The investigations of the last forty years have shown that Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has been now thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and arranged--until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archaeologists, have brought these prophecies to evident fulfilment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a FALL, there has been a RISE of man, from the earliest indications in the Quaternary, or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.(190) (190) For Vanini, see Topinard, Elements of Anthropologie, p. 52. For a brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in Germany, Goguet in France, Hoare in England, and others in various parts of Europe, as regards this development of the scientific view during the eighteenth century, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i. For the agency of Bodin, Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, Philosophy of History, introduction, pp. 28 et seq. For a shorter summary, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern archaeologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works cited in this article. For a generous statement regarding the great services of the Danish archaeologists in this field, see Quatrefages, introduction to Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques de l'Espagne et du Portugal. The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the Fall" came, as we have seen, from geology. According to that doctrine, as held quite generally from its beginnings among the fathers and doctors of the primitive Church down to its culmination in the minds of great Protestants like John Wesley, the statement in our sacred books that "death entered the world by sin" was taken as a historic fact, necessitating the conclusion that, before the serpent persuaded Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, death on our planet was unknown. Naturally, when geology revealed, in the strata of a period long before the coming of man on earth, a vast multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted to destroy their fellow-creatures on land and sea, and within the fossilized skeletons of many of these the partially digested remains of animals, this doctrine was too heavy to be carried, and it was quietly dropped.