NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 439 



was a prevailing belief that fossil remains, in general, might be 

 brought under the head of " sports of Nature," a pious turn being given 

 to this phrase by the suggestion that these " sports " were in accord- 

 ance with some inscrutable purpose of the Almighty. 



Such remained a leading orthodox mode of explanation in the 

 Church, Catholic and Protestant, for centuries. 



But the better scientific method could not be entirely suppressed ; 

 and, near the beginning of the seventeenth century, De Clave, Bitaud, 

 and De Villon revived it in France. / Straightway, the theological 

 faculty of Paris protested against the scientific doctrine as unscriptural, 

 destroyed the offending treatises, banished their authors from Paris, 

 and forbade them to live in towns or enter places of public resort.* 



The champions of science, though repressed for a time, quietly 

 labored on, and especially in Italy. Half a century later, Steno, a 

 Dane, and Scilla, an Italian, went still further in the right direction ; 

 and, though they and their disciples took great pains to throw a tub to 

 the whale, in the shape of sundry vague concessions based upon the 

 book of Genesis, geological truth was more and more developed by 

 them. 



In France, the old theological spirit remained more powerful. At 

 the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon made another attempt to 

 state simple geological truths ; but the theological faculty of the Sar- 

 bonne dragged him at once from his high position, forced him to re- 

 cant ignominiously, and to print his recantation. This humiliating 

 document reminds us painfully of that forced upon Galileo nearly a 

 hundred years before. It runs as follows : " I declare that I had no 

 intention to contradict the text of Scripture, that I believe most firmly 

 all therein related about the creation, both as to order of time and 

 matter of fact. I abandon everything in ray book respecting the 

 formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to 

 the narrative of Moses." 



It has been well observed by one of the greatest of modern au- 

 thorities that the doctrine which Buffon thus "abandoned "is as firmly 

 established as the earth's rotation upon its axis.f Yet one hundred 

 and fifty years were required to secure for it even a fair hearing ; the 

 prevailing doctrine of the Church continued to be that "in the be- 

 ginning God made the heavens and the earth " ; that " all things 

 were made at the beginning of the world" ; andthat to say that stones 

 and fossils were made before or since "the beginning" is contrary to 

 Scripture. Again, we find theological substitutes for scientific ex- 

 planation ripening into phrases more and more hollow, making fossils 

 " sports of Nature," or "mineral concretions," or "creations of plastic 

 force," or "models" made by the Creator before he had fully decided 

 upon the best manner of creating various beings. 



* See Morley, "Life of Palissy the Potter," vol. ii, p. 315, ei seq. 



j; Sec citation and remark in Lyell's " Principles of Geology," chap, iii, p. 57. 



