taken place
since.

Some difficulties arose here and there as zoology progressed and
revealed ever-increasing numbers of species; but through the Middle
Ages, and indeed long after the Reformation, these difficulties were
easily surmounted by making the ark of Noah larger and larger, and
especially by holding that there had been a human error in regard to its
measurement.(13)

(13) For St. Augustine, see De Genesis and De Trinitate, passim; for
Bede, see Hexaemeron, lib. i, in Migne, tome xci, pp. 21, 36-38, 42; and
De Sex Dierum Criatione, in Migne, tome xciii, p. 215; for Peter Lombard
on "noxious animals," see his Sententiae, lib. ii, dist. xv, 3, Migne,
tome cxcii, p. 682; for Wesley, Clarke, and Watson, see quotations from
them and notes thereto in my chapter on Geology; for St. Augustine
on "superfluous animals," see the De Genesi, lib. i, cap. xvi, 26; on
Luther's view of flies, see the Table Talk and his famous utterance,
"Odio muscas quia sunt imagines diaboli et hoereticorum"; for the agency
of Aristotle and Plato in fastening the belief in the fixity of species
into Christian theology, see Sachs, Geschichte der Botanik, Munchen,
1875, p. 107 and note, also p. 113.

But naturally there was developed among both ecclesiastics and laymen
a human desire to go beyond these special points in the history of
animated beings--a desire to know what the creation really IS.

Current legends, stories, and travellers' observations, poor as they
were, tended powerfully to stimulate curiosity in this field.

Three centuries before the Christian era Aristotle had made the
first really great attempt to satisfy this curiosity, and had begun
a development of studies in natural history which remains one of the
leading achievements in the story of our race.

But the feeling which we have already seen so strong in the early
Church--that all study of Nature was futile in view of the approaching
end of the world--indicated so clearly in the New Testament and voiced
so powerfully by Lactantius and St. Augustine--held back this current
of thought for many centuries. Still, the better tendency in humanity
continued to assert itself. There was, indeed, an influence coming from
the Hebrew Scriptures themselves which wrought powerfully to this end;
for, in spite of all that Lactantius or St. Augustine might say as to
the futility of any study of Nature, the grand utterances in the Psalms
regarding the beauties and wonders o