For a long period, in mediæval days, science was to most people what it was to Servetus, a simple paraphrase or glossary of a revealed text. In this was the truth, and if observation itself seemed sometimes contradictory, it was certain that there was some mistake; it was necessary to re-examine the contested question, and by dint of inquiring into the facts, they were altered so wisely, that in the end they always were found to agree. All over the East, among the Semitic race,[1] that which above all other possesses respect for authority, science still lives. Without the law there is no science, and the Korán is what the books of the sons of Israel and the writings of the apostles were in the middle ages, the great, the only authority, to which everything was referred.[2] If science has shone with a bright light in the East, this was due solely to the introduction of a more human philosophy, born among another race, and conveyed there by the works of Aristotle and the neo-Platonists. The East was inspired for an instant with these foreign doctrines, which it would have been incapable of originating itself. It revived for a century or two under their influence, but soon everything reverted to a former state of order; having shone in the barbarism of a pure theism, whence it would never have come out without the contact of a world extrinsic and superior to certain considerations, without the momentary education which it had thus received from it. All the sciences are not in the same intimate relation with the texts called revealed; the mathesiological order is that in which the sciences have had, and could have, the least to suffer from religious influence; in the first place, mathematics, which, from their nature, would never have known how to yield; and, lastly, geology and anthropology, allied by intimate relations to the Divine tradition of the first chapter of Genesis. But see how geology, which we thought for so long a time was in agreement with it, grows more distant every day as new discoveries are multiplied. The pretended epochs see, day by day, that their artificial limits are disappearing, now that one finds reptiles in coal-fields and mammalia in Trias.