r THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 65 
é them in his mind; and if this can be said of the great 
wt genius of the Middle Ages, what may not be imagined of 
the people in general! ‘ fed 
f Between the Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle and 
i Herodotus, who made some study of botany, and 
ted Theophrastus, who interested himself in the morphology of 
; plants to the year 1532, is an appallingly long stretch of 
? time, but the first record that I have been able to discover 
- of a collection of plant species is of that date. Aris- 
totle is regarded as the first of entomologists, but the pro- 
giess from his date onward could scarcely be considered 
overwhelming when we find an Italian busy disproving the 
theory of the spontaneous generation of larvae, in the latter 
half of the 17th century. Even down through the 17th — 
and into the 18th century, the presence of shells in the 
_—_— rocks was attributed to the Noachian deluge. In about the 
ani 5 year 1634 Galileo was persecuted by the Inquisition, and 
compelled to retract his statement that the earth revolved” 
round the sun. 
: While writing this paper I chanced across some re-— 
a marks by Mr. Frederic Harrison in the Fortnightly Review 
of June, 1918, and as they are extremely appropriate to ~ 
my subject, I take the opportunity of quoting them here :— 
‘‘Turning to the scientific treatises of Bishop Wilkins (1614- 
1672), a founder and first secretary of the Royal Society, I was 
2 struck by a singular point in the history of science and religion. | 
é Wilkins, a man certainly of original mind, the inventor of the term 
‘submarine navigation,’ and the first to consider the problem seri- 
ously as a competent mathematician, published, in 1640, a learned 
26 » Discourse in 150 pages, to prove that the earth is a planet, and 
goes round the sun. And this adventurous essay, full of some sound, 
and much absurd, mechanieal science, was published in a fifth 
. _ edition in 1707, twenty years after Newton’s telescope, seventy years 
after Galileo’s Dialogues, nearly one hundred years after the pub- 
lication of Kepler’s New Astronomy, and nearly two hundred years 
after Copernicus began to revolutionise our conception of the solar 
system. And Wilkin’s Discourse of 1640 was published twenty 
~ years after the Novwm Organum, many years after the death of 
Bacon, and some years after the Geometry of Descartes. That is 
to say, it required some two centuries before even men of science 
Were quite certain that the earth moved round the sun.’? 
ae ‘«When we read these mathematical tracts of Wilkins, published 
a just a hundred years after the Reformation, in the very dawn of P 
; modern philosophy and physical science, we may see how original — 
thought was in the bondage of ancient fetters, even in the lifetime 
of Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, Hobbes, and Toricelli. Wilkins, keen, 
learned, ingenious as he was, is dominated by three f 
orces—antique 
