very bad fall over
_Bathybius_ and was man enough to admit that he was wrong. Curiously
enough, what Huxley thought a living thing really was a concretion, just
as what Fallopius thought a concretion had been a living thing.

Another extremely curious fact is that another distinguished man of
science, who lived three hundred years later than Fallopius and had all
the knowledge which had accumulated during that prolific period to
assist him, the late Philip Gosse, fell into the same pit as Fallopius.
As his son tells us, he wrote a book to prove that when the sudden act
of creation took place the world came into existence so constructed as
to bear the appearance of a place which had for aeons been inhabited by
living things, or, as some of his critics unkindly put it, "that God hid
the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity."
Gosse had the real answer under his eyes which Fallopius had not, for
the riddle was unread in the latter's days. Yet Gosse's really
unpardonable mistake was attributed to himself alone, and "Plymouth
Brethrenism," which was the sect to which he belonged, was not saddled
with it, nor have the Brethren been called obscurantists because of it.

Of course there is a second string to the accusation we are dealing
with. If the scientific man did really express new and perhaps startling
opinions, they would have been much newer and much more startling had he
not held himself in for fear of the Church and said only about half of
what he might have said. It is the half instead of the whole loaf of the
former accusation. Thus, in its notice of Stensen, the current issue of
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says: "Cautiously at first, for fear of
offending orthodox opinion, but afterwards more boldly, he proclaimed
his opinion that these objects (_viz._ fossils) had once been parts of
living animals."

One may feel quite certain that if Stensen had not been a Catholic
ecclesiastic this notice would have run--and far more
truthfully--"Cautiously at first, until he felt that the facts at his
disposal made his position quite secure, and then more boldly, etc.
etc."

What in the ordinary man of science is caution, becomes cowardice in the
Catholic. We shall find another example of this in the case of Buffon
(1707-1788) often cited as that of a man who believed all that Darwin
believed and one hundred years before Darwin, and who yet was afraid to
say it because of the Church to which