Poor schemers! Before the year was out an infant was born in
Lincolnshire, whose destiny it was to round and complete and carry
forward the work of their victim, so that, until man shall cease from
the planet, neither the work nor its author shall have need of a
monument.

* * * * *

Here might I end, were it not that the same kind of struggle as went on
fiercely in the seventeenth century is still smouldering even now. Not
in astronomy indeed, as then; nor yet in geology, as some fifty years
ago; but in biology mainly--perhaps in other subjects. I myself have
heard Charles Darwin spoken of as an atheist and an infidel, the theory
of evolution assailed as unscriptural, and the doctrine of the ascent of
man from a lower state of being, as opposed to the fall of man from some
higher condition, denied as impious and un-Christian.

Men will not learn by the past; still they brandish their feeble weapons
against the truths of Nature, as if assertions one way or another could
alter fact, or make the thing other than it really is. As Galileo said
before his spirit was broken, "In these and other positions certainly no
man doubts but His Holiness the Pope hath always an absolute power of
admitting or condemning them; but it is not in the power of any creature
to make them to be true or false, or otherwise than of their own nature
and in fact they are."

I know nothing of the views of any here present; but I have met educated
persons who, while they might laugh at the men who refused to look
through a telescope lest they should learn something they did not like,
yet also themselves commit the very same folly. I have met persons who
utterly refuse to listen to any view concerning the origin of man other
than that of a perfect primaeval pair in a garden, and I am constrained
to say this much: Take heed lest some prophet, after having excited your
indignation at the follies and bigotry of a bygone generation, does not
turn upon you with the sentence, "Thou art the man."

SUMMARY OF FACTS FOR LECTURE VI

_Science before Newton_

_Dr. Gilbert_, of Colchester, Physician to Queen Elizabeth, was an
excellent experimenter, and made many discoveries in magnetism and
electricity. He was contemporary with Tycho Brahe, and lived from 1540
to 1603.

_Francis Bacon_, Lord Verulam, 1561-1626, though a brilliant writer, is
not specially important as regards science. He was not a scientific man,
and his r