cts of the dawning intellectual activity of man. In those
early days positive knowledge was not to be had, but the craving after
it needed, at all hazards, to be satisfied, and according to the
country, or the turn of thought of the speculator, the suggestion that
all living things arose from the mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg,
or from some more anthropomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient
resting-place for his curiosity. The myths of Paganism are as dead as
Osiris or Zeus, and the man who should revive them, in opposition to the
knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to scorn; but the coeval
imaginations current among the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded
by writers whose very name and age are admitted by every scholar to be
unknown, have unfortunately not yet shared their fate, but, even at this
day, are regarded by nine-tenths of the civilized world as the
authoritative standard of fact and the criterion of the justice of
scientific conclusions, in all that relates to the origin of things,
and, among them, of species. In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn
of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew
is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox.
Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the
days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their
good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters? Who shall count
the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the
effort to harmonize impossibilities--whose life has been wasted in the
attempt to force the generous new wine of Science into the old bottles
of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party?

It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been
amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every
science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history
records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed,
the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and
crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is
the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it
forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as
willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the
beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty
thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hand