Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - A History of Evolution (1922).djvu/30

 Rh trashy books, filled with myriads of impossible "facts," undoubtedly did a great deal to block the progress of true evolutionary studies. Just as the public today does not distinguish between the would-be orator who talks of the "facts" of natural selection, and the true evolutionist, and ridicules both, so the public the eighteenth century linked the speculators with the sincere, hard-working naturalists, and declared the ideas of both to be foolish and blasphemous.

One of the most amusing of the speculators was Claude Duret, mayor of a small French town. In his "Histoire Admirable des Plantes," published in 1609, he described and illustrated a tree which he said was rare in France, but "frequently observed in Scotland ." From this tree, as pictured by the mayor, leaves are falling; on one side they reach water, and are slowly transformed into fishes; upon the other