purely human concerns, did not, however, quickly or easily gain
popular approbation and respect. The process of emancipating natural
science from current prejudices, both of the learned and of the
unlearned, has been long and painful, and is not wholly completed yet.
If we go back to the opening of the seventeenth century we find three
men whose business it was, above all, to present and defend common
sense in the natural sciences. The most eloquent and variedly
persuasive of these was Lord Bacon. Then there was the young Descartes
trying to shake himself loose from his training in a Jesuit seminary
by going into the Thirty Years' War, and starting his intellectual
life all over by giving up for the moment all he had been taught.
Galileo had committed an offense of a grave character by discussing in
the mother tongue the problems of physics. In his old age he was
imprisoned and sentenced to repeat the seven penitential psalms for
differing from Aristotle and Moses and the teachings of the theologians.
On hearing Galileo's fate. Descartes burned a book he had written, _On
The World_, lest he, too, get into trouble.

From that time down to the days of Huxley and John Fiske the struggle
has continued, and still continues--the Three Hundred Years' War for
intellectual freedom in dealing with natural phenomena. It has been a
conflict against ignorance, tradition, and vested interests in church
and university, with all that preposterous invective and cruel
misrepresentation which characterize the fight against new and
critical ideas. Those who cried out against scientific discoveries did
so in the name of God, of man's dignity, and of holy religion and
morality. Finally, however, it has come about that our instruction in
the natural sciences is tolerably free; although there are still large
bodies of organized religious believers who are hotly opposed to some
of the more fundamental findings of biology. Hundreds of thousands of