communicate to him a single scientific fact which he is competent to find out for himself. About an age previous to the times of Turrettine, the danger of "corrupting philosophy through an intermixed divinity" was admirably shown by Bacon in his "Novum Organum;" and the line indicated was exactly what we now find was laid down of old with such precision in Scripture. "To deify error and to adore vain things," said the great philosopher, "may be well accounted the plague of the understanding. Some modern men, guilty of much levity, have so indulged this vanity, that they have essayed to find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis, the Book of Job, and other places of holy writ, seeking the living among the dead. Now this vanity is so much the more to be checked and restrained, because, by unadvised mixture of Divine and human things, not only a phantastical philosophy is produced, but also an heretical religion. Therefore it is safe to give unto Faith, with a sober mind, the things that are Faith's." The passage, partially quoted, has been not unfrequently misapplied, as if it bore, not against theologians such as Turrettine and the Franciscans, but against theologians such as Chalmers, Dr. Bird Sumner, and Dr. Pye Smith,--not against the men who derive a false science from Scripture, into which God never introduced natural science of any kind, but against the men who, having sought and acquired their science where it is alone to be found, have striven to bring Scripture, in the misinterpreted passages, into harmony with its findings. Taken, however, as a whole, its true meaning is obvious. It is the men who have "essayed to find natural philosophy" positively revealed in Genesis and the other sacred books,--not the men who have merely shown that there is nothing in Scripture which conflicts with the natural philosophy legitimately found elsewhere,--that are obnoxious to the censure conveyed in the remark. It is they only, and not the others, that are "_phantastical_" in their philosophy and "_heretical_" in their religion. I say heretical in their religion. The Ptolemaic doctrine which ascribed to the earth a central place in the universe was only scientifically false, whereas the same doctrine in Turrettine and the Franciscans, from the circumstance that they pledged the Scripture to its falsity, and professed to derive it direct from revelation, was not only scientifically false, but a heresy to boot. And, in like manner, it is the class who term themselves the "Mosaic geologists,"--men such as the Granville Penns, Moses Stewarts, Eleazar Lords, Dean Cockburns, and Peter Macfarlanes,--who essay to "find natural philosophy in the first chapter of Genesis," and that too a demonstrably false natural philosophy, who are obnoxious to the Baconian censure now. No true geologist ever professes to deduce his geology from Scripture. It is from the earth's crust, with its numerous