fourth edition, Paris, 1855, vol. ii. Archbishop Spaulding has something of the same sort in his Miscellanies. L'Epinois, Galilee, p. 22 et seq., stretches this as far as possible to save the reputation of the Church in the Galileo matter. As to the various branches of the Protestant Church in England and the United States, it is a matter of notoriety that the smug, well-to-do laymen, whether elders, deacons, or vestrymen, are, as a rule, far more prone to heresy-hunting than are their better educated pastors. As to the cases of Messrs. Winchell, Woodrow, Toy, and all the professors at Beyrout, with details, see the chapter in this series on The Fall of Man and Anthropology. Among Protestant historians who have recently been allowed full and free examination of the treasures in the Vatican Library, and even those involving questions between Catholicism and Protestantism, are von Sybel, of Berlin, and Philip Schaff, of New York. It should be added that the latter went with commendatory letters from eminent prelates in the Catholic Church in America and Europe. For the closing citation, see Canon Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 432. CHAPTER IV. FROM "SIGNS AND WONDERS" TO LAW IN THE HEAVENS. I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. Few things in the evolution of astronomy are more suggestive than the struggle between the theological and the scientific doctrine regarding comets--the passage from the conception of them as fire-balls flung by an angry God for the purpose of scaring a wicked world, to a recognition of them as natural in origin and obedient to law in movement. Hardly anything throws a more vivid light upon the danger of wresting texts of Scripture to preserve ideas which observation and thought have superseded, and upon the folly of arraying ecclesiastical power against