For instance, nothing is more common in the mouths of certain kinds of scholars than the expressions of wonder as to why men did not study nature more assiduously before our time. Here is a magnificent open book full of the most alluring lessons which any one may study for himself, and that somehow it is presumed men neglected {99} down to our time. We are the age of nature students, and preceding times are looked at askance for having neglected the opportunities that lay so invitingly open to them in this subject. It has always been a wonder to me how people dare to talk this way. Our old literatures are full of observations on nature. In my book on "The Popes and Science" I take Dante as a typical product of the universities of the thirteenth century, and show without any difficulty as it seems to me, that there is no poet of the modern time who can draw figures from nature which demand even a detailed knowledge of nature with so much confidence as Dante. He knows the most intimate details about the birds, about many animals, about the ways of flowers, about children, describes some experiments in science, has a wide knowledge of astronomy and in general is familiar with nature quite as much if not more than any modern writer not _ex professo_ a naturalist. He describes the metamorphosis of insects, how the ants communicate with one another, knows the secrets of the bees and exhibits wide knowledge of the secrets of bird life. The presumption that people did not study nature in the olden time is quite unjustified. They did not write long books about trivial subjects of nature-study. They did not conclude that because they were seeing something for the first time, that that was the first time in the world's history it had ever been seen. They were gentle, {100} kindly scholars who assumed that others had eyes and saw too, and as fortunately there was no printing press there was not that hurried rushing into print, with superficial observations and still more superficial conclusions, which has characterized so much of our recent literature of nature-study and that has been so well dubbed "nature faking." Of course we have had faking of the same kind in nearly everything else: we have history faking in our supposed historical romances, science faking in our pseudo-science, science-history faking in our ready presumption that the men of the olden time could not have had our interests, and, above all--may I now say it?--in our cheap conclusion that there must have been some reason for their lack of interest in science, and then the assumption without anything further, that it must have been because of the Church.