The hardy Greek sailor landed on the Cyclopean island, and discovered that Polyphemus, and Arges, and Brontes, and Steropes, and all the other one-eyed monsters were nothing but sea-wrack, bowlders, and weeds. He sailed farther, past Scylla and Charybdis, and discovered no greater dangers than sharp rocks and whirlpools. Yet farther he sailed out into the unknown sea, and the only Siren's song he heard was the whistling of the wind through the cordage of his vessel. In vain the Church thundered against the daring investigator. Neither fire, nor sword, nor imprisonment, nor death itself could check the march of truth. Mythology and pagan theogony had received their death-blows; superstition, bigotry, and dogmatism were elbowed aside and gave place to dawning science. The Church held that that which had been believed by pious men for untold ages must necessarily be true. Science, in the garb of philosophy, with cold, dispassionate criticism, proved that these hitherto accepted truths were arrant fallacies. The poets and writers then took up the subject, and finally the people fell into line, so superstitious, bigoted, dogmatic mythology died, intellectuality took its place, and higher civilization took a step forward. Thomas H. Huxley writes, in his preface to "Science and Christian Tradition," as follows: "I have never 'gone out of my way' to attack the Bible or anything else; it was the dominant, ecclesiasticism of my early days, which, as I believe, without any warrant from the Bible itself, thrust the book in my way. "I had set out on a journey, with no other purpose than that of exploring a certain province of natural knowledge; I strayed no hair's breadth from the course which it was my right and my duty to pursue; and yet I found that, whatever route I took, before long I came to a tall and formidable looking fence. Confident as I might be in the existence of an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood the thorny barrier with its comminatory notice-board--'NO THOROUGHFARE. By order. MOSES.' There seemed no way over; nor did the prospect of creeping round, as I saw some do attract me.... The only alternatives were either to give up my journey--which I was not minded to do--or to break the fence down and go through it." Huxley found that this Mosaic fence, as erected by dogmatic theologians and scholasticists, was but a flimsy structure at best, and one that was easily overthrown and destroyed. Dogmatic theology teaches that man was created from the dust of the earth, and that he at once fell heir to an estate of physical and psychical habitudes which were God-like in character; scientific investigation, on the contrary, demonstrated the fact that man's inception begins in bathybian protoplasm and culminates, as far as his general physical organism is concerned, in the last link of an evolutionary chain that reaches back and back, through countless eons of ages, to the very beginnings of life.