58 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



extinct ; but we still have hosts of earnest workers, battling with problems 

 directly concerned with mankind, who either know nothing of man's 

 place in nature or even deny that he is subject to natural laws. In such 

 cases ignorance and prejudice are far more dangerous than when they 

 inspired opposition to Galileo ; to living beings the laws of life are more 

 directly important than those of planetary motion. 



It is difficult to recapture the sense of amazement that must have 

 assailed the minds of those who first observed and pondered over fossils. 

 The ideas aroused by the ' figured stones ' must have seemed grotesque 

 and incredible even when they fell short of profanity. Many and various 

 hypotheses were devised to explain away facts whose obvious interpre- 

 tation did violence to accepted tradition. During the seventeenth 

 century, mongrel mixtures of imperfect observation and misread Scripture 

 appeared in polemic succession as ' Theories of the Earth.' These 

 treatises can never become out of date. Much as they resemble guides to 

 Wonderland written by the White Knight, they are good illustrations of 

 the perennial danger of logic based on incomplete premisses. 



Fossils were ascribed to astrological conjunctions, meteoric showers, 

 thunderbolts, and even to the machinations of the Arch-fiend. Belief 

 in the celestial, or at least cosmic, origin of fossils was very general ; 

 perhaps it was fostered by the abundance of ' Shepherds' Crowns ' on the 

 ploughed fields. The five-rayed pattern of these casts of sea-urchins, 

 no less than the stellate structure of nodules of pyrites, linked all ' ex- 

 traneous fossils ' with the stars. Sounder reasoning, in the light of the 

 knowledge then available, prompted a belief (championed strongly by 

 Nicholas Lang) in some fertilising essence that generated fossils in rocks 

 as it did jelly-fish in sea-water. 



At last, as evidence accumulated, the inevitable and (to us) obvious 

 interpretation of fossils became accepted by all who studied them ; 

 although then, as now, the opinionated felt qualified to deny truths of 

 which they were ignorant. The situation was admirably summed up in 

 1732 by J. P. Breynius in his treatise on the reputed petrified melons of 

 Mount Carmel. He showed convincingly that these objects were crystal- 

 filled geodes ; but in so doing he was anxious to avoid casting doubt on 

 the organic nature of true fossils. He expressed the opinion that, after 

 the revelations made by Columna, Steno and Scilla, ' he who would doubt 

 the truth of the assertion [that the Glossopetra of Malta were true 

 sharks' teeth] must assuredly have a fungus for a brain.' 



Real progress in the study of fossils had to wait until a change of fashion 

 allowed persons of intelligence and refinement to leave the chaste shelter 

 of libraries and cabinets and to expose themselves to the rigours of the 

 open country. Hitherto savants had been content (for the most part) to 

 speculate and debate over specimens brought to them by illiterate yokels ; 

 and they often wove into their theories the fantastic stories with which 

 the discoveries had been embellished. The greater part of two centuries 



