94 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



many mountains' (cp. Osborn's From the Greeks to 

 Darwin, p. 76). A similar explanation of fossils 

 was given by the engineer-artist Leonardo da Vinci 

 in the fifteenth century, and by the potter Bernard 

 Palissy in the sixteenth century ; but thence on- 

 wards, for more than a hundred years, the earth was 

 as a sealed book to man. . The earlier chapters of 

 its history, once reopened, have never been closed 

 again. Varied as were the theories of the causes 

 which wrought manifold changes on its surface, 

 they agreed in demanding a far longer time-history 

 than the Church was willing to allow. If the 

 reasoning of the geologists was sound, the narra- 

 tive in Genesis was a myth. Hence the renewal of 

 struggle between the Christian Church and Science, 

 waged, at first, over the six days of the Creation. 



Here and there, in bygone days, a sceptical voice 

 had been raised in denial of the Mosaic authorship 

 of the Pentateuch. Such was that of La Peyrere 

 who, in 1655, published an instalment of a work in 

 which he anticipated what is nowadays accepted, 

 but what then was akin to blasphemy to utter. For 

 not only does he doubt whether Moses had any 

 hand in the writings attributed to him : he rejects 

 the orthodox view of suffering and death as the 

 penalties of Adam's disobedience ; and gives rational- 

 istic interpretation of the appearance of the star of 

 Bethlehem, and of the darkness at the Crucifixion. 

 But La Peyrere became a Roman Catholic, and, of 

 course, recanted his opinions. Then, nearer the time 

 when controversy on the historical character of the 

 Scriptures was becoming active, one Astruc, a French 

 physician, suggested, in a work published in 1753, 



