98 SCIENCE IN " BONDAGE 



riddle, giving the answer which we accept to-day 

 as correct, and on whom was conferred by his 

 brethren two hundred years later the title of 

 " The Father of Geology." It is a little difficult 

 to understand how the " unchanging Church " 

 should have welcomed, or at least in no way 

 objected to, Stensen's views when the mere 

 entertainment of them by Fallopius is supposed 

 to have terrified him into silence. But when the 

 story of Fallopius is mistold, as indicated above, 

 it need hardly be said that the story of Stensen is 

 never so much as alluded to. 



The real facts of the case are these : Fallopius 

 was one of the most distinguished men of science 

 of his day. Every medical student becomes 

 acquainted with his name because it is attached 

 to two parts of the human body which he first 

 described. He made a mistake about fossils, and 

 that is the plain truth as we now know, a 

 most absurd mistake, but that is all. As we 

 hinted above, he is very far from being the only 

 scientific man who has made a mistake. Huxley 

 had a very bad fall over Bathybius and was man 

 enough to admit that he was wrong. Curiously 

 enough, what Huxley thought a living thing really 

 was a concretion, just as what Fallopius thought 

 a concretion had been a living thing. 



Another extremely curious fact is that another 

 distinguished man of science, who lived three 

 hundred years later than Fallopius and had all the 

 knowledge which had accumulated during that 

 prolific period to assist him, the late Philip Gosse, 

 fell into the same pit as Fallopius. As his son 



