cation of the same age as the
"Compendium Theologica,"--he makes his Marchioness surmount it too.
"'But I have a difficulty to solve,' he represents the lady as saying,
'and you must be serious. As the earth moves, the air changes every
moment; so we breathe the air of another country.' 'Not at all,' replied
I; 'for the air which encompasses the earth follows with us, and turns
with us. Have you not seen the labors of the silkworm? The shell or
cocoon which it weaves around itself with so much art is of a down very
loose and soft; and so the earth, which is solid, is covered, from the
surface twenty leagues upwards, with a kind of down, which is the air,
and, like the shell of the silkworm, turns along with it.'" Even
Turrettine, however, was as far in advance of some of our contemners of
science in the present day, as Fontenelle was in advance of Turrettine,
or Newton in advance of Fontenelle. The old theologian could scarce have
held, with a living ecclesiastic of the Romish Church in Ireland, Father
Cullen, that the sun is _possibly_ only a fathom in diameter; or have
asserted with a most Protestant lecturer who addressed an audience in
Edinburgh little more than three years ago, that, though God created all
the wild animals, it was the devil who made the flesh-eaters among them
fierce and carnivorous; and, of course, shortened their bowels,
lengthened their teeth, and stuck formidable claws into the points of
their digits.[36] Further, the error of Turrettine was but that of his
age, whereas our modern decriers of scientific fact and inference are
always men greatly in the rear of theirs, and as far inferior to the
ancient assertors of the same errors as the few untutored peasants and
fishermen of our own time, located in remote parts of the country, who
still retain the old faith in witchcraft, are inferior to the great
lawyers, poets, and divines,--the Fairfaxes, Henry Mores, Judge Haleses,
and Sir George Mackenzies,--who in the seventeenth century entertained a
similar belief. And so it may seem somewhat idle work to take any pains
in "scattering" such a "rear of darkness thin" as this forlorn phalanx
composes. "Let them alone," said a lunatic in the lucid fit, to a
soldier who had told him, when asked why he carried a sword, that it was
to kill his enemies,--"let them alone, and they will all die of
themselves." But though very inconsiderable, there is a comparatively
large proportion of the class perilously poste