The latter has already given them magnificent answers in astronomy and in geology. Before irrefutable facts, the later upholders of the ancient biblical interpretations have either been obliged to withdraw, or to be silent. No one believes in the immobility of the earth, in creation having taken place in six days of twenty-four hours each, or in the simultaneous appearance of all animals, or all plants. Astronomy has made known to us the genesis of worlds; geology has taught us how continents and seas, valleys and mountains are formed, thus evolving some of the grandest results due to the action of second causes in the inorganic empire. There remains the organic empire, plants, animals, and man himself. Here curiosity is excited, and the want of explanation becomes more pressing, but unfortunately observation and experiment are equally at fault. Some men, eminent in science and in the richness of their imaginations, have thought themselves able to do without it. Reviving the methods of the Greek philosophers, they have thought it possible to explain living nature and the entire universe, by connecting certain facts with conceptions, which are almost entirely intellectual. Once started in this path, they are readily elated at their own thoughts. When the positive knowledge which has been accumulated by the long-continued labours of their illustrious predecessors, has embarrassed their speculations, they have at once, so to speak, thrown it overboard; they have pushed to the utmost the more or less logical development of their _à priori_, and have nothing but irony and disdain for those who hesitate to follow them. These men could not but excite admiration. They spoke in the name of science alone; by its means they replied to aspirations perfectly justifiable on such a topic; they produced theories which charmed by their fulness and the apparent precision of their explanations. They were able consequently to influence even those men of science who had not gone to the bottom of things, and much more so the general public, who are always satisfied to believe what they are told. The nature of the resistance which they have met with from time to time was calculated to increase the splendour of their triumph. Men as imprudent as ill-judged have attacked them in the name of dogma. Scientific discovery has degenerated into controversy; both parties have become excited, and in the two camps it has been considered necessary to deny all the statements of the enemy; they have vied with each other in violence, and _savants_, who pretended to speak in the name of free thought, have not shown themselves the less intolerant. I will only remind the one party of the trial of Galileo, and the other of the theories of Voltaire denying the existence of fossils.