Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - A History of Evolution (1922).djvu/31

 28 they strike dry land and change themselves into birds. Fathers Bonnami and Kircher were lovers of the same kind of natural history; the latter describes orchids which give birth to birds and tiny men. Other writers of the time described and figured such creatures as centaurs, sea-serpents, ship-swallowing devil-fish, unicorns, and so on, solemnly assuring the readers that they had seen, and sometimes even killed these creatures. And all of this nonsense was greedily read and believed by people who refused to admit that one species might, in the course of thousands of years, change into something distinguishably different from the original form! One wonders if there has been a greater paradox in the world than a public which denied the existence of links between one species and another, yet believed in centaurs which were half man and half horse. Is it any wonder that, amid such an environment, science was almost stifled, and philosophy was largely a matter of deduction and imagination?