EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 281 
consequently it has had a tendency either to frighten 
honest inquirers or to induce their neighbours to burn 
them, and this state of things has undoubtedly been a 
drawback on the progress of mankind. It was said of 
Pythagoras that when he discovered his famous propo- 
sition about triangles which sixty generations of school- 
boys have known as the Forty-seventh in the first 
book of Euclid, he celebrated his discovery by sacri- 
ficing a hundred oxen to Apollo. “From that time to 
this,” exclaims Ludwig Buechner, with a bitter sneer 
on his lips, “from that time to this, whenever a new 
truth in science is discovered, all oxen bellow with 
fright!” For all its brutality, there is clear pith and 
humour in this remark; but it does not express the 
proper frame of mind in which to contemplate the 
narrowness of the men of bygone days. 
We ought so far to sympathize with them as to see 
that at the first glance it must have seemed very de- 
grading to be told that man’s terrestrial habitat was an 
attendant upon the sun and not the sun upon the earth; 
nor can we wonder that when Newton appealed to apple 
and sling, it should have occurred to many people that 
he was dethroning God and putting gravitation 
in His place. That sort of thing went on until 
scientific students of nature in many cases ac- 
knowledged the imputation. Being good physicists, 
but weak philosophers, they acknowledged the charge 
and retorted: “What then? No matter what be- 
comes of religion, we must abide by the evidence 
before us; we must follow Truth, though she lead us 
to Hades.” Such was the atheistic state of mind 
illustrated by the French materialists of the eighteenth 
century, and they have had a considerable following 
