EVOLUTION MADE PLAIN 33 
your eminences * * abjure, detest and curse the 
error and the heresy of the movement of the 
earth.” Even Newton’s great discovery of the 
law of gravitation was denounced as “sub¬ 
versive of natural, and inferentially, of re¬ 
vealed rligion.” 
A hundred years ago the use of anesthetics 
in childbirth was opposed in Scotland on the 
ground that it was seeking to remove the curse 
God had placed upon the daughters of Eve for 
her transgression. 
King Charles of Spain declared that the dig¬ 
ging of a canal across the isthmus of Panama, 
thus severing North and South America, would 
be a sin; for is it not written: “What God hath 
joined together let no man put asunder”? 
In America the famous Rev. Cotton Mather 
wrote a letter to John.Higginson informing him 
that the “general court” had given secret orders 
to a sea captain to waylay William Penn and 
the one hundred Quaker colonists—“heretics 
and malignants”—who were then on their way 
to Pennsylvania, capture the “ungodly crew” 
and sell them “to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch 
good prices in rum and sugar,” for in so doing 
“the lord may be glorified and not mocked 
on soil of this new country,” closing his pious 
letter with the felicitous phrase, “Yours in the 
bowels of Christ.” 
In 1826 the school board of Lancaster, Ohio, 
refused to permit the use of the schoolhouse for 
a debate as to whether railroads were prac¬ 
ticable. The letter reads: “You are welcome 
to the schoolhouse to debate all proper ques¬ 
tions in, but such things as railroads and tele- 
