Let the ingenuous reader try to make the supposition that he had been brought up in ignorance of that truth, and without any training in astronomy, and that in adolescence or mature years it had been casually put to him as a non-authoritative suggestion. Would he have been quick to surmise that the paradox might be truth? Let him next try to imagine that he had been educated by an eccentric guardian in the Ptolemaic creed, which accounted so plausibly for so many solar and stellar phenomena, and that until middle life he had been kept unaware of the Copernican heresy. Can he be sure that, meeting it not as an accredited doctrine but as a novel hypothesis, he would have been prompt to recognize that it was the better solution? If he can readily say Yes, I know not whether his confidence is enviable or otherwise. Reading in Sylvester's translation of the Divine Weeks of Du Bartas, which had such vogue in the days of James VI, the confident derision and "confutation" of the heliocentric theory, I really cannot be sure that had I lived in those days I should have gone right where Bacon went wrong. To a mere historical student, not conscious of any original insight into the problems of nature, there ought to be something chastening in the recollection that every great advance in the human grasp of them has been hotly or hilariously denounced and derided; and that not merely by the average ignoramus, but by the mass of the experts. It was not the peasants of Italy who refused to look through Galileo's telescope--they were not invited to; it was the academics, deep in Aristotle. It was not the laity who distinguished themselves by rejecting Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood; it was all the doctors above forty then living, if we can believe a professional saying. And it was not merely the humdrum Bible-readers who scouted geology for generations, or who laughed consumedly for decades over the announcement that Darwin made out men to be "descended from monkeys." That theory, as it happened, had been unscientifically enough propounded long before Darwin; and, albeit not grounded upon any such scientific research as served to establish the Darwinian theory in a generation, yet happened to be considerably nearer rationality than the Semitic myth which figured for instructed Christendom as the absolute and divinely revealed truth on the subject. A recollection of the hate and fury with which geologists like Hugh Miller repelled the plain lesson of their own science when it was shown to clash with the sacred myth, and a memory of the roar of derision and disgust which met Darwin, should set reasonable men on their guard when they find themselves faced by propositions which can hardly seem more monstrous to this generation than those others did to our fathers and grandfathers.