Now, there is one very important point to which the author of this complaint does not seem to have adverted. The astronomer founded his belief in the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun, not on a mere dream-like hypothesis, founded on nothing, but on a wide and solid base of pure induction. Galileo was no mere dreamer;—he was a discoverer of great truths, and a profound reasoner regarding them: and on his discoveries and his reasonings, compelled by the inexorable laws of his mental constitution, did he build up certain deductive beliefs, which had no previous existence in his mind. His convictions were consequents, not antecedents. Such, also, is the character of geological discovery and inference, and of the existing belief,—their joint production,—regarding the great antiquity of the globe. No geologist worthy of the name _began_ with the belief, and then set himself to square geological phenomena with its requirements. It is a deduction,—a result;—not the starting assumption, or given sum, in a process of calculation, but its ultimate finding or answer. Clergymen of the orthodox Churches, such as the Sumners, Sedgwicks, Bucklands, Conybeares, and Pye Smiths of England, or the Chalmerses, Duncans, and Flemings of our own country, must have come to the study of this question of the world’s age with at least no bias in favor of the geological estimate. The old, and, as it has proven, erroneous reading of the Mosaic account, was by much too general a one early in the present century, not to have exerted upon them, in their character as ministers of religion, a sensible influence of a directly opposite nature. And the fact of the complete reversal of their original bias, and of the broad unhesitating finding on the subject which they ultimately substituted instead, serves to intimate to the uninitiated the strength of the evidence to which they submitted. There can be nothing more certain than that it is minds of the same calibre and class, engaged in the same inductive track, that yielded in the first instance to the astronomical evidence regarding the earth’s motion, and, in the second, to the geological evidence regarding the earth’s age.[40]