Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/598

580 century we find that among the crimes for which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to have his tongue torn out and to be burned alive was his belief that there is a gradation extending upward from the lowest to the highest form of created beings.

In the eighteenth century we find this same idea of an upward progress, especially through the three ages of stone, bronze, and iron, cropping out in scientific form still more definitely from beneath the vast mass of theological reasoning in Germany, France, and England.

The investigations of the last forty years have shown that Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius has been now thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and arranged; until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archæologists, have brought these prophecies to evident fulfillment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron; and arraying vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a fall, there has been a rise of man from the earliest indications in the Quaternary or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.

The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the fall" came, as we have seen, from geology. According to that doctrine, as held quite generally from its beginnings among the fathers and doctors of the primitive Church down to its culmination in

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