At
this present moment, a huge animal dug out of the Big Bone Lick, sixty
feet long, and twenty-five feet high, is parading through the columns of
the European newspapers, after making its progress through our own. This
is, what every naturalist supposed it be, also a great imposition.
Within these few days, drums and trumpets have been sounded for other
monsters. A piece of one of our common coal plants is conjured into a
petrified rattlesnake, and one of the most familiar fossils solemnly
announced all the way from Canada, under a name exploded, and long
forgotten by naturalists. All these gibes and reproaches we ought to
have been spared. There ought to have been the ready means amongst us,
together with the independence and intelligence, to put down these
impostures and puerilities as they arose."
This is well said, and if it be intended to refer to the popular class,
who have not made science a study; to men who make wheelbarrows or sell
cotton and sugar--to the same classes of men, in fact, who in England,
are busied in the daily pursuits by which they earn their bread, leaving
science to scientific men, but respecting its truths, cannot tell "a
hawk from a handsaw"--it is all true enough.
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