THE PROGRESS OF GEOLOGY 413 



Ephesus. His singular dress and obsolete language con- 

 founded the baker, to whom he offered an ancient medal of 

 Decius as the current coin of the empire; and Jamblichus, 

 on the suspicion of a secret treasure, was dragged before 

 the judge. Their mutual enquiries produced the amazing 

 discovery, that two centuries were almost elapsed since 

 Jamblichus and his friends had escaped from the rage of a 

 pagan tyrant/ 



This legend was received as authentic throughout the 

 Christian world before the end of the sixth century, and 

 was afterwards introduced by Mahomet as a divine revela- 

 tion into the Koran, and from hence was adopted and 

 adorned by all the nations from Bengal to Africa who pro- 

 fessed the Mahometan faith. Some vestiges even of a 

 similar tradition have been discovered in Scandinavia. 

 ' This easy and universal belief/ observes the philosophical 

 historian of the Decline and Fall, ' so expressive of the 

 sense of mankind, may be ascribed to the genuine merit of 

 the fable itself. We imperceptibly advance from youth to 

 age, without observing the gradual, but incessant, change 

 of human affairs; and even, in our larger experience of 

 history, the imagination is accustomed, by a perpetual series 

 of causes and effects, to unite the most distant revolutions. 

 But if the interval between two memorable eras could be 

 instantly annihilated; if it were possible, after a momentary 

 slumber of two hundred years, to display the new world to 

 the eyes of a spectator who still retained a lively and recent 

 impression of the old, his surprise and his reflections would 

 furnish the pleasing subject of a philosophical romance/ 1 



Prejudices arising from our peculiar position as inhabi- 

 tants of the land. The sources of prejudice hitherto con- 

 sidered may be deemed peculiar for the most part to the in- 

 fancy of the science, but others are common to the first 

 cultivators of geology and to ourselves, and are all singularly 

 calculated to produce the same deception, and to strengthen 

 our belief that the course of Nature in the earlier ages dif- 

 fered widely from that now established. Although these 

 circumstances cannot be fully explained without assuming 

 some things as proved, which it has been my object else- 

 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap, xxxiii. 



