All the same, the shriveled little fellow played a most important rôle in the history of progress. He was not much of a writer. He shared the prejudice of his class and his age against the literary profession. A gentleman (even a Venetian gentleman who was supposed to be familiar with double-entry bookkeeping) handled a sword and not a goose-quill. Hence the unwillingness of Messire Marco to turn author. But the fortunes of war carried him into a Genoese prison. And there, to while away the tedious hours of his confinement, he told a poor scribbler, who happened to share his cell, the strange story of his life. In this roundabout way the people of Europe learned many things about this world which they had never known before. For although Polo was a simple-minded fellow who firmly believed that one of the mountains he had seen in Asia Minor had been moved a couple of miles by a pious saint who wanted to show the heathen “what true faith could do,” and who swallowed all the stories about people without heads and chickens with three legs which were so popular in his day, his report did more to upset the geographical theories of the Church than anything that had appeared during the previous twelve hundred years. Polo, of course, lived and died a faithful son of the Church. He would have been terribly upset if any one had compared him with his near-contemporary, the famous Roger Bacon, who was an out and out scientist and paid for his intellectual curiosity with ten years of enforced literary idleness and fourteen years of prison. And yet of the two he was by far the more dangerous. For whereas only one person in a hundred thousand could follow Bacon when he went chasing rainbows, and spun those fine evolutionary theories which threatened to upset all the ideas held sacred in his own time, every citizen who had been taught his ABCs could learn from Polo that the world was full of a number of things the existence of which the authors of the Old Testament had never even suspected. I do not mean to imply that the publication of a single book caused that rebellion against scriptural authority which was to occur before the world could gain a modicum of freedom. Popular enlightenment is ever the result of centuries of painstaking preparation. But the plain and straightforward accounts of the explorers and the navigators and the travelers, understandable to all the people, did a great deal to bring about that spirit of scepticism which characterizes the latter half of the Renaissance and which allowed people to say and write things which only a few years before would have brought them into contact with the agents of the Inquisition.