FORERUNNERS 19 



in the century and country in which he was born towards the 

 natural sciences connected with the history of the earth. 



We have seen how the enthusiasm of the old Renaissance 

 scholars had died out in the denser atmosphere of the succeeding 

 centuries, how their successors at Berne and Zurich had lived more 

 in their libraries than on the mountains. The Reformation had, 

 among its consequences, occupied men's minds with dogmatic 

 disputes to the detriment of the natural sciences. Theology and 

 dogma were doing their best to hinder the birth or check the 

 growth of inconvenient rivals, the Logics that attempt to deal with 

 ascertained facts. ' New Presbyter is but old priest writ large ' 

 an ecclesiastical government naturally inclines to despotism, and 

 Calvin's at Geneva was no exception to the rule. The control 

 of the Venerable Company lay like a blight on many forms of 

 independent mental activity. It was not until towards the close 

 of the seventeenth century, when its tyranny had been relaxed, 

 that the Republic produced any names that acquired in literature 

 or physical science a more than local reputation. The chief 

 agents in this great change, the admission of free inquiry and 

 toleration in the place of dogma and persecution, were the Cartesian 

 philosopher and magistrate, Jean Robert Chouet (1642-1731), 

 and the liberal-minded pastor, Jean Alphonse Turrettini (1671- 

 1737). Both were active champions of liberty, but of the two 

 Turrettini was the more influential. His persuasive eloquence 

 resounded in the pulpits of Geneva and was listened to with 

 willing ears, and, if his dream of uniting the Protestant churches 

 in a common bond remains still unfulfilled, he was successful in 

 freeing his own city from the grosser forms of intellectual bondage 

 in which it had been too long held. In the clerical oligarchy set 

 up by Calvin he introduced the principle of individual liberty of 

 mind of the English Puritans, and thus sowed the seeds which 

 resulted in Rousseau and the Revolution of 1789. 1 



The results of this widening of the intellectual horizon were 

 not, however, immediately manifest among the professors and 

 the students of the Geneva Academy, at any rate in the field 

 of physical research. Apart from his uncle Bonnet, it was to 

 German Switzerland, to Albrecht von Haller and Griiner, that 



"- 1 See Professor Borgeaud's review of Vallette's J. J. Rousseau Oenevois, 

 vol. viii, Annales de la Societe J. J. Rousseau, Geneve. 



