There is nothing speculative (?) in the hypothesis that General George Washington was evolved from a crustacean. There never was a more absurd and wild speculation. It is an old speculation. Anaximander, who lived six centuries before Christ, advocated the assumption. His words are the following: "The sun's heat, acting on the original miry earth, produced filmy bladders or bubbles, and these, becoming surrounded with a prickly rind, at length burst open, and as from an egg, animals came forth. At first they were ill-formed and imperfect, but subsequently they elaborated and developed." This has the genuine ring of the language of modern unbelievers. Christianity, in its beginning, had to encounter this "speculation" along with the current literature and philosophy of a civilization which was semi-barbarous and centuries old, but it triumphed over all, and in the third century it triumphed everywhere. Since that time one effort has been made upon the part of paganism to regain her former strength in the old world. Julian made that effort. He tried to revive and establish the supremacy of pagan thought by the power of the state. Subsequent to this it disappeared in the east, and has only plead for toleration in the west. But the dark ages came on in all their hideousness, and unbelief developed itself about the close of the fifteenth century, all over Europe. Paganism, as the result, was fostered near the bosom of the church. The fifth Lateran Council proclaimed anew the tenet of the imperishability of the spirit of man. The Padua University adopted a system of materialism taught in the works of Alexander, of Aphrodisias. A form of pantheism known in the philosophy of Averroes soon became a center of skepticism. In the latter part of the seventeenth century modern unbelievers began their assaults. Lord Herbert and Hobbs in England, Spinoza in Holland, and Bayle in France.