It made considerable difference to his recollections of Rome what date it was within this period that he arrived. If at the beginning, he would have found St. Peter's half-finished and the interior in a state better suited to a pig-sty; and the rest of the city to match; the most confident Protestant would be gratified to find himself scandalised beyond expectation. By 1601 St. Peter's was practically in all its glory, the city unsurpassed in its care for the needy and sick, and of average morality. In the interval, too, the catacombs had been discovered, and though Bosio, the explorer of them, did not publish the results of his explorations till 1632 they became more accessible meanwhile; continuing, however, to be regarded as isolated "crypts." It was his book "Roma Sotterranea" that first caused them to be considered collectively; and it was under that name that Evelyn paid his visit to them in 1645, the first of these tourists to make anything that can be called an excursion among them. He entered through a burrow in a cornfield two miles from the city, so small that he had to crawl on his stomach for the first twenty paces. But the main feature of the Rome of 1600 was still its power. Not simply influence in the present as a result of power in the past, but the strength of age, middle-age, and youth existing in unison. To begin with, their reverence for Ancient Rome was greater than ours; an effect partly of their theory of history, partly of the narrower limits of their acquaintance with the materials of history. For the former cause, it was bound to be an axiom of history as long as the Bible remained authoritative as a statement of historical fact, that mankind had proceeded from good to bad, and from bad to worse, as time had advanced. And whatever, in the thought of the age, tended to shake this view, was held in check by the discoveries, in different, previously unexplored, parts of the world, of communities which seemed to be possessed at once of a higher morality and also of a more primitive civilisation, than the European. It is probably impossible for us to realise the alteration that the theory of evolution has introduced into current ideas about history.