400 EVOLUTION AND DOGMA. 



Kircher and their collaborators lived in the infancy 

 of science ; that they had to blaze the way for their 

 successors, and that, notwithstanding their best ef-' 

 forts to arrive at the truth, error was inevitable. 

 Ignorant of countless facts now known to every 

 schoolboy, and unacquainted with the theories and 

 laws which are now the common possession of all 

 who read and think, it was but natural that they 

 should have had recourse to explanations and hy- 

 potheses which we should at present regard as fanci- 

 ful and absurd. 



Thus, Kepler taught that the heavenly bodies 

 were guided in their orbits by angels. Water, it was 

 universally believed, would not rise in a pump above 

 a certain height because nature abhors a vacuum. 

 Fossils, it was thought, were but outlines of future 

 creations which the great Artificer had cast aside, or 

 objects placed in the tilted and contorted strata of 

 the earth "to bring to naught human curiosity." 



The statements regarding animals found in the 

 " Physiologus " and in the " Bestiaries," allegorical 

 works much esteemed during the Middle Ages, were 

 accepted as veritable facts, and believed as firmly as 

 were the ludicrous stories of Pliny, the naturalist. For 

 a thousand years and more, even those who professed 

 to teach natural history saw in the fables regarding 

 the dragon and the unicorn, the phoenix and the 

 basilisk, the hippogriff and the centaur, nothing to 

 stagger their faith and nothing that was inconsistent 

 with the science of the times. They believed with- 

 out question that the phoenix rose from its ashes, 

 that the pelican nourished its young with its blood, 



