cher
of mathematics served six months in the common Gaol at Gloucester!

While men were being tried for publishing the "Free-thinker", the
Premier of England was William Ewart Gladstone. And if you wish to
know what an established church can do by way of setting up dullness
in high places, get a volume of this "Grand Old Man's" writings on
theological and religious questions. Read his "Juventus Mundi", in the
course of which he establishes a mystic connection between the trident
of Neptune and the Christian Trinity! Read his efforts to prove that
the writer of Genesis was an inspired geologist! This writer of
Genesis points out in Nature "a grand, fourfold division, set forth in
an orderly succession of times: First, the water population; secondly,
the air population; thirdly, the land population of animals; fourthly,
the land population consummated in man." And it seems that this
division and sequence "is understood to have been so affirmed in our
time by natural science that it may be taken as a demonstrated
conclusion and established fact." Hence we must conclude of the writer
of Genesis that "his knowledge was divine"! Consider that this was
actually published in one of the leading British monthlies, and that
it was necessary for Professor Huxley to answer it, pointing out that
so far is it from being true that "a fourfold division and orderly
sequence" of water, air and land animals "has been affirmed in our
time by natural science", that on the contrary, the assertion is
"directly contradictory to facts known to everyone who is acquainted
with the elements of natural science". The distribution of fossils
proves that land animals originated before sea-animals, and there has
been such a mixing of land, sea and air animals as utterly to destroy
the reputation of both Genesis and Gladstone as possessing a divine
knowledge of Geology.

#Gibson's Preservative#

I have a friend, a well-known "scholar", who permits me the use of his
extensive library. I stand in the middle and look about me, and see in
the dim shadows walls lined from floor to ceiling with decorous and
grave-looking books, bound for the most part in black, many of them
fading to green with age. There are literally thousands of such, and
their theme is the pseudo-science of "divinity". I close my, eyes, to
make the test fair, and walk to the shelves and put out my hand and
take a book. It proves to be a modern work, "A History of the English
Prayer-boo