ingle well-known shell.

Ever more and more difficult, too, became the question of the
geographical distribution of animals. As new explorations were made in
various parts of the world, this danger to the theological view went on
increasing. The sloths in South America suggested painful questions: How
could animals so sluggish have got away from the neighbourhood of Mount
Ararat so completely and have travelled so far?

The explorations in Australia and neighbouring islands made matters
still worse, for there was found in those regions a whole realm of
animals differing widely from those of other parts of the earth.

The problem before the strict theologians became, for example, how to
explain the fact that the kangaroo can have been in the ark and be now
only found in Australia: his saltatory powers are indeed great, but
how could he by any series of leaps have sprung across the intervening
mountains, plains, and oceans to that remote continent? and, if the
theory were adopted that at some period a causeway extended across the
vast chasm separating Australia from the nearest mainland, why did not
lions, tigers, camels, and camelopards force or find their way across
it?

The theological theory, therefore, had by the end of the eighteenth
century gone to pieces. The wiser theologians waited; the unwise
indulged in exhortations to "root out the wicked heart of unbelief," in
denunciation of "science falsely so called," and in frantic declarations
that "the Bible is true"--by which they meant that the limited
understanding of it which they had happened to inherit is true.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the whole theological theory
of creation--though still preached everywhere as a matter of form--was
clearly seen by all thinking men to be hopelessly lost: such strong men
as Cardinal Wiseman in the Roman Church, Dean Buckland in the Anglican,
and Hugh Miller in the Scottish Church, made heroic efforts to save
something from it, but all to no purpose. That sturdy Teutonic and
Anglo-Saxon honesty, which is the best legacy of the Middle Ages to
Christendom, asserted itself in the old strongholds of theological
thought, the universities. Neither the powerful logic of Bishop Butler
nor the nimble reasoning of Archdeacon Paley availed. Just as the line
of astronomical thinkers from Copernicus to Newton had destroyed the old
astronomy, in which the earth was the centre, and the Almighty sitting
above the firmament th