us?"

Many must have thought: We worked so laboriously only to encumber our
minds, and yet but one thing was needful: we should have been humble
and simple, but independent. Instead, we filled our souls with
darkness, and the ray that would have made us see, could not penetrate
to us.

Let us take some grosser errors. As far back as the days of the Greek
civilization it was known empirically that "stones can fall from the
sky." Falls of aerolites are recorded in the most ancient Chinese
chronicles. In the Middle Ages and in modern times intimations of the
fall of aerolites have increased in frequency. Remarkable facts are
indeed recorded in history in connection with similar phenomena: the
meteorite which fell in 1492 served the Emperor Maximilian I of
Germany as a pretext to excite Christendom to a war against the Turks.
Nevertheless, the phenomenon was not admitted by men of science until
the eighteenth century. One of the largest meteorites on record was
that which fell near Agram in 1751; it weighed about forty
kilogrammes, and was deposited and catalogued in the court
mineralogical museum at Vienna. This is what Stuetz, a German savant,
had to say on the subject in 1790: "Those ignorant of natural history
may believe that iron has fallen from the sky, and even educated men
in Germany may have believed this in 1751, taking into account the
universal ignorance then prevalent as to natural history and physics;
but in our times it would be unpardonable to admit even the
plausibility of such fables."

In the same year 1790, an aerolite weighing ten kilogrammes fell in
Gascony. It was observed by a large number of persons, and an official
report, signed by three hundred witnesses, was sent to the Academy of
Paris. The reply was that "it had been very amusing to receive a legal
document dealing with such an absurdity." [7]

[Footnote 7: But a great physicist, unable to share _amusement_,
wrote: "It is sad to see a municipality giving credence to the babble
of the vulgar in a protocol, and to see authentic testimonies to an
occurrence which is obviously impossible."]

When, a few years later, Chladni of Wittenberg, the founder of
scientific acoustics, began to admit the phenomenon and to believe in
the existence of aerolites, he was stigmatized as "a man who was
ignorant of every law and who did not consider the damage he was doing
in the moral world"; and one savant declared that "if he had himself
seen iron fall