Every truth, every new idea, has to battle against old established notions. If the new idea is persisted in, which is ordinarily the case, a struggle must ensue. The old idea resists, refuses to yield, no matter how false, ridiculous, or pernicious it may be. Yield, however, it must, and does in the course of time. Truth must win in the long run, though it has to fight its way through depths of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, sustained by hate, bigotry, terrorism, and persecution. As century after century passed in the Dark Ages, apostles of science and truth appeared, here and there, now and then, calm, dignified, patient, persistent and persevering, untiring, self-denying, men of superior intellect, unswayed and undismayed by existing authorities. These men gave us, though not a complete, a very ample revelation of nature, unfolding its mysteries, explaining its phenomena, making known the truth as far as men had been able to discover up to their time. Nature with its laws man had to observe carefully in order to learn to unravel its secrets, its workings, its forces. There is no way to reveal them except through the mind of man. There are no means of knowing or discovering the intricacies and subtleties of nature's hidden and inexhaustible resources but by careful thought, reason, constant study and application. Not a single problem has ever been solved--in fact, one cannot be solved--except by acquired intellectual powers, developed by the refining process of education of the great nervous centers of man. Many scholars have devoted and still devote their time, their energy, their life, in search of new facts, new truths, concerning the stars, planetary system, and this terrestrial globe we live on especially. Centuries before Christ's time, and after, men were engaged in developing the science of Astronomy--Anaximander, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Herschel, and many others. These men were the apostles of truth, the teachers of facts, and some of them were martyrs to science. The great civilizer, the press of modern times, was recently filled with accounts about the planet Mars, comet, etc., giving all the detailed information obtainable. Everyone who reads the newspapers learns something about Mars, and ventures to give his opinion, whether it is like the earth--inhabited, has seas or atmosphere, etc. So that, whatever new facts are revealed, new truths announced, the minds of men are made so much richer. Knowledge, the progress of science, the discoveries of important facts, the improvements of political, social, or civil laws, do not come to us spontaneously, nor do they come to us suddenly in overpowering quantities; it is a process of gradual acquirement, a slow accumulation, to which every generation contributes its quota of observation and experience that makes up the total wealth of aggregate thought, and is handed down from generation to generation, our common inheritance.