1 86 Popular Delusions in Natural History. [Sess. 



the merest rudiments of Geology to which I have already 

 referred. Fancy a piece of blackband ironstone deposited 

 under water in the remote Carboniferous period, millions of 

 years before the animals and plants which we now see around 

 us had come into existence — covered up under hundreds, 

 perhaps thousands, of feet of superincumbent strata — sub- 

 jected to a pressure which has in most cases crushed the 

 real fossils it contains as flat as paper, and yet containing 

 a live frog or toad belonging to a species alive at the present 

 day ! There are, I believe, some theologians, litterateurs, and 

 art critics who dislike science. Well, then, they should really 

 get hold of a true and authentic case of a live frog inside a 

 block of stone ; for the blow of the hammer that disclosed 

 that frog would at the same time destroy not only Geology, 

 but all science with it, and then we should be again brought 

 back to a blessed and undisturbed medievalism. Of such a 

 consummation I, however, see at present no prospect. 



Some may say that Science is like Mephistopheles, who, 

 when Faust asked him who he was, replied, " Ich bin der 

 Geist der stets verneint." But Science affirms as well as 

 denies, and her denials are like the negative pole of a mag- 

 net, which as a matter of course presupposes the positive as 

 well. 



Popular delusions, then, seem to owe their origin to two 

 different causes — first, to simple ignorance, which leads people 

 to adopt erroneous ideas regarding certain things, or to devise 

 erroneous explanations of natural phenomena ; secondly, to 

 imperfect and hasty observation, which, supplemented by 

 subsequent involuntary mental exaggeration or distortion, 

 leads individuals to firmly believe that they have actually 

 seen things which in reality they have not seen. And we 

 may, indeed, have both causes combined in the production of 

 beliefs which in the process of time become firmly established 

 among large sections of the people. It is certainly a strange, 

 if unwelcome, conclusion to which we are obliged to come, 

 that the accounts given by persons of untrained observational 

 powers as to what they profess to have seen are simply not to be 

 trusted, even though they may have no desire to deceive, and 

 may be, like John Jennings who found the toad in the block 

 of limestone at Lockport, persons of " unimpeachable veracity." 



