Page:Educational Review Volume 23.djvu/47

 in the next age is received with enthusiastic applause.” As we travel in retrospect along the stepping-stones from myth to science, from credulity to logicality, we find rather little disproof and very much outgrowth. It is because we have a more appropriate, that is, a truer way of regarding a certain cluster of phenomena, that we discard the old way; and this truer conception, reached partly by new fact, partly by new argument, partly by new insight, partly by new applications of method, is the logical legacy which the successive “heirs of all the ages”—each in turn “in the foremost ranks of time”—bequeath to their descendants.

The word-learning of the scholastics is reflected in their explanation of the existence of fossils by recourse to a “stone-making force,” or a “lapidific juice,” or a “seminal air,” or a “tumultuous movement of terrestrial exhalations”; the theologizing proclivities of the upholders of scriptural literalism appear in their accounting for fossils as “sports of nature,” as models made by the Creator before he had decided upon the most suitable forms for the animals to assume, or as snares hidden by the Almighty to tempt the unorthodox. Voltaire argued that “fossil fishes were the remains of fishes intended for food, but spoiled and thrown away by travelers; that the fossil shells were accidentally dropped by Crusaders and pilgrims returning from the Holy Land,” and one Beringer indited ponderous tomes to prove that they were “stones of a peculiar sort, hidden by the Author of nature for his own pleasure.” Beringer’s work deserves a prominent place in the museum of credulity; for it is related