What can we do? Shall we recall the disagreeable past? Shall we point to mediæval scholars conniving with the clergy to deny the Heliocentric theory, for fear of hurting an ecclesiastical dogma? Must we recall how learned conchologists once denied that the fossil shells, found scattered over the face of the earth, were ever inhabited by living animals at all? How the naturalists of the eighteenth century declared these but mere _fac-similes_ of animals? And how these naturalists fought and quarrelled and battled and called each other names, over these venerable mummies of the ancient ages for nearly a century, until Buffon settled the question by proving to the negators that they were mistaken? Surely an oyster-shell is anything but transcendental, and ought to be quite a palpable subject for any exact study; and if {85} the scientists could not agree on that, we can hardly expect them to believe at all that evanescent forms,—of hands, faces, and whole bodies sometimes—appear at the seances of spiritual mediums, when the latter are honest. There exists a certain work which might afford very profitable reading for the leisure hours of skeptical men of science. It is a book published by Flourens, the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, called _Histoire des Recherches de Buffon_. The author shows in it how the great naturalist combated and finally conquered the advocates of the _fac-simile_ theory; and how they still went on denying everything under the sun, until at times the learned body fell into a fury, an epidemic of negation. It denied Franklin and his refined electricity; laughed at Fulton and his concentrated steam; voted the engineer Perdonnet a strait-jacket for his offer to build railroads; stared Harvey out of countenance; and proclaimed Bernard de Palissy “as stupid as one of his own pots!”