ding,
because he thought that he was thereby serving the interest of the
Church. What he said concerned fossils, then beginning to puzzle the
scientific world of the day. Confronted with these objects and living,
as he did, in an unscientific age, when the seven days of creation were
interpreted as periods of twenty-four hours each and the universality of
the Noachian deluge was accepted by everybody, it would have been
something like a miracle if he had at once fathomed the true meaning of
the shark's teeth, elephant's bones, and other fossil remains which came
under his notice. His idea was that all these things were mere
concretions "generated by fermentation in the spots where they were
found," as he very quaintly and even absurdly put it. The accusation,
however, is not that Fallopius made a mistake--as many another man has
done--but that he deliberately expressed an opinion which he did not
hold and did so from religious motives. Of course, this includes the
idea that he knew what the real explanation was, for had he not known
it, he could not have been guilty of making a false statement. There is
no evidence whatever that Fallopius ever had so much as a suspicion of
the real explanation, nor, it may be added, had any other man of science
for the century which followed his death.

Then there arose another Catholic churchman, Nicolaus Stensen
(1631-1686), who, by the way, ended his days as a bishop, who did solve
the riddle, giving the answer which we accept to-day as correct, and on
whom was conferred by his brethren two hundred years later the title of
"The Father of Geology." It is a little difficult to understand how the
"unchanging Church" should have welcomed, or at least in no way objected
to, Stensen's views when the mere entertainment of them by Fallopius is
supposed to have terrified him into silence. But when the story of
Fallopius is mistold, as indicated above, it need hardly be said that
the story of Stensen is never so much as alluded to.

The real facts of the case are these: Fallopius was one of the most
distinguished men of science of his day. Every medical student becomes
acquainted with his name because it is attached to two parts of the
human body which he first described. He made a mistake about fossils,
and that is the plain truth--as we now know, a most absurd mistake, but
that is all. As we hinted above, he is very far from being the only
scientific man who has made a mistake. Huxley had a