ns of the sacred books, and turned their faces away from
scientific investigation, it was among their contemporaries at the
revival of learning that there began to arise fruitful thought in this
field. Then it was, about the beginning of the sixteenth century, that
Leonardo da Vinci, as great a genius in science as in art, broached
the true idea as to the origin of fossil remains; and his compatriot,
Fracastoro, developed this on the modern lines of thought. Others in
other parts of Europe took up the idea, and, while mixing with it many
crudities, drew from it more and more truth. Toward the end of the
sixteenth century Bernard Palissy, in France, took hold of it with the
same genius which he showed in artistic creation; but, remarkable as
were his assertions of scientific realities, they could gain little
hearing. Theologians, philosophers, and even some scientific men of
value, under the sway of scholastic phrases, continued to insist upon
such explanations as that fossils were the product of "fatty matter set
into a fermentation by heat"; or of a "lapidific juice";(135) or of
a "seminal air";(136) or of a "tumultuous movement of terrestrial
exhalations"; and there was a prevailing belief that fossil remains, in
general, might be brought under the head of "sports of Nature," a pious
turn being given to this phrase by the suggestion that these "sports"
indicated some inscrutable purpose of the Almighty.

(135) Succus lapidificus.

(136) Aura seminalis.

This remained a leading orthodox mode of explanation in the Church,
Catholic and Protestant, for centuries.

II. EFFORTS TO SUPPRESS THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW.

But the scientific method could not be entirely hidden; and, near the
beginning of the seventeenth century, De Clave, Bitaud, and De Villon
revived it in France. Straightway the theological faculty of Paris
protested against the scientific doctrine as unscriptural, destroyed the
offending treatises, banished their authors from Paris, and forbade them
to live in towns or enter places of public resort.(137)

(137) See Morley, Life of Palissy the Potter, vol. ii, p. 315 et seq.

The champions of science, though depressed for a time, quietly laboured
on, especially in Italy. Half a century later, Steno, a Dane, and
Scilla, an Italian, went still further in the right direction; and,
though they and their disciples took great pains to throw a tub to the
whale, in the shape of sundry