Abstract
IT is a familiar fact that from time to time wrong-headed but enthusiastic persons appear in the scientific arena boldly challenging the truth of some one or other of the most firmly-established and essential doctrines of the scientific creed. Sometimes a clever investigator discovers that we moderns are all in the wrong, and that the sun after all goes round the earth; another will have it that the moon does not revolve on its axis; a third disputes the correctness of the theory of gravitation; whilst a fourth finds no difficulty whatever in squaring the circle. Such men have cropped up at intervals throughout the historical period. They are not without their usefulness in their generation, for they afford some little mirth, and give an opportunity sometimes to men of science to reconsider their standpoints and settle themselves more firmly upon them. It seems uncertain whether Prof. Dawson, of McGill College, Montreal, is to be classed with these malcontents, or whether his scientific heresies are to be explained as conforming to the general law that superstitions generally survive and even thrive in colonies long after they have died out in their mother country.
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Primitive Man 1 . Nature 22, 82–86 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/022082a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/022082a0