vague concessions to the Genesis legends,
they developed geological truth more and more.

In France, the old theological spirit remained exceedingly powerful.
About the middle of the eighteenth century Buffon made another attempt
to state simple geological truths; but the theological faculty of the
Sorbonne dragged him at once from his high position, forced him to
recant ignominiously, and to print his recantation. It runs as follows:
"I declare that I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture;
that I believe most firmly all therein related about the creation, both
as to order of time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book
respecting the formation of the earth, and generally all which may be
contrary to the narrative of Moses." This humiliating document reminds
us painfully of that forced upon Galileo a hundred years before.

It has been well observed by one of the greatest of modern authorities
that the doctrine which Buffon thus "abandoned" is as firmly established
as that of the earth's rotation upon its axis.(138) Yet one hundred
and fifty years were required to secure for it even a fair hearing; the
prevailing doctrine of the Church continued to be that "all things were
made at the beginning of the world," and that to say that stones
and fossils were made before or since "the beginning" is contrary
to Scripture. Again we find theological substitutes for scientific
explanation ripening into phrases more and more hollow--making fossils
"sports of Nature," or "mineral concretions," or "creations of plastic
force," or "models" made by the Creator before he had fully decided upon
the best manner of creating various beings.

(138) See citation and remark in Lyell's Principles of Geology, chap.
iii, p. 57; also Huxley, Essays on Controverted Questions, p. 62.

Of this period, when theological substitutes for science were carrying
all before them, there still exists a monument commemorating at the
same time a farce and a tragedy. This is the work of Johann Beringer,
professor in the University of Wurzburg and private physician to
the Prince-Bishop--the treatise bearing the title Lithographiae
Wirceburgensis Specimen Primum, "illustrated with the marvellous
likenesses of two hundred figured or rather insectiform stones."
Beringer, for the greater glory of God, had previously committed
himself so completely to the theory that fossils are simply "stones of
a peculiar sort, hidden by the Aut