Another extremely curious fact is that another distinguished man of science, who lived three hundred years later than Fallopius and had all the knowledge which had accumulated during that prolific period to assist him, the late Philip Gosse, fell into the same pit as Fallopius. As his son tells us, he wrote a book to prove that when the sudden act of creation took place the world came into existence so constructed as to bear the appearance of a place which had for aeons been inhabited by living things, or, as some of his critics unkindly put it, "that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity." Gosse had the real answer under his eyes which Fallopius had not, for the riddle was unread in the latter's days. Yet Gosse's really unpardonable mistake was attributed to himself alone, and "Plymouth Brethrenism," which was the sect to which he belonged, was not saddled with it, nor have the Brethren been called obscurantists because of it. Of course there is a second string to the accusation we are dealing with. If the scientific man did really express new and perhaps startling opinions, they would have been much newer and much more startling had he not held himself in for fear of the Church and said only about half of what he might have said. It is the half instead of the whole loaf of the former accusation. Thus, in its notice of Stensen, the current issue of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says: "Cautiously at first, for fear of offending orthodox opinion, but afterwards more boldly, he proclaimed his opinion that these objects (_viz._ fossils) had once been parts of living animals." One may feel quite certain that if Stensen had not been a Catholic ecclesiastic this notice would have run--and far more truthfully--"Cautiously at first, until he felt that the facts at his disposal made his position quite secure, and then more boldly, etc. etc."