windows of heaven " and letting out " the 

 waters that be above the firmament " upon the earth continuing 



1 See Haxthausen, " Etudes sur la Russie." 



- Burton, " History of Scotland," vol. viii., p. 511. See also Mause Headrigg's views 

 in Scott's " Old Mortality," chapter vii. For the case of a person debarred from the 

 communion for " raising the devil's wind " with a winnowing-machine, see works of Sir 

 J. Y. Simpson, vol. ii. Those doubting the authority or motives of Simpson may be 

 reminded that he was, to the day of his death, one of the strictest adherents of Scotch 

 orthodoxy. 



2 See Journal of Sir I. Brunei, for May 20, 1827, in " Life of I. K. Brunei," p. 30. 



* This scene will be recalled, easily, by many leading ethnologists in America, and es- 

 pecially by Mr. E. G. Squier, formerly ninister of the United States to Central America. 



